Video Friday: Sewer Spiders

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.

CoRL 2022: 14–18 December 2022, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

Enjoy today’s videos!

NO THANK YOU.

It’s for inspecting sewers, which means that it has a way into your house.

[ Tmsuk ] via [ Robotstart ]

As impressive as this is (and I’m pretty impressed), this really reinforces how effortless this kind of manipulation is for most humans.

[ Sanctuary ]

Yifeng Zhu from UT Austin writes, “We have a paper accepted at the Conference on Robot Learning 2022, which describes a robot that learns a closed-loop visuomotor policy to make coffee using k-cup machine. We envision that our model can apply to robot manipulators to perform complicated in-home tasks with a handful of demonstrations, and we are very excited to share our work with the community.”

[ VIOLA ]

Thanks, Yifeng!

If you want to properly train a table-tennis robot in the real world, you need something on the other side of the table to challenge it. This open-source ball launcher, called AIMY, is arguably better than a human at this.

[ AIMY ]

Thanks, Alexander!

Come for the inflatable tentacles, stay for the manipulator made out of pool floaties.

[ Suzumori Endo Lab ]

Petoi Bittle robot dog is dressed up to play a Halloween scene. He approaches a gummy bear from behind. But it turned out to be...

[ Bittle ]

Thanks, Rongzhong!

Kodiak is the first self-driving trucking company to demonstrate how our autonomous technology, the kodiakDriver, can maintain complete control of the truck even after suffering a catastrophic tire blowout. The kodiakDriver can actually maintain such precise control that the vehicle doesn’t even leave the lane.

The stopping in the middle of the road there is just to illustrate the control that the vehicle has; in practice, it would pull over to the side.

[ Kodiak ]

Some beautiful flapping-wing motion on this orithopter.

[ GRVC ]

We propose WaddleWalls, a room-scale interactive partitioning system using a swarm of robotic partitions that allow occupants to interactively reconfigure workspace partitions to satisfy their privacy and interaction needs.

[ Paper ]

Boston Dynamics celebrates 30 years of innovation, exploration, and collaboration! We're excited to see what the next 30 years holds for us and for the robotics industry.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

I think perhaps I am nowhere near wealthy enough to understand the point of this.

Apparently, you wear a sensorized version of the watch for a couple of weeks, which allows this robot arm to re-create your movements, and then the actual watch gets calibrated based on how you like to wave your arms around IRL. Which seems a little nuts to me, but so does spending US $93,500 on a watch.

[ De Bethune ] via [ Gizmodo ]

Well, this is probably my least favorite use case for drones. Not sure how much of the video is real, but the project certainly is.

[ Elbit ]

Franka Emika released its next-generation robotic platform—Franka Research 3—the platform of choice for cutting-edge AI and robotics research.

[ Franka ]

What makes the human hand special, and why is it worth replicating in mechanical form?

[ Shadow ]

This week's CMU RI Seminar is from Chelsea Finn at Stanford, entitled "Robots Should Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle."

Despite numerous successes in deep robotic learning over the past decade, the generalization and versatility of robots across environments and tasks has remained a major challenge. In this talk, I will discuss how our embodied learning algorithms need to reduce, reuse, and recycle—reducing the need for special-purpose online data collection, reusing existing data, and recycling pretrained models with various downstream tasks.

[ CMU RI ]

Watch the entire Bay Area Robotics Symposium live stream here.

[ BARS 2022 ]

Special thanks today to Dr. Eric Ackerman, an IEEE member with an email address that often gets confused with mine and who very kindly sends stuff along to me.