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.
IEEE SSRR 2023: 13–15 November 2023, FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN
Humanoids 2023: 12–14 December 2023, AUSTIN, TEXAS.
Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 2024, ZURICH
Enjoy today’s videos!
The process of getting Spot to talk with a personality is very cool, but this is also something that should be done very carefully: Spot is a tool, and although it may sound like it thinks and feels, it absolutely doesn’t. Just something to keep in mind as more Spots (and other robots) make it out into the wild.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
Shhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet.
[ Paper ]
This video presents the remarkable capabilities of the 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.
[ PAL Robotics ]
Dr. Hooman Samani from the Creative Robotics Lab at the University of the Arts London writes, “The idea is to show how robots can be beyond traditional use and involve more people in robotics such as artists as we do at our university. So we made this video to show how a co-bot can be used as a DJ and people and robots dance together to the robot DJ in a robot dance party!”
[ London CCI ]
Future robots should perform multiple and various tasks, instead of simple pick-and-place operations. In this video, Dino Robotics demonstrates the functionalities in their software solution: it cooks a steak! Bon Appétit!
[ Dino Robotics ]
This video presents a novel perching and tilting aerial robot for precise and versatile power-tool work on vertical walls. The system was developed as part of the AITHON ETH Zürich Bachelor student focus project and presented at IEEE IROS 2023. It combines a compact integrated perching drone design with a concrete drill’s heavy payload and reaction forces.
[ Paper ]
This is what very high precision, very useful robotics looks like.
[ Dusty ]
I never thought I’d write this sentence, but here is some video of a failing robotic mudskipper sex doll.
[ Nature ]
Good aim on this drone considering that its landing pad is speeding along at 20 knots.
[ AeroVironment ]
From the people responsible for the giant gundam in Japan comes this very big and very slow rideable quadruped thing.
[ Robotstart ]
RoboCup 2024 will be in Eindhoven in July!
[ RoboCup ]
A brief look into the 2023 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems, which took place in July 2023 in Prague.
[ CTU ]
Lava caves on Mars and particularly on the moon are not only interesting for exo-geologists and other space scientists, but they also could be used as storage rooms or even habitats for future human settlements. The question is how to access and explore these huge cavities under the lunar surface without risking the lives of astronauts. This is where robots, or rather teams of robots, come into play.
[ DFKI ]
The rise of recent Foundation models (and applications e.g. ChatGPT) offer an exciting glimpse into the capabilities of large deep networks trained on Internet-scale data. In this talk, I will briefly discuss some of the lessons we’ve learned while scaling real robot data collection, how we’ve been thinking about Foundation models, and how we might bootstrap off of them (and modularity) to make our robots useful sooner.
[ UPenn ]