Video Friday: Robot Friends

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

3 min read

A teal and white humanoid robot stands on a stage with its arm outstretched

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

ICRA 2022: 23–27 May 2022, Philadelphia
ERF 2022: 28–30 June 2022, Rotterdam, Netherlands
CLAWAR 2022: 12–14 September 2022, Azores, Portugal

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.


Kawasaki introduced a bunch of new robots at iREX in Japan. Including this friendly fellow, called Kaleido.

And here, of course, is Bex, the robotic ibex that we wrote about earlier this week. But it’s way weirder on video!

川崎重工 「RHP Bex」人が乗る #2022国際ロボット展 #irex2022www.youtube.com

There are some other new robots too! Robotstart was there in person, so check out its coverage at the link below.

[ Robotstart ]

In better times, Ukrainian drone enthusiasts flew their gadgets into the sky to photograph weddings or race drones for fun. Now some are risking their lives by forming a volunteer drone force to help their country repel the Russian invasion.

[ AP News ]

Now on Kickstarter, a robotic cat that will not make you sneeze!

As always, remember that crowdfunding videos like these show only the best possible performance and demonstrate a borderline unrealistic experience. Kickstart accordingly, starting at $1K.

[ Kickstarter ]

Thanks, Marie!

This is a pretty great application for a robot arm, right?

The obvious next step is making the driving autonomous too, so that the operator can take a nap.

[ RMV ]

DRC-Hubo has joined the UMass Lowell NERVE Center, where it’s going to learn how to do useful stuff on boats. I totally get why you’d want (or need!) a biped for boatvironments, but good luck with balancing on the high seas.

[ UML ]

Marsupial robot teams have lots of advantages when exploring unknown environments, as long as you can keep them from stepping on or falling off each other. I love the bungie idea here.

[ ARL ]

Fly Like A Girl is a half-day program that introduces youth aged 10–18 to different aspects of drones and applications behind them.

[ WeRobotics ]

iCub embracing its well-documented obsession with condiments.

[ Paper ]

Quadrotors, meet robot arm!

[ INRoL ]

UAVs have a lot to learn from birds. Although, birds may be able to learn a thing or two from UAVs as well, like how to sound like a swarm of giant bees.

[ UMich ]

Haptic teleoperation of a 6 DoF omnidirectional drone sure seems like a very challenging controls problem.

[ ASL ]

Did you ever hide something in the sand at the beach when you were a kid? This is like that, except for adults and robots.

[ DFKI ]

A mobile robot that can explore, inspect, and apply air-sealing foam in spaces beyond human reach.

[ Northeastern ]

Telexistence, best known for its futuristic telepresence anime humanoid robots, is now working on something decidely more mundane.

[ Telexistence ]

In this work, we make two contributions: (i) we perform the first benchmark comparison of existing learned control policies for agile quadrotor flight and show that training a control policy that commands body-rates and thrust results in more robust sim-to-real transfer compared to a policy that directly specifies individual rotor thrusts, (ii) we demonstrate for the first time that such a control policy trained via deep reinforcement learning can control a quadrotor in real-world experiments at speeds over 45km/h.

[ UZH RPG ]

Carmel Majidi, Sarah Bergbreiter, and Vickie Webster-Wood talk about the vision for Softbotics: to engineer machines and robots that put humans at the center and are designed for everyday life.

[ CMU ]

The Conversation (2)
Rokon Zaman
Rokon Zaman21 Mar, 2022
INDV

Engineers have been after making human like or animal like robots for over a century. But upon creating sensation, why do they disappear? Where is the research challenge? Here is further to it: https://www.the-waves.org/2020/07/20/innate-abilities-stall-humanoid/

naty mag
naty mag15 Mar, 2022
INDV

What if a hacker will hack it's program in future and controlled the robot? In future there's gonna be more hackers and by controlling robots they could get the entire world to be theirs.