Weekly Robotics #282

Recently, I’ve been attending a university of life and studying home reconstruction and all kinds of home appliances. At this stage, I could write a thesis on toilets, lighting fixtures, ovens, and more! I miss the days when my only research online was robotics! As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo.

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Autonomous Exploration Development Environment

cmu-exploration

“The environment is meant for leveraging system development and robot deployment for ground-based autonomous navigation and exploration. Containing a variety of simulation environments, autonomous navigation modules such as collision avoidance, terrain traversability analysis, waypoint following, etc, and a set of visualization tools, users can develop autonomous navigation systems and later on port those systems onto real robots for deployment. Here is our open-source repository.” To learn more about this work, check out this video.

Steam Deck as a Robot Controller

adityakamath.hashnode

This article is another excellent piece by Aditya Kamath, where he does a deep dive into using this portable PC to control robots. I will never get bored of Steam Deck-controlled robots!

How I built a fully offline smart home, and why you should too

androidauthority

Spoiler alert: not robotics, but since I’m looking into all kinds of aspects of home renovations, getting new equipment, and whatnot, I thought I would share this piece, where Calvin Wankhede discusses how he created an offline smart home using home assistant and a bunch of smart appliances that use Zigbee. I like the idea of all hardware being accessible locally and not exposing it to the Internet.

Vroomba Gets Upgrades And A Spoiler

hackaday

Tuning a Roomba to go really fast sounds like a fantastic project, and I bet the author had loads of fun doing this! Imagine, though, having this robot cleaning your home and running into your ankle at 50 km/h!

Publication of the Week - Analytical Model and Experimental Testing of the SoftFoot: an Adaptive Robot Foot for Walking over Obstacles and Irregular Terrains

arxiv

Humanoid robots typically use flat, stiff feet, thus requiring their bodies to account for any disturbances in the terrain. This paper presents SoftFoot, a foot that can adapt to irregularities in the terrain. The foot has a bio-inspired passive-compliant structure similar to ours; the mechanism can deform on top of the irregular object with pulleys, tendons, and springs. This gives more stability and also a higher resistance to impact. The article is full of illustrations that are worth checking out.

Business

Neocis brings in $20M for robotic dental surgeries - The Robot Report

therobotreport

“Neocis, which has developed the Yomi robot to assist in dental implant surgeries, has brought in $20 million in funding. The Miami-based company plans to use the funding for business initiatives including product development, sales enablement, and clinical education”.

The Burro Grande finds the agtech robotics firm going big

techcrunch

“The company announced today that it has raised a healthy $24 million Series B, co-led by Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital. Both firms will also be bringing their partners to the Burro board”.

Dextrous Robotics closes up shop

techcrunch

Dextrous Robotics, a company that we featured back in November through their chopstick unloading robot is closing down due to insolvency.