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.

ICRA@40: 23–26 September 2024, ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS

IROS 2024: 14–18 October 2024, ABU DHABI, UAE

ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK

Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH

Enjoy today’s videos!

At ICRA 2024, in Tokyo last May, we sat down with the director of Shadow Robot, Rich Walker, to talk about the journey toward developing its newest model. Designed for reinforcement learning, the hand is extremely rugged, has three fingers that act like thumbs, and has fingertips that are highly sensitive to touch.

[ IEEE Spectrum ]

Food Angel is a food delivery robot to help with the problems of food insecurity and homelessness. Utilizing autonomous wheeled robots for this application may seem to be a good approach, especially with a number of successful commercial robotic delivery services. However, besides technical considerations such as range, payload, operation time, autonomy, etc., there are a number of important aspects that still need to be investigated, such as how the general public and the receiving end may feel about using robots for such applications, or human-robot interaction issues such as how to communicate the intent of the robot to the homeless.

[ RoMeLa ]

The UKRI FLF team RoboHike of UCL Computer Science of the Robot Perception and Learning lab with Forestry England demonstrate the ANYmal robot to help preserve the cultural heritage of an historic mine in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, UK.

This clip is from a reboot of the British TV show “Time Team.” If you’re not already a fan of “Time Team,” let me just say that it is one of the greatest retro reality TV shows ever made, where actual archaeologists wander around the United Kingdom and dig stuff up. If they can find anything. Which they often can’t. And also it has Tony Robinson (from “Blackadder”), who runs everywhere for some reason. Go to Time Team Classics on YouTube for 70+ archived episodes.

[ UCL RPL ]

UBTECH humanoid robot Walker S Lite is working in Zeekr’s intelligent factory to complete handling tasks at the loading workstation for 21 consecutive days, and assist its employees with logistics work.

[ UBTECH ]

Current visual navigation systems often treat the environment as static, lacking the ability to adaptively interact with obstacles. This limitation leads to navigation failure when encountering unavoidable obstructions. In response, we introduce IN-Sight, a novel approach to self-supervised path planning, enabling more effective navigation strategies through interaction with obstacles.

[ ETH Zurich paper / IROS 2024 ]

When working on autonomous cars, sometimes it’s best to start small.

[ University of Pennsylvania ]

MIT MechE researchers introduce an approach called SimPLE (Simulation to Pick Localize and placE), a method of precise kitting, or pick and place, in which a robot learns to pick, regrasp, and place objects using the object’s computer-aided design (CAD) model, and all without any prior experience or encounters with the specific objects.

[ MIT ]

Staff, students (and quadruped robots!) from UCL Computer Science wish the Great Britain athletes the best of luck this summer in the Olympic Games & Paralympics.

[ UCL Robotics Institute ]

Walking in tall grass can be hard for robots, because they can’t see the ground that they’re actually stepping on. Here’s a technique to solve that, published in Robotics and Automation Letters last year.

[ ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab ]

There is no such thing as excess batter on a corn dog, and there is also no such thing as a defective donut. And apparently, making Kool-Aid drink pouches is harder than it looks.

[ Oxipital AI ]

Unitree has open-sourced its software to teleoperate humanoids in VR for training-data collection.

[ Unitree / GitHub ]

Nothing more satisfying than seeing point-cloud segments wiggle themselves into place, and CSIRO’s Wildcat SLAM does this better than anyone.

[ IEEE Transactions on Robotics ]

A lecture by Mentee Robotics CEO Lior Wolf, on Mentee’s AI approach.

[ Mentee Robotics ]

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.

ICRA@40: 23–26 September 2024, ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS

IROS 2024: 14–18 October 2024, ABU DHABI, UAE

ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK

Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH

Enjoy today’s videos!

Perching with winged Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has often been solved by means of complex control or intricate appendages. Here, we present a method that relies on passive wing morphing for crash-landing on trees and other types of vertical poles. Inspired by the adaptability of animals’ and bats’ limbs in gripping and holding onto trees, we design dual-purpose wings that enable both aerial gliding and perching on poles.

[ Nature Communications Engineering ]

Pretty impressive to have low enough latency in controlling your robot’s hardware that it can play ping pong, although it makes it impossible to tell whether the robot or the human is the one that’s actually bad at the game.

[ IHMC ]

How to be a good robot when boarding an elevator.

[ NAVER ]

Have you ever wondered how insects are able to go so far beyond their home and still find their way? The answer to this question is not only relevant to biology but also to making the AI for tiny, autonomous robots. We felt inspired by biological findings on how ants visually recognize their environment and combine it with counting their steps in order to get safely back home.

[ Science Robotics ]

Team RoMeLa Practice with ARTEMIS humanoid robots, featuring Tsinghua Hephaestus (Booster Alpha). Fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer match with the official goal of beating the human WorldCup Champions by the year 2050.

[ RoMeLa ]

Triangle is the most stable shape, right?

[ WVU IRL ]

We propose RialTo, a new system for robustifying real-world imitation learning policies via reinforcement learning in “digital twin” simulation environments constructed on the fly from small amounts of real-world data.

[ MIT CSAIL ]

There is absolutely no reason to watch this entire video, but Moley Robotics is still working on that robotic kitchen of theirs.

I will once again point out that the hardest part of cooking (for me, anyway) is the prep and the cleanup, and this robot still needs you to do all that.

[ Moley ]

B-Human has so far won 10 titles at the RoboCup SPL tournament. Can we make it 11 this year? Our RoboCup starts off with a banger game against HTWK Robots form Leipzig!

[ Team B-Human ]

AMBIDEX is a dual-armed robot with an innovative mechanism developed for safe coexistence with humans. Based on an innovative cable structure, it is designed to be both strong and stable.

[ NAVER ]

As NASA’s Perseverance rover prepares to ascend to the rim of Jezero Crater, its team is investigating a rock unlike any that they’ve seen so far on Mars. Deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan explains why this rock, found in an ancient channel that funneled water into the crater, could be among the oldest that Perseverance has investigated—or the youngest.

[ NASA ]

We present a novel approach for enhancing human-robot collaboration using physical interactions for real-time error correction of large language model (LLM) parameterized commands.

[ Figueroa Robotics Lab ]

Husky Observer was recently used to autonomously inspect solar panels at a large solar panel farm. As part of its mission, the robot navigated rows of solar panels, stopping to inspect areas with its integrated thermal camera. Images were taken by the robot and enhanced to detect potential “hot spots” in the panels.

[ Clearpath Robotics ]

Most of the time, robotic workcells contain just one robot, so it’s cool to see a pair of them collaborating on tasks.

[ Leverage Robotics ]

Thanks, Roman!

Meet Hydrus, the autonomous underwater drone revolutionising underwater data collection by eliminating the barriers to its entry. Hydrus ensures that even users with limited resources can execute precise and regular subsea missions to meet their data requirements.

[ Advanced Navigation ]

Those adorable Disney robots have finally made their way into a paper.

[ RSS 2024 ]