Weekly Robotics #221
Working on this newsletter issue, I’ve again given myself Rust FOMO. Hopefully, this is the last time, but I’ll report back if I come up with any insights on Rust. This weekend, I played with Oculus 2, and I’m amazed at how well it does indoor tracking, especially since it’s only a side task for this system. As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo. Last week’s most clicked link was the list of IROS 2022 award winners, with 15.6% opens.
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Weekly Robotics is being developed thanks to the Patreon supporters and the following business sponsors:
A New Community of Embedded Systems and Robotics Developers on Discord
Besides the open-source project Luos, a Discord community of embedded and robotic developers has been created to help, inspire and share with each other. This Discord server aims to exchange new methodologies for project development. It can be interesting for you to participate in the discussion to give your opinion and experience and learn from others by getting inspired.
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ROSCon 2022 Videos and Slides now Available
The talks from this year’s ROSCon are available in record time on the conference’s website. If you find any of the presentations fascinating, please let me know, as I’ll be looking forward to watching some of them in the coming weeks.
RustConf 2022 - All aboard the Rust (electric freight) train! by Julie Wang
In this Rust talk, Julie Wang from Parallel Systems shows how one can design robotized train carriages using Rust. I recommend checking out the state machine (3:28) and the simulation (11:15) parts of the talk. When I started watching the panel, I was ready to bet that the team was using ROS, but it turned out that the team developed all the code and tooling in-house.
Clever Control Loop Makes This Spinning Drone Fault-Tolerant
You might remember the single-rotor UAV from some of the previous issues. In this update, Nicholas talks about adding pitch and roll control in ‘spin-hover’, which also allows the rotor to recover, even if two out of three motors are damaged.
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Design And Implementation Of An Autonomous Charging Station For Agricultural Electrical Vehicles
El Houssein Chouaib Harik, one of our readers, shared the work he contributed to, where a cobot mounted on a robot base with mecanum wheels is used to plug power to an electric agricultural vehicle autonomously. The localization of the plug and the socket is done through fiducial markers. You can learn more about this work through this publication.
Spacee Shelf-Mounted Robots Count Inventory
This project was interesting. Spacee is a tiny ‘cart’ that can be mounted inside a shelf profile and can slide across, capturing a video feed for inventory management. At a high level, the concept is very similar to Spider-Go that I featured in the issue #180. Shelf-mounted solutions will be severe contenders to any in-store wheeled robots and inventor management using drones.
Publication of the Week - RI Seminar: Soon-Jo Chung: Safe and Stable Learning for Agile Robots without Reinforcement Learning (2022)
RI (Robotics Institute) seminars from Carnegie Mellon University are back. In this seminar, professor Soon-Jo Chung talks about his fascinating work with dynamic robots. From all projects shown, Leonardo’s robot is the star. This robot mixes aerial locomotion with a bipedal mechanism capable of flying, walking, and even slacklining. While Leo uses lots of control theory, machine learning leverages its functionalities by reducing computational intensity for optimization methods and helps to deal with challenging real-world disturbances, such as strong winds. Prof. Chung illustrates other incredible projects varying from swarm control to safe motion planning.
Business
Ouster and Velodyne Announce Proposed Merger of Equals to Accelerate Lidar Adoption
If you find this unexpected, then you are certainly not alone. I don’t know about your experience, but Velodyne and Ouster products were my first choices for 3D LiDARs in my consulting, and if the merger goes through, chances are the price of the technology will go up until new competition enters the market. In the proposed scheme Angus Pacala, the CEO of Ouster, will be the CEO of the company, while Dr. Ted Tewksbury, the CEO of Velodyne, will become the board’s chairman.
Labrador Systems deploys its first assistive elder-care robots
Labrador Systems, a manufacturer of sensible consumer robotics that we’ve covered in the issue #202 has started shipping their products to the first selected customers.
Announcements
Geo Week
Geo Week, February 13-15, 2023 in Denver, is the learning and networking nexus of the geospatial and built worlds. Professionals from a wide variety of industries and disciplines convene to advance digital technologies in these sectors. It combines 3 previous event brands (in AEC, 3D and Lidar) and important collocated user meetings (ASPRS, USIBD, MAPPS, WGIC and more to be announced). The 2022 event had 2,121 registrants, and hosted 1,889 verified delegates from 48 nations. Geo Week 2023 will convene 2,500+ attendees from 6 continents. Use code SAVE100 for a $100 discount and/or FREE Expo.