Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
Robotic Arena – January 25, 2020 – Wrocław, Poland
DARPA SubT Urban Circuit – February 18-27, 2020 – Olympia, Wash., USA
ICARSC 2020 – April 15-17, 2020 – Ponta Delgada, Azores
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
One of Digit’s autonomy layers ensures a minimum distance from obstacles, even mobile ones like pesky engineers. In this video, the vision system is active and Digit is operating under full autonomy.
I would pay money to watch a second video that’s just like this one except Agility has given Digit a voice and it’s saying this stuff dynamically.
[ Agility Robotics ]
The Intel RealSense lidar camera L515 is the world’s smallest and most power efficient hi-resolution lidar, featuring unparalleled depth and accuracy that makes it perfect for indoor uses cases. The L515 is designed with proprietary technology that creates entirely new ways to incorporate lidar into smart devices to perceive the world in 3D.
[ Intel ]
This project investigates a design space, a fabrication system and applications of creating fluidic chambers and channels at millimeter scale for tangible actuated interfaces. The ability to design and fabricate millifluidic chambers allows one to create high frequency actuation, sequential control of flows and high resolution design on thin film materials. We propose a four dimensional design space of creating these fluidic chambers, a novel heat sealing system that enables easy and precise millifluidics fabrication, and application demonstrations of the fabricated materials for haptics, ambient devices and robotics.
[ MIT ]
This looks like it could be relaxing.
[ Eura Shin ]
This is only sort of robotics related, but it’s cool: changing the direction of a ping pong ball by nudging it with controllable ultrasound.
Check out the natural gait on this little running robot from Nagoya Institute of Technology:
[ Nagoya ]
UAV Turbines announced that it successfully demonstrated its Monarch Hybrid Range Extender (HREX), a microturbine powered generator technology that extends the range of electrically powered medium-sized unmanned aircraft.
In UAV Turbines’ HREX system, the engine extracts energy from the fuel and uses it to power the propulsion motor directly, with any excess electric power used to top off the battery charge. This greatly increases range before the weight of the added fuel becomes uneconomical. There are many tradeoffs in optimizing power for any specific system; for example, some energy is lost in the extraction process, but as the fuel is consumed, the net weight of the aircraft drops. It is this flexibility that enables engine optimizations not otherwise possible with a single power source.
[ UAV Turbines ]
Happy Holidays from Sphero!
[ Sphero ]
Happy Holidays from Yaskawa, which, despite having access to lots of real robots, stubbornly refuses to use them in their holiday videos.
[ Yaskawa ]
Join us in celebrating the life of Woodie Flowers, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at MIT and co-founder of the FIRST Robotics Competition. A beloved teacher and pioneer in hands-on engineering education, Flowers developed design and robotics competitions at MIT, FIRST, and beyond, while promoting his concept of “gracious professionalism.”
[ MIT ]
I still really like the design of EMYS, although I admit that it looks a little strange when viewed from the side.
[ EMYS ]
Japanese college students compete to make the best laundry hanging robot, where speed and efficiency are a hilarious priority.
[ ROBOCON ]
The U in U-Drone stands for: Underground, Unlimited, Unjammable, User-Friendly and Unearthing. A prototype of a compact cable drone (U-Drone) has been developed in the one year project. It has been tested and demonstrated in underground tunnels (without GPS reception), whereby the drone can be operated at distances of up to 100 meters.
The commands to the U-Drone, and the images and data from the drone to the operator, run through an (unjammable) lightweight cable. The replaceable spool with the 100 meter cable is connected to the U-Drone and therefore unwinds from the drone during the flight in such a way that the drone is not stopped when the cable gets stuck.
[ Delft Dynamics ]
Interesting tiltrotor design for a drone that can apply a probe to a structure at any angle you want.
[ Skygauge ]
NASA has developed a flexible way to test new designs for aircraft that use multiple rotors to fly. The Multirotor Test Bed, or MTB, will let researchers study a wide variety of rotor configurations for different vehicles, including tiltrotor aircraft, mid-sized drones and even air taxis planned for the coming era of air travel called Urban Air Mobility.
[ NASA ]
Here’s a robot not to get on the wrong side of.
The Javelin Joint Venture team, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Company, successfully fired Javelin missiles from a Kongsberg remote weapon station integrated onto an unmanned vehicle platform. The demonstrations, conducted at the Redstone Test Center, Ala., validated the integration of the weapon station, missile and vehicle.
[ Raytheon ]
From Paul Scharre, who knows what he’s talking about more than most, a nuanced look at the lethal autonomous robots question.
[ Freethink ]
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.
Erico Guizzo is the Director of Digital Innovation at IEEE Spectrum, and cofounder of the IEEE Robots Guide, an award-winning interactive site about robotics. He oversees the operation, integration, and new feature development for all digital properties and platforms, including the Spectrum website, newsletters, CMS, editorial workflow systems, and analytics and AI tools. An IEEE Member, he is an electrical engineer by training and has a master’s degree in science writing from MIT.
