Video Friday: GR-1

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Humanoids 2023: 12–14 December 2023, AUSTIN, TEXAS

Cybathlon Challenges: 2 February 2024, ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE

Enjoy today’s videos!

Fourier Intelligence has just announced the mass production of their GR-1 humanoid, and they’ve got at least a dozen of them.

[ Fourier Intelligence ]

Thanks, Ni Tao!

This collaborative work between researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and VISTEC introduces a biomorphic soft robotic skin for a hexapod robot platform, featuring a central pattern generator–based neural controller for generating respiratory-like motions on the skin. The design enables visuo-haptic nonverbal communication between humans and robots and improves the robot’s aesthetics by enhancing its biomorphic qualities.

[ Paper ]

Thanks, Mads!

According to data from 2010, around 1.8 million people in the United States can’t eat on their own. Yet training a robot to feed people presents an array of challenges for researchers. A team led by researchers at the University of Washington created a set of 11 actions a robotic arm can make to pick up nearly any food attainable by fork. In tests with this set of actions, the robot picked up the foods more than 80 percent of the time, which is the user-specified benchmark for in-home use. The small set of actions allows the system to learn to pick up new foods during one meal.

[ UW ]

Thanks, Stefan!

If you watch enough robot videos, you get to know when a robot is being pushed in a way that’s easy to recover from, and when it’s actually being challenged. The end of this video shows IHMC’s Nadia getting pushed sideways against its planted foot, which necessitates a crossover step recovery.

[ Paper ] via [ IHMC ]

Thanks, Robert!

Ayato Kanada, an assistant professor at Kyushu University, wants to build woodpecker-inspired Doc Ock tentacles. And when you’re a professor, you can just do that.

Also, woodpeckers are weird.

[ Ayato Kanada ]

Thanks, Ayato!

Explore Tevel’s joint robotic fruit-harvesting pilot program with Kubota in this video, filmed during the 2023 apple harvest season in the Mazzoni Group’s orchards in Ferrara, Italy. Watch as our autonomous fruit-picking systems operate with precision, skillfully harvesting various apples in the idyllic Italian orchards.

[ Tevel ]

Understanding what’s an obstacle and what’s only obstacle-ish has always been tricky for robots, but Spot is making some progress here.

[ EVORA ]

We tried to play Street Fighter 6 by teleoperating Reachy! Well, it didn’t go as planned, as Antoine won. But it was a pretty epic fight!

[ Pollen Robotics ]

The key assets of a data center are the servers. While most of them are active in the server room, idle and new assets are stored in the IT warehouse. Focusing mainly on this IT warehouse, SeRo automates the inbound and outbound management of the data center’s assets.

[ Naver Labs ]

Humans can be so mean.

[ Flexiv ]

Interesting HRI with the flashing light on Spot here.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Flying in circles with a big tank of gas really seems like a better job for a robot pilot than for a human one.

[ Boeing ]

On 2 November 2023, at an event hosted by the Swiss Association of Aeronautical Sciences at ETH, Professor Davide Scaramuzza presented a comprehensive overview of our latest advancements in autonomous drone technology aimed at achieving human-level performance.

[ UZH RPG ]