Weekly Robotics #223
I would love to hear from you. If you could spend five minutes to fill in this survey, it would immensely help. I’m especially interested to learn if you are OK with receiving an extra e-mail with a highly technical meaty robotics article in your inbox. From everyone who expresses interest, we will randomly draw two readers who get our ‘I make robot’ T-shirts. Huge thanks for making Weekly Robotics better! As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo. Last week’s most clicked link was the open-access book Foundations of Robotics, with 16.7% opens.
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How I over-engineered a Fast Fourier Transform for Arduino
Hugo Levy-Falk created an Arduino implementation of FFT, and in this blog post, he shares all the technical details about his work. Hugo went through an exciting journey to create this blazing-fast implementation. You can check the code in the project repository.
Flocks of assembler robots show potential for making larger structures
This research explores voxels, electro-mechanical units that can work in the swarm on tasks, reconfigure and build large structures. Conceptually, this work reminds me of Roombots from EPFL, although the MIT approach seems to create whole robot units with more degrees of freedom. You can find a paper showcasing this work in Nature.
Robotics Professor Answers Robot Questions From Twitter
In this video, Henny Admoni answers some questions about robotics from the Twitter audience. If you have trouble explaining your work as a roboticist, this video is great to send over to your aunts and uncles. I like this format!
Hummingbird’s Guide to Behavior Trees
A YouTuber going by Hummingbird created a series of videos about BehaviorTrees, using BehaviorTree.CPP in the implementation tutorial. On YouTube, you will also find part two and part three of the series. Huge thanks to the author for his hard work and for promoting BTs!
Scene Report: Boston
Brian Heater recently traveled to Boston to meet with some robotics companies. This long-form article is a summary of some of the most interesting Robotics startups Brian got to visit during his trip.
An Awesome Tutorial to Learn Outlier Detection in Python using PyOD Library
I came across PyOD the other day. It’s a library for outlier detection, and the above blog post looks like a great introduction to the topic.
SFPD authorized to kill suspects using robots in draft policy
In San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors will be considering a policy that would allow the police in this city to use robots equipped with lethal weapons. Can the police in the US drive tanks yet?
Publication of the Week - Uniform Passive Fault-Tolerant Control of a Quadcopter with One, Two, or Three Rotor Failure (2022)
As I’ve said in the previous issues, I’m not the best drone pilot, but modern controllers did the job for me. This paper presents a uniform passive fault-tolerant control (FTC) for a quadcopter that can fly with one, two, or even three rotors fail. This method differs from similar ones as it doesn’t use any rotor fault information or controller switching, making it fast and reliable. The authors used a GPS with the Pixhawk 4 controller to achieve position control of the quadcopter even with three rotors failing. The video of the system in action is extraordinary. Comment from Mat: What is this sorcery?! I was really impressed by the experiment videos and the Hardware In The Loop setup.
Business
Attabotics brings in $71.7M in Series C funding
“Attabotics announced that it brought in $71.7 million in Series C-1 funding. The latest round brings its total funding to $165.1 million since its founding in 2015. “