Weekly Robotics #243
Today’s issue is relatively light as I’m recovering from the holidays. I promise I’ll make it up to you in the next issue! As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo . Last week’s most clicked link was the article about using ROS with Multipass , with 16.9% opens.
Sponsored
Weekly Robotics is being developed thanks to the Patreon supporters and the following business sponsors:
CARMA II: A ground vehicle for autonomous surveying of alpha, beta and gamma radiation
This research presents a mobile robot (using ROS) capable of detecting various types of radiation. Because the robot can overlay the radiation data onto a costmap, it can use this data for path planning, de-risking the potential spread of contamination and increasing the longevity of the robot’s electronics.
Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Celebrates 50 Flights
Ingenuity celebrates its 50th (!!) flight on Mars, ten times more flights than initially planned. Well done, little buddy!
ESP32 Buyer’s Guide: Different Chips, Firmware, Sensors
The linked feature is a neat, concise overview of the ESP32 microchips.
Throw the CANfetti: Scythe Celebrates its First Open Source Release
领英推荐
Scythe, a manufacturer of autonomous movers, had released an open-source CANopen software package. You can find more information about this project inside the repo .
Language Embedded Radiance Fields
“LERF optimizes a dense, multi-scale language 3D field by volume rendering CLIP embeddings along training rays, supervising these embeddings with multi-scale CLIP features across multi-view training images. After optimization, LERF can extract 3D relevancy maps for language queries interactively in real-time. LERF enables pixel-aligned queries of the distilled 3D CLIP embeddings without relying on region proposals, masks, or fine-tuning, supporting long-tail open-vocabulary queries hierarchically across the volume”.
Publication of the Week - Robust Body Exposure (RoBE): A Graph-based Dynamics Modeling Approach to Manipulating Blankets over People (2023)
This paper presents a robot capable of manipulating blankets over people with mobility impairments. The authors use a Stretch RE1 mobile manipulator to grasp the blanket or sheet and drag it to uncover the person’s limb. They also used a GNN (Graph neural network) to learn a model for the cloth’s dynamics and predict its displacement. Twelve participants tested the method and demonstrated its robustness and generalization over different sizes, poses, and blanket configurations. The article page contains a video and more details.
Business
Carbon Robotics Raises $30 Million in Funding to Scale AI-Powered LaserWeeder? Platform
“Carbon Robotics , a leader in AI-powered robotics, today announced it closed $30 million in Series C financing from new lead investor Sozo Ventures along with existing investors Anthos Capital, Fuse Venture Capital, Ignition Partners, Liquid2 and Voyager Capital. The funding will be used to expand sales regions in North America, optimize and scale manufacturing, develop new software and hardware products, and launch into international markets. This latest round of financing brings Carbon Robotics’ overall funding to $67 million”.
Announcements
Start Up Meeting Aerial Robotics WG
Aerial Robotics Working Group is starting up! The first meeting will take place on the 26th of April. Check out the post above for more details about the project and the event.