Video Friday: UAVs Delivering Packages, More Sushi Than You Can Possibly Eat, and RoboCup Outtakes

THIS WEEK: Will robots help a human graffiti the side of a building? Will Northrop Grumman make one of the most overblown UAV promo videos ever? Will a Darwin-OP headbutt a robot that may or may not be Italian in a RoboCup blooper reel? The answer to all of these questions is "why would we be asking if we didn't have all of this stuff queued up and ready to show you," so check out Video Friday after the break.

It's not quite a Tacocopter (not yet), but Michael McGuinness, Sean McSheehy, Mikhail Medvedev, and Abe Shultz from UMass Lowell have built themselves a little autonomous airplane that can drop off packages at GPS waypoints.

[ UMass Lowell ]

On Wednesday when we showed that high-speed robotic motion control vid, we mentioned Bot & Dolly. So, here's the kind of TOTALLY AWESOME thing that they do:

[ Bot & Dolly ]

Northrop Grumman's X-47B unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) just finished up its airworthiness test phase, and Northrop has put together a highlight reel. If you look closely, you can spot the X-47B's tailhook, all set for eventual aircraft carrier deployment.

[ UCAS-D ]

Speaking of Northrop Grumman, here's a promo video for its recently-introduced MQ-4C Triton, a variant of the Global Hawk designed for maritime surveillance. It's not so much the Triton that makes this worth watching, it's more just how incredibly awesomely overblown and terrible the video itself is. You'll see what I mean.

AAAARG MY EYES.

[ MQ-4C ]

Yep, those singing robot heads are back, this time with Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. It starts off slow, and then gets weird:

Robots? Cleaning whiskey barrels? It's more likely than you think, at least, in Scotland at Diageo:

"Before being bottled the whisky gets its unique flavor by being matured in oak casks (barrels). Between batches the casks are thoroughly cleaned, a job now carried out by ABB robots, which has removed people from a heavy and tedious task."

Some 2,500 pieces of inari sushi per hour is a lot of inari sushi, which is why you need a robot to do the hard part: delicately stuffing rice into the fried tofu skin.

If you like sushi, this robot is a steal at just $50,000.

Via [ DigInfo News ]

To wrap things up, we've got a video from BotSportTV of a bunch of bloopers from RoboCup. You'll see a bunch of footage of CHARLI, and make sure to stick around until 1:25 to watch a Darwin-OP pull a Zidane-style headbutt on some lesser robot which may or may not have made an insulting remark about its programmer.

[ BotSport.TV ]