Robotic Movies: Pollen Robotics, DARPA, and Extra

Video Friday is your weekly number of superior robotics movies, collected by your pals at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We additionally publish a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics occasions for the following 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

Take pleasure in right this moment’s movies!

[ Pollen Robotics ]

A robotic pangolin designed to plant timber is the winner of the 2023 Pure Robotics Contest, which rewards robotic designs impressed by nature. Because the profitable 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 profitable design got here from Dorothy, a highschool scholar from California.

Dr. Rob Siddall, a roboticist on the College of Surrey who constructed Plantolin, mentioned, “Within the wild, giant animals will lower paths via the overgrowth and transfer seeds. This doesn’t occur practically 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 largest challenges by trying 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 power for environment friendly selecting, inserting, and throwing of objects, providing a flexible answer 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 programs, 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 obligatory. Its superior barcode scanning can learn any barcode symbology in any orientation positioned wherever on the entrance of cartons or pallets.

[ Corvus Robotics ]

Thanks, Jackie!

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

[ Under Control Robotics ]

The power to precisely and quickly determine key physiological signatures of harm – comparable to hemorrhage and airway accidents – proved key to success within the DARPA Triage Problem Occasion 1. DART took the highest spot within the Programs 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 Remaining 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 complicated. We centered on reciprocal innervation within the human nervous system, after which applied 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 also 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 trade’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 true world has not but been realised. On this examine, 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 knowledge 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 manage its silicone face, and 5 for the neck. It makes use of GPT-4o with a customisable character.

[ Engineered Arts ]

We’re testing a system that features robots, structural constructing blocks, and sensible algorithms to construct large-scale constructions for future deep house exploration. On this video, autonomous robots labored as a workforce 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 prevailing demos for our robotic arms! On this video you may 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, mushy, and modular robotics, aimed toward tackling real-world challenges.

[ EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab ]

Humanoid robotic firms are promising that humanoids will quick turn into our buddies, 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 firms deploy them profitably? Will humanoids take our jobs, and in that case, what ought to we be doing to organize?

[ Human Robot Interaction Podcast ]

In line with Net 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 amount. On prime of that, Canada’s printed Science, Know-how, and Innovation Priorities has AI on the prime of the “Know-how Superior Canada” record, however robotics isn’t even listed. AI has additionally engaged the general public’s creativeness extra so than robotics with “AI” dominating Google Search tendencies in comparison with “robotics.” This has us questioning: “Is AI Skyrocketing whereas Robotics Inches Ahead?”

[ Ingenuity Labs RAIS2024 Robotics Debate ]