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 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN

RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS

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

Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH

Enjoy today’s videos!

Festo has robot bees!

It’s a very clever design, but the size makes me terrified of whatever the bees are that Festo seems to be familiar with.

[ Festo ]

Boing, boing, boing!

[ USC ]

Why the heck would you take the trouble to program a robot to make sweet potato chips and then not scarf them down yourself?

[ Dino Robotics ]

Mobile robots can transport payloads far greater than their mass through vehicle traction. However, off-road terrain features substantial variation in height, grade, and friction, which can cause traction to degrade or fail catastrophically. This paper presents a system that utilizes a vehicle-mounted, multipurpose manipulator to physically adapt the robot with unique anchors suitable for a particular terrain for autonomous payload transport.

[ DART Lab ]

Turns out that working on a collaborative task with a robot can make humans less efficient, because we tend to overestimate the robot’s capabilities.

[ CHI 2024 ]

Wing posts a video with the title “What Do Wing’s Drones Sound Like” but only includes a brief snippet—though nothing without background room noise—revealing to curious viewers and listeners exactly what Wing’s drones sound like.

Because, look, a couple seconds of muted audio underneath a voiceover is in fact not really answering the question.

[ Wing ]

This first instance of ROB 450 in Winter 2024 challenged students to synthesize the knowledge acquired through their Robotics undergraduate courses at the University of Michigan to use a systematic and iterative design and analysis process and apply it to solving a real, open-ended Robotics problem.

[ Michigan Robotics ]

This Microsoft Future Leaders in Robotics and AI Seminar is from Catie Cuan at Stanford, on “Choreorobotics: Teaching Robots How to Dance With Humans.”

As robots transition from industrial and research settings into everyday environments, robots must be able to (1) learn from humans while benefiting from the full range of the humans’ knowledge and (2) learn to interact with humans in safe, intuitive, and social ways. I will present a series of compelling robot behaviors, where human perception and interaction are foregrounded in a variety of tasks.

[ UMD ]