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.
Cybathlon Challenges: 2 February 2024, ZURICH
Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE
ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN
RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS
Enjoy today’s videos!
Figure’s robot is watching videos of humans making coffee, and then making coffee on its own.
While this is certainly impressive, just be aware that it’s not at all clear from the video exactly how impressive it is.
[ Figure ]
It’s really the shoes that get me with Westwood’s THEMIS robot.
THEMIS can also deliver a package just as well as a human can, if not better!
And I appreciate the inclusion of all of these outtakes, too:
Kepler Exploration Robot recently unveiled its latest innovation, the Kepler Forerunner series of general-purpose humanoid robots. This advanced humanoid stands at a height of 178cm (5’10”), weighs 85kg (187 lbs.), and boasts an intelligent and dexterous hand with 12 degrees of freedom. The entire body has up to 40 degrees of freedom, enabling functionalities such as navigating complex terrains, intelligent obstacle avoidance, flexible manipulation of hands, powerful lifting and carrying of heavy loads, hand-eye coordination, and intelligent interactive communication.
Introducing the new Ballie, your true AI companion. With more advanced intelligence, Ballie can come right to you and project visuals on your walls. It can also help you interact with other connected devices or take care of hassles.
[ Samsung ]
There is a thing called Drone Soccer that got some exposure at CES this week, but apparently it’s been around for several years, and originated in South Korea. Inspired by Quiddich, targeted at STEM students.
[ Drone Soccer ]
Every so often, JPL dumps a bunch of raw footage onto YouTube. This time, there’s Perseverance’s view of Ingenuity taking off, a test of the EELS robot, and an unusual sample tube drop test.
[ JPL ]
Our first months delivering to Walmart customers have made one thing clear: Demand for drone delivery is real. On the heels of our Dallas-wide FAA approvals, today we announced that millions of new DFW-area customers will have access to drone delivery in 2024!
[ Wing ]
Dave Burke works with Biomechatronics researcher Michael Fernandez to test a prosthesis with neural control, by cutting a sheet of paper with scissors. This is the first time in 30 years that Dave has performed this task with his missing hand.
[ MIT ]
Meet DJI’s first delivery drone—FlyCart 30. Overcome traditional transport challenges and start a new era of dynamic aerial delivery with large payload capacity, long operation range, high reliability, and intelligent features.
[ DJI ]
The Waymo Driver autonomously operating both a passenger vehicle and class 8 truck safely in various freeway scenarios, including on-ramps and off-ramps, lane merges, and sharing the road with others.
[ Waymo ]
In this paper, we present DiffuseBot, a physics-augmented diffusion model that generates soft robot morphologies capable of excelling in a wide spectrum of tasks. DiffuseBot bridges the gap between virtually generated content and physical utility by (i) augmenting the diffusion process with a physical dynamical simulation which provides a certificate of performance, and ii) introducing a co-design procedure that jointly optimizes physical design and control by leveraging information about physical sensitivities from differentiable simulation.
[ Paper ]
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.
