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.
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
IROS 2023: 1–5 October 2023, DETROIT
CLAWAR 2023: 2–4 October 2023, FLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL
Enjoy today’s videos!
Here are a couple of highlight videos from the Tech United RoboCup team, competing in the Middle-Size League at RoboCup 2023 in Bordeaux. There’s an especially impressive goal toward the end of the second video—as a soccer-playing human, I would have been proud to score something like that.
[ Tech United ]
How to infuriate a NAO for 2 minutes and 38 seconds.
[ Team B-Human ]
Goalie behavior testing for Robot ARTEMIS 2, Team RoMeLa UCLA.
[ RoMeLa ]
We fabricated an array of six inflatable actuators driven by a single pressure line that play Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Our actuators are buckled shells that snap through in a second configuration when the inner pressure reaches a threshold. The actuators are designed to play a piano key each time they snap and we developed an algorithm that based on a desired sequence of notes gives as output the geometrical parameters of each actuator, thus part of the control architecture is encoded in their mechanics.
“Nonlinear inflatable actuators for distributed control in soft robots” was recently published in Nature Advanced Materials.
Thanks, Edoardo!
Always nice to be reminded that you’ve conquered things that used to slip you up.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
Sure, let’s make winged scorpion robots!
[ GRVC ]
Introducing the TIAGo Pro, a revolutionary robot with fully torque-controlled arms with optimal arm mounting. This enhances the manipulation capabilities and enables state-of-the-art Human-Robot Interaction. Designed for agile manufacturing and future healthcare applications.
Equipped with major hardware upgrades like torque-controllable arms, EtherCAT communication bus at 1KHz, and increased computational power, the TIAGo Pro boosts productivity and efficiency with machine learning algorithms.
[ PAL Robotics ]
Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is the most common approach for estimating the state of autonomous micro aerial vehicles using only onboard sensors. Existing methods improve VIO performance by including a dynamics model in the estimation pipeline. However, such methods degrade in the presence of low-fidelity vehicle models and continuous external disturbances, such as wind. Our hybrid dynamics model uses a history of thrust and IMU measurements to predict vehicle dynamics. To demonstrate the performance of our method, we present results on both public and novel drone dynamics datasets and show real-world experiments of a quadrotor flying in strong winds up to 25 km/h.
To be presented at RSS 2023 in Daegu, South Korea.
[ UZH RPG ]
This cute little robotic dude is how I want all my packages delivered.
[ RoboDesign Lab ]
Telexistence raises USD 170M Series B, Announces new partnerships with SoftBank Robotics Group and Foxconn, accelerating its business expansion in North America and operational capabilities in mass production.
[ Telexistence ]
The qb SoftClaw demonstrating that the only good tomato is a squished to death tomato.
[ qb Robotics ]
You see multi-colored balls, we see pills and tablets, garments and fabrics, ripe berries and unripe berries. Learning one simple concept–how to sort items–can be applied to endless work scenarios.
[ Sanctuary ]
Some highlights from Kuka’s booth at Automatica in Germany. Two moments that jumped out to me included the miniature automotive assembly line made of LEGO Technic, and also the mobile robot with a bit “NO RIDING” sticker on it. C’mon, Kuka, let us have some fun!
Also at Automatica was the final round of the Kuka Innovation Award. It was a really intertesting competition this year, although one of the judges seems like a real dork.
[ Kuka ]
I don’t know how Pieter pulled this off, but here’s a clip from the Robot Brains podcast, where he talks with astronaut Woody Hoburg up on the International Space Station.
[ Robot Brains ]
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.
