According to my (mind-bendingly sophisticated) calculations, in just two weeks from now, it'll officially be National Robotics Week in the United States. I'm mentioning this now because I'm assuming that you're very busy and important, and that you'll need that much lead time to make it to all of the activities. All of them. Road trip!
To get you pumped up, here's the week's worth of robot vids.
MorpHex MKII has somehow ingested even more servos, and is DEATH to smiling yellow balloons. Also, it rolls.
[ Zenta ]
We saw a demo like this with industrial robots and slot cars at IREX, but somehow, little trains are a heck of a lot more fun:
Via [ Gizmodo ]
SenseFly's eBee map-making drone has made a lovely map of, um, some rocky canyon-y place that does a lovely job of being three dimensional:
That is one cool mesh right there. Damn.
[ SenseFly ]
Are you ready to be swarmed by robot insects? Time to DASH!
[ DASH Robotics ]
Team BlackSheep took their FPV flying robots to Hong Kong. We're especially interested in this, because we'll be in Hong Kong in just a few months for ICRA 2014.
[ Team BlackSheep ]
Isn't it great that robots can learn how to be flawless at a task by watching humans fail at it over and over?
This video presents an imitation learning approach for a fluid pouring task, which consists of grasping a bottle containing a fluid and pouring a specified amount of the fluid into a container placed on a rotating table. The robot learns how to do this task from human demonstrations. In addition to learning from successful demonstrations, our approach allows learning from errors made by humans and how they recovered from these errors in subsequent trials. We report experimental results consisting of a 5 DOF robot using the learned parameters to successfully perform the pouring task to illustrate our approach.
UMD's Robo Raven has nearly doubled the number of solar cells on its wings. We don't have any hard numbers on performance improvements, except for "more power than ever before."
[ UMD ]
ROBOT CRAB WILL CRUSH YOU. While naked.
[ Crabster CR200 ]
I know it just looks like a lot of featureless snow and ice, and it is, but this is what the South Pole looks like, I guess. And someone bothered to lug an AR Drone out there to fly it around:
[ Parrot ]
Continuing with our two-video theme of robots flying in cold places, here's a drone flying through some spectacular ice caves:
And a little behind the scenes:
[ Firefight Films ]
We'll finish the week with a TED Talk featuring Edward Snowden, which has a place in our Video Friday because he gives it on stage in Vancouver, Canada, from somewhere in Russia, through a Suitable Technologies Beam Pro:
This sort of politics isn't really the purview of this blog, but we will mention that the NSA has a response to Edward Snowden's talk in a TED Talk of their own, here.
[ TED ]
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.
