Robotic Movies: Pollen Robotics, DARPA, and Extra

Video Friday is your weekly choice of superior robotics movies, collected by your mates at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We additionally publish a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics occasions for the subsequent few months. Please ship us your occasions for inclusion.

IROS 2024: 14–18 October 2024, ABU DHABI, UAE

ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK

Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH

Humanoids 2024: 22–24 November 2024, NANCY, FRANCE

Get pleasure from at present’s movies!

[ Pollen Robotics ]

A robotic pangolin designed to plant bushes is the winner of the 2023 Pure Robotics Contest, which rewards robotic designs impressed by nature. Because the successful entry, the pangolin—dubbed “Plantolin”—has been dropped at life by engineers on the College of Surrey in the UK. Out of 184 entries, the successful design got here from Dorothy, a highschool pupil from California.

Dr. Rob Siddall, a roboticist on the College of Surrey who constructed Plantolin, stated, “Within the wild, massive animals will lower paths by the overgrowth and transfer seeds. This doesn’t occur almost as a lot in city areas just like the South East of England—so there’s undoubtedly room for a robotic to assist fill that hole. Dorothy’s good design reminds us how we are able to resolve a few of our greatest challenges by seeking to nature for inspiration.”

[ Plantolin ]

Our novel focused throwing end-effector is designed to seamlessly combine with drones and cellular manipulators. It makes use of elastic vitality for environment friendly choosing, putting, and throwing of objects, providing a flexible resolution for industrial and warehouse purposes. By combining a physics-based mannequin with residual studying, it achieves elevated accuracy in focused throwing, even with beforehand unseen objects.

[ Throwing Manipulation, multimedia extension for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters ]

Thanks, Nagamanikandan!

[ Paper ]

Thanks, Sorina!

Corvus Robotics, a supplier of autonomous stock administration methods, introduced an up to date model of its Corvus One system that brings, for the primary time, the power to fly its drone-powered system in a lights-out distribution middle with none added infrastructure like reflectors, stickers, or beacons.

With impediment detection at its core, the lightweight drone safely flies at strolling pace with out disrupting workflow or blocking aisles and may preventatively ascend to keep away from collisions with individuals, forklifts, or robots, if mandatory. Its superior barcode scanning can learn any barcode symbology in any orientation positioned anyplace on the entrance of cartons or pallets.

[ Corvus Robotics ]

Thanks, Jackie!

The primary public strolling demo of a brand new humanoid from Below Management Robotics.

[ Under Control Robotics ]

The power to precisely and quickly establish key physiological signatures of harm – resembling hemorrhage and airway accidents – proved key to success within the DARPA Triage Problem Occasion 1. DART took the highest spot within the Techniques competitors, whereas Coordinated Robotics topped the leaderboard within the Digital competitors and pulled off the win within the Information competitors. All certified groups are eligible for prizes within the Ultimate Occasion. These self-funded groups gained between $60,000 – $120,000 every for his or her first-place finishes.

[ DARPA ]

The physique construction of an anatomically right tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoid is advanced. We centered on reciprocal innervation within the human nervous system, after which carried out antagonist inhibition management (AIC) primarily based on the reflex. To confirm its effectiveness, we utilized AIC to the higher limb of the tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoid, Kengoro, and succeeded in dangling for 14 minutes and doing pull-ups.

That can be how I do pull-ups.

[ Jouhou System Kougaku Laboratory, University of Tokyo ]

Thanks, Kento!

On June 5, 2024 Digit accomplished it’s first day of labor for GXO Logistics, Inc. as a part of common operations. That is the results of a multi-year settlement between GXO and Agility Robotics to start deploying Digit in GXO’s logistics operations. This settlement, which follows a proof-of-concept pilot in late 2023, is each the business’s first formal business deployment of humanoid robots and first Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) deployment of humanoid robots.

[ Agility Robotics ]

Though there’s a rising demand for cooking behaviours as one of many anticipated duties for robots, a sequence of cooking behaviours primarily based on new recipe descriptions by robots in the actual world has not but been realised. On this research, we suggest a robotic system that integrates real-world executable robotic cooking behaviour planning utilizing the Massive Language Mannequin (LLM) and classical planning of PDDL descriptions, and meals ingredient state recognition studying from a small variety of information utilizing the Imaginative and prescient-Language mannequin (VLM).

[ JSK Robotics Laboratory, University of Tokyo GitHub ]

Thanks, Naoaki!

[ AxLab Actuated Experience Lab, University of Chicago ]

Azi reacts in full AI to the scripted skit it did with Ameca.

Azi makes use of 32 actuators, with 27 to regulate its silicone face, and 5 for the neck. It makes use of GPT-4o with a customisable persona.

[ Engineered Arts ]

We’re testing a system that features robots, structural constructing blocks, and sensible algorithms to construct large-scale buildings for future deep house exploration. On this video, autonomous robots labored as a group to move materials in a mock rail system and simulate a construct of a tower at our Roverscape.

[ NASA Ames Research Center ]

In the summertime of 2024 HEBI’s intern Aditya Nair labored so as to add new use-case demos, and enhance high quality and consistency of the present demos for our robotic arms! On this video you possibly can see train and report, augmented actuality, gravity compensation, and impedance management gimbal for our robotic arms.

[ HEBI Robotics ]

This video showcases cutting-edge improvements and robotic demonstrations from the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL) at EPFL. As we’re closing the semester, this occasion brings collectively the thrilling progress and breakthroughs made by our researchers and college students over the previous months. On this video, you’ll expertise a set of thrilling demonstrations, that includes the newest in reconfigurable, smooth, and modular robotics, geared toward tackling real-world challenges.

[ EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab ]

Humanoid robotic corporations are promising that humanoids will quick turn into our mates, colleagues, workers, and the spine of our workforce. However how shut are we to this actuality? What are the important thing prices related to working a humanoid? Can corporations deploy them profitably? Will humanoids take our jobs, and if that’s the case, what ought to we be doing to organize?

[ Human Robot Interaction Podcast ]

Based on Internet of Science, there have been 1,147,069 publications from 2003 to 2023 that fell below their class of “Laptop Science, Synthetic Intelligence.” Throughout the identical time interval, 217,507 publications fell below their “Robotics” class, about 1/fifth of the quantity. On high of that, Canada’s printed Science, Expertise, and Innovation Priorities has AI on the high of the “Expertise Superior Canada” listing, however robotics is just not even listed. AI has additionally engaged the general public’s creativeness extra so than robotics with “AI” dominating Google Search traits in comparison with “robotics.” This has us questioning: “Is AI Skyrocketing whereas Robotics Inches Ahead?”

[ Ingenuity Labs RAIS2024 Robotics Debate ]