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 two months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
Automate – April 3-3, 2017 – Chicago, Ill., USA
ITU Robot Olympics – April 7-9, 2017 – Istanbul, Turkey
ROS Industrial Consortium – April 07, 2017 – Chicago, Ill., USA
U.S. National Robotics Week – April 8-16, 2017 – USA
NASA Swarmathon – April 18-20, 2017 – NASA KSC, Florida, USA
RoboBusiness Europe – April 20-21, 2017 – Delft, Netherlands
RoboGames 2017 – April 21-23, 2017 – Pleasanton, Calif., USA
ICARSC – April 26-30, 2017 – Coimbra, Portugal
AUVSI Xponential – May 8-11, 2017 – Dallas, Texas, USA
AAMAS 2017 – May 8-12, 2017 – Sao Paulo, Brazil
Austech – May 9-12, 2017 – Melbourne, Australia
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
Japan recently announced a major robotics event for next year. The World Robot Summit will feature a series of competitions, talks, and exhibits. We like the theme: “Robotics for Happiness.”
[ WRS ]
The 2017 NYC Drone Film Festival took place earlier this month, and it’s worth checking out the winners in nearly a dozen categories. Here’s the “best in show” film:
[ NYCDFF via Fstopppers ]
ICYMI here’s Jeff Bezos piloting a giant mecha at his secret tech retreat.
Yes, that’s the giant mecha we featured in Video Friday earlier this year and (ahem) suggested it could be CGI. Clearly it’s very real, and hopefully we’ll be learning more about it in the near future. Like, why are they building this?
[ Caleb Harper via The Verge ]
Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out of Google/Alphabet, has posted a video this week of what it says is the “world’s first fully self-driving ride on public roads.” The ride took place in Austin, with one passenger on board and no safety driver.
Waymo—formerly the Google self-driving car project—stands for a new way forward in mobility. In 2015, we invited Steve Mahan, former CEO of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center, for a special ride. Steve had ridden in our cars in the past—first accompanied by a test driver in 2012 and then on a closed course in 2014. This time was different. Steve experienced the world’s first fully self-driving ride on public roads, navigating through everyday traffic with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no test driver.
[ Waymo ]
Project Abbie is inspired by the story of Abbie Benford, who succumbed to complications related to anaphylaxis just eight days before her 16th birthday. The Wyss Institute, in collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital, is developing a wearable, non-invasive device that could sense anaphylaxis and automatically inject epinephrine in individuals who are unable to do so themselves; a device that could have saved Abbie’s life.
[ Wyss Institute ]
NASA engineer turned youtuber Mark Rober explains how he built a robotic “auto-bullseye” dartboard using six Vicon cameras, a bunch of servos, and some Matlab code.
[ Mark Rober ]
Here’s how to make an AI mistake a car for a shoe.
[ EPFL ]
The video shows the winning Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) Grand Challenge trial of team NimbRo, developed at the Autonomous Intelligent Systems group of University of Bonn, Germany. Three tasks are solved simultanously in the same arena: 1) landing a MAV on a moving vehicle, 2) approaching a panel, grasping a wrench, and turning a valve stem, 3) collecting objects and transporting them to a target zone with three MAVs.
[ Team Nimbro ]
CMU spin-off RoadBotics is using vision and AI to take on potholes.
[ RoadBotics ]
DJI has eviscerated the competition in the hobby and prosumer drone markets. Now it’s going after commercial drone sectors like agriculture and search and rescue.
[ DJI ]
Teleport yourself into a four-legged robot and walk around an industrial complex with this 360o video featuring ETH’s ANYmal (fast forward to 2:20 for quadruped FPV).
[ ETH ]
Socibot is out and about entertaining people with its face-changing head and terrible jokes.
“Siri? She’s an ex-girlfriend of mine.”
[ Socibot ]
And now, “the strange man from Japan.”
[ Hiroshi Ishiguro via CeBIT ]
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 digital product manager at IEEE Spectrum. 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. He’s the cofounder of the IEEE Robots Guide, an award-winning interactive site about robotics. An IEEE Member, he is an electrical engineer by training and has a master’s degree in science writing from MIT.
