Weekly Robotics #289
Today’s intro is non-robotic related, so you can skip to the next section if you are here only for the robots. I recently graduated to the world of adult people by embarking on a journey towards reconstructing an apartment. The biggest surprise to me so far, which might be specific to my local market, is that the front doors are all made to order, and the lead time is approximately two to three months. This problem would make for an interesting case study on automation, predicting demand, and how customizability fits in with all of it. I’ve seen some companies showcasing robot manipulators on their websites, so the process should be automated to some extent. Curious! As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo.
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RicMonk: A Three-Link Brachiation Robot with Passive Grippers for Energy-Efficient Brachiation
If you are like me, you probably woke up today and thought to yourself: ?I wonder how the underactuated branching AcroMonk from this issue is doing”*. And then you came across RickMonk, linked above, which really seems to take the design of its predecesor to the next level by adding a counterweight.
*not necessarily an accurate reconstruction of the events
World’s Fastest Camera Drone Vs F1 Car (ft. Max Verstappen)
Even though I was skeptical about this video based on the title, I highly enjoyed this mini-documentary on making a drone that can go over 300 km/h and catch up with an F1 car on the Silverstone Circuit. Will these types of drones ever make it for race coverage? The views would be amazing, but the risk might be too high to deploy these.
Airfoil
Bartosz Ciechanowski created another article. As always, it’s super high quality with great interactive visualizations. I think Bartosz is one of the top scientific content creators on the Internet these days.
Meet Punyo, TRI’s Soft Robot for Whole-Body Manipulation Research
Before last week, Punyo was, to me, a synonym for a tactile bubble gripper that you can build at home. Not anymore! It’s now a whole robot for whole-body manipulation research that does not use anything resembling fingers, yet it can still carry a bunch of stuff. Cool stuff!
领英推荐
The Audio-Visual BatVision Dataset for Research on Sight and Sound
“The BatVision dataset contains large scale audio-visual data from a robots’ perspective. For its creation, a robot traversed corridors, offices, lecture halls and driveways at a historic campus and modern office building like a bat, emitting chirping sounds with a speaker. A binaural microphone recorded their echoes which carry rich scene information of objects, materials and layout. With this paper we provide echoes, camera images and depth maps, shown overlayed on typical scenes on the right. Echoes are shown under images. This dataset will help investigate fundamental questions on how sound interacts with spaces, how it can be harnessed for robotic navigation and what in general can be understood about a scene from how it sounds”.
Nautilus: An autonomous surface vehicle with a multilayer software architecture for offshore inspection
If you want to build your autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) that can survive in the sea with waves as high as 2.5 m, then this open-access paper might be a good starting point. The boat contains multiple cameras for inspection, LiDAR, a GNSS system in RTK configuration, and an IMU. The software architecture is interesting, covering a vast amount of abstractions. It warrants a deeper look at the relationship of Mission-> Task-> Skill-> Action and exploring how it differs from a traditional state machine (if at all).
All Roads Lead to Robotics
Here is an opinion piece from Eric Jang to hype you up. Eric is leading the AI efforts at 1X Technologies, and in the featured piece, he advocates that AI will run into similar problems as robotics because it will be escaping a finely defined world of bits. I found this quote in the article very interesting: “A little bit of ignorance propagates very quickly, and soon your robot ends up on the floor having a seizure because it thinks that it still has a chance at maintaining balance.”
(Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup
Building a business, even a robotics one, will sooner or later involve some DevOps work. That’s why I highly appreciate this list put together by Jack Lindamood.
Publication of the Week - High-Speed Motion Planning for Aerial Swarms in Unknown and Cluttered Environments
With no further due, this paper presents a high-speed, decentralized, and synchronous motion planning framework (HDSM) for an aerial swarm. And as much as it sounds already challenging, it also has been tested on Crazyflie nano-drones, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods. You can check the video of the paper with more details and the drones running.
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10 个月This blog provides captivating insights into robotics advancements. From brachiation robots to high-speed drones, it's a fascinating glimpse into the future.? Check out Moonbattle Conference 2024 for more exciting robot journeys and learn how they can help us safely https://moonpreneur.com/moonbattle2024/
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