Video Friday: Googly Eye

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Robotics Summit & Expo: 10–11 May 2023, BOSTON

ICRA 2023: 29 May–2 June 2023, LONDON

RoboCup 2023: 4–10 July 2023, BORDEAUX, FRANCE

RSS 2023: 10–14 July 2023, DAEGU, SOUTH KOREA

IEEE RO-MAN 2023: 28–31 August 2023, BUSAN, SOUTH KOREA

CLAWAR 2023: 2–4 October 2023, FLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL

Humanoids 2023: 12–14 December 2023, AUSTIN, TEXAS

Enjoy today’s videos!

THE EYE

[ Atonaton ]

Off-road terrain presents unique challenges for autonomous driving: steep slopes, ditches, rocks, vegetation, and ever-changing weather conditions. To ensure that our software stack is robust to anything it may encounter, we are constantly in the field testing and learning. This video shows clips of our field activities in late 2022 and early 2023, including our initial work with fully unoccupied vehicles.

Some real DARPA Grand Challenge vibes here, except where these robots are going, they don’t need roads.

UW Off-road Autonomous Driving - Complex Terrain to Fast Trail | DARPA-funded Researchwww.youtube.com

[ UW ]

On April 2, 2023, IHMC participated in National Robotics Week by opening its doors to the public. Preceding the global events of 2020, the IHMC Robotics Open House was an annual event. This year was the organization’s first opportunity to participate in National Robotics Week since then. Academic outreach is at the very foundation of IHMC’s mission, and needless to say...our entire organization is incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to continually inspire future generations.

[ IHMC ]

Thanks, William!

Inspired by the adaptable nature of organic brains, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have introduced a method for robust flight navigation agents to master vision-based fly-to-target tasks in intricate, unfamiliar environments. The liquid neural networks, which can continuously adapt to new data inputs, showed prowess in making reliable decisions in unknown domains like forests, urban landscapes, and environments with added noise, rotation, and occlusion. These adaptable models, which outperformed many state-of-the-art counterparts in navigation tasks, could enable potential real-world drone applications like search and rescue, delivery, and wildlife monitoring.

[ MIT ]

Half a century since the concept of a cyborg was introduced, digital cyborgs, enabled by the spread of wearable robotics, are the focus of much research in recent times. We introduce JIZAI ARMS, a supernumerary robotic limb system consisting of a wearable base unit with six terminals and detachable robot arms controllable by the wearer.

[ CHI 2023 ]

This video captures a series of experiments carried out at West Virginia University on how to rescue a stuck planetary rover with another rover. All experiments were done with human remote control by three operators: two rover drivers and a manipulator operator.

[ WVUIRL ]

It’s still kind of wild to me that quadrupeds are good enough now that there are multiple viable use cases for them.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

What can robots actually do...today? Can they help the average person beat a high jumper? “The Testing Lab” is a new series from Michigan Robotics. They’ll put robots to the test to see just how far they have come, and how far they still have to go. The first installment is focused on powered exoskeletons. These robotic exoskeletons have the possibility of aiding a wide range of users, from those who do physical labor to those who need help with mobility to the elderly. Can it do something more easily measurable, like jump?

[ Neurobionics Lab ]

The CYBATHLON Challenges took place on 29 March 2023. There were 15 teams participating in 5 different disciplines. The teams brought incredible advances in assistive technology to the competition.

[ Cybathlon ]

It’s time to get rolling (or walking, crawling...) again. It’s been 29 years of Mobot (MObile Autonomous roBOTs) - with novel solutions, clever ideas, and great contestants (across all disciplines). And not all Mobots have to have wheels. The problem is still a good one and poses challenges to accommodate both novice and expert level entries. There isn’t one way to build a Mobot!

[ Mobot ]

This Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute (CMU RI) seminar is presented by JPL’s Vandi Verma, on “Mars Robots and Robotics at NASA JPL.”

In this seminar I’ll discuss Mars robots, the unprecedented results we’re seeing with the latest Mars mission, and how we got here. Perseverance’s manipulation and sampling systems have collected samples from unique locations at twice the rate of any prior mission. 88% of all driving has been autonomous. This has enabled the mission to achieve its prime objective to select, core, and deploy a high-value sample collection on the surface of Mars within one Mars year of landing. The Ingenuity helicopter has completed 49 flights on Mars. I’ll provide an overview of robotics at JPL and discuss some open problems that if addressed could further enhance future space robotics.

[ CMU RI ]