Weekly Robotics #233
Last week, we premiered the second article in our long-form section and today, you can show interest in writing for us by filling this form. As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo. Last week’s most clicked link was an ad for Viam, with 11.2% opens.
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Weekly Robotics is being developed thanks to the Patreon supporters and the following business sponsors:
Be an Isaac ROS DevOps Hero with Containerized Development
NVIDIA? Isaac ROS is a collection of hardware accelerated packages that make it easier for ROS 2 developers to build high-performance robotics solutions. In this webinar, we investigate how to build your workstation and your NVIDIA Jetson Isaac ROS. Starting with an introduction to Docker and Continuous Integration (CI), we deep dive into Isaac ROS, how to set up a basic docker, and how to build the Isaac ROS packages directly for your distribution.
Building a legged robot in 80 days: Lessons learned, tears shed, blood spilled
This blog post is an exciting story about how a team of five participated in the European Land Robot Trial (ELROB) with only 87 days to prepare. If you are a roboticist, you probably know this story already. You race against time working on the build; you redesign parts of the system as you go, burn some components or PCBs, but keep going until the thing can put one leg in front of the other, and then, it’s a demo day.
QuadricSLAM
I was tempted to paste a definition of Quadric here, but then I figured we would run out of newsletter space to cover other projects. This work estimates an object’s 3D quadric surface and enables object-oriented SLAM. You will find more information about this research on arXiv.
SMARS Mini
Kevin McAleer built this 50mm rover and shared plenty of content around it. The rover uses Tiny2040 (according to the website, it’s the same chip as RPi Pico), N20 Motors, MX1508 PWM, and a VL53L0X distance sensor. The total cost of all electronics is around 46 GBP. You will find .stl files for 3D printing this robot and the micropython code to run it all at the above link.
领英推荐
TermViz - ROS visualization on the terminal
All you ROS hackers that occasionally need to SSH to a robot in the field to troubleshoot will have a field trip with this tool. It allows visualizing some ROS messages (including cameras!) in a terminal. If you like this kind of tool, you might want to check out rosshow, which we covered 201 issues ago.
Visualizing Tendon-driven Continuum Robots in MATLAB
This short post introduces CRVisToolkit, a set of MATLAB functions for visualization and plotting of continuum robots (robots with infinite degrees of freedom and number of joints).
From Crazyflies to “Crazybats”
Fascinating research from EPFL, where researchers implement echolocation on micro drones that, thanks to sound-based interference, will avoid obstacles.
Publication of the Week - Online Learning Based Mobile Robot Controller Adaptation for Slip Reduction (2023)
One of the biggest enemies of all time from mobile robots’ odometry is slippage. This paper presents a method for slip reduction using a reinforcement learning (RL) module. The authors separated the controllers into two, a lateral one to reduce lateral error from the robot’s position to the path and a longitudinal one that aims to regulate the robot’s speed. The RL model works at a higher level to simultaneously tune both controllers’ parameters online. Overall, the method could outperform the best fixed-gain baselines by 6.6% for average lateral error and 12.7% for max lateral error in simulation.
Business
What slowdown? – December 2022 robotics investments reach $1.14B
December was fruitful for Robotics companies that raised $1.14B in investments. This article contains a list of all funding events taken into account in the calculations - most of them in the USA and China.
Thank you for featuring the CRVisToolkit and our Open Continuum Robotics Project!