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!
You may not be familiar with Swiss-Mile, but you’d almost certainly recognize its robot: it’s the ANYmal with wheels on its feet that can do all kinds of amazing things. Swiss-Mile has just announced a seed round to commercialize these capabilities across quadrupedal platforms, including Unitree’s, which means it’s even affordable-ish!
It’s always so cool to see impressive robotics research move toward commercialization, and I’ve already started saving up for one of these of my own.
[ Swiss-Mile ]
Thanks Marko!
This video presents the capabilities of PAL Robotics’ TALOS robot as it demonstrates agile and robust walking using Model Predictive Control (MPC) references sent to a Whole-Body Inverse Dynamics (WBID) controller developed in collaboration with Dynamograde. The footage shows TALOS navigating various challenging terrains, including stairs and slopes, while handling unexpected disturbances and additional weight.
[ PAL Robotics ]
Thanks Lorna!
Do you want to create a spectacular bimanual manipulation demo? All it takes is this teleoperation system and a carefully cropped camera shot! This is based on the Mobile ALOHA system from Stanford that we featured in Video Friday last week.
[ AgileX ]
Wing is still trying to make the drone-delivery thing work, and it’s got a new, bigger drone to deliver even more stuff at once.
[ Wing ]
A lot of robotics research claims to be about search and rescue and disaster relief, but it really looks like RSL’s ANYmal can actually pull it off.
And here’s even more impressive video, along with some detail about how the system works.
[ Paper ]
This might be the most appropriate soundtrack for a robot video that I’ve ever heard.
Snakes have long captivated robotics researchers due to their effective locomotion, flexible body structure, and ability to adapt their skin friction to different terrains. While extensive research has delved into serpentine locomotion, there remains a gap in exploring rectilinear locomotion as a robotic solution for navigating through narrow spaces. In this study, we describe the fundamental principles of rectilinear locomotion and apply them to design a soft crawling robot using origami modules constructed from laminated fabrics.
[ SDU ]
We wrote about Fotokite’s innovative tethered drone seven or eight years ago, and it’s good to see the company is still doing solid work.
I do miss the consumer version, though.
[ Fotokite ]
This is SHIVAA the strawberry picking robot of DFKI Robotics Innovation Center. The system is being developed in the RoLand (Robotic Systems in Agriculture) project, coordinated by the #RoboticsInnovationCenter (RIC) of the DFKI Bremen. Within the project we design and develop a semi-autonomous, mobile system that is capable of harvesting strawberries independent of human interaction.
[ DFKI ]
On December 6, 2023, Demarcus Edwards talked to Robotics students as a speaker in the Undergraduate Robotics Pathways & Careers Speaker Series, which aims to answer the question: “What can I do with a robotics degree?”
This movie, Loss of Sensation, was released in Russia in 1935. It seems to be the movie that really, really irritated Karel Čapek, because they made his “robots” into mechanical beings instead of biological ones.
[ IMDB ]
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.
