Video Friday: StickBot

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

2 min read

An image of a robot made of a small sticks tied together with a tangle of colorful wires, batteries, actuators, and electronics

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.

IROS 2022: 23–27 October 2022, KYOTO, JAPAN
ANA Avatar XPRIZE Finals: 4–5 November 2022, LOS ANGELES
CoRL 2022: 14–18 December 2022, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

Enjoy today’s videos!


From Devin Carroll, who brought us a robot made of ice, is a robot made of sticks.

[ UPenn ]

Amazon Astro can now check on your pets for you. Not sure how the pets feel about that, though.

[ Amazon ]

Soft robot hugs for everyone!

[ Paper ]

Scythe’s upgraded M.52 autonomous robotic mower can now handle more complex obstacles and terrain, with big enough batteries to behead grass all day long.

[ Scythe ]

Thanks, Jack!

Agility CEO Damion Shelton and CTO Jonathan Hurst discuss artificial intelligence and its role in robot control. They also discuss the capability of robot learning paired with physics-based locomotion, Cassie setting a new world record using learned policies for control, and an exploration of the future of robotics through Dall-E.

That new version of Digit is looking slick!

[ Agility Robotics ]

Intel gives an update on RealSense at a recent ROS Industrial meeting, and the part you’ll probably want to listen to starts at 3:50.

[ ROS-I ]

Local navigation and locomotion of legged robots are commonly split into separate modules. In this work, we propose to combine them by training an end-to-end policy with deep reinforcement learning. Training a policy in this way opens up a larger set of possible solutions, which allows the robot to learn more complex behaviors.

That box climbing, right?

[ RSL ]

Neura Robotics is building a new humanoid. Most of this video is CG, but since there does appear to be a physical robot at the very end (albeit one that doesn’t do much), we’ll let it slide.

[ Neura Robotics ]

Dino Robotics will help you teach your robot to make hard-boiled eggs, which will make it a better chef than I am.

[ Dino Robotics ]

You know what sucks for robots? Lidar in blowing snow.

[ Paper ]

This research is banned in the United States.

[ Shadow ]

We often get asked about how Starship robots navigate around the community and those within, so we wanted to give a little insight—and some tips on what to do if you come across one on your journey. Have a look at how our robots navigate around various obstacles throughout their delivery journeys.

[ Starship ]

AIIRA’s vision is to create new AI-driven, predictive digital twins for modeling plants, and deploy them to increase the resiliency of the nation’s agricultural systems.

[ AIIRA ]

On 22 September 2022, Ryan Eustice of Toyota Research Institute talked to robotics students as a speaker in the Undergraduate Robotics Pathways & Careers Speaker Series, which aims to answer the question “What can I do with a robotics degree?”

[ Michigan Robotics ]

This Maryland Robotics Center Seminar is by Michael T. Tolley at University of California, San Diego, on biologically inspired soft mobile robots.

[ UMD ]

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