Video Friday: Resilient Bugbots

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.

Robotics Summit & Expo: 10–11 May 2023, BOSTON

ICRA 2023: 29 May–2 June 2023, LONDON

RoboCup 2023: 4–10 July 2023, BORDEAUX, FRANCE

RSS 2023: 10–14 July 2023, DAEGU, KOREA

IEEE RO-MAN 2023: 28–31 August 2023, BUSAN, KOREA

CLAWAR 2023: 2–4 October 2023, FLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL

Humanoids 2023: 12–14 December 2023, AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA

Enjoy today’s videos!

Inspired by the hardiness of bumblebees, MIT researchers have developed repair techniques that enable a bug-sized aerial robot to sustain severe damage to the actuators, or artificial muscles, that power its wings—but to still fly effectively.

[ MIT ]

This robot gripper is called DragonClaw, and do you really need to know anything else?

“Alas, DragonClaw wins again!”

[ AMTL ]

Here’s a good argument for having legs on a robot:

And here’s a less-good argument for having legs on a robot, but still, impressive!

[ ANYbotics ]

Always nice to see drones getting real work done! Also, when you offer your drone up for powerline inspections and promise that it won’t crash into anything, that’s confidence.

[ Skydio ]

Voxel robots have been extensively simulated because they’re easy to simulated, but not extensively built because they’re hard to build. But here are some that actually work.

[ Paper ]

Thanks, Bram!

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a promising approach to developing controllers for quadrupedal robots. We explore an alternative to the position-based RL paradigm, by introducing a torque-based RL framework, where an RL policy directly predicts joint torques at a high frequency, thus circumventing the use of a PD controller. The proposed learning torque control framework is validated with extensive experiments, in which a quadruped is capable of traversing various terrain and resisting external disturbances while following user-specified commands.

[ Berkeley ]

In this work we show how bio-inspired, 3D-printed snakeskins enhances the friction anisotropy and thus the slithering locomotion of a snake robot. Experiments have been conducted with a soft pneumatic snake robot in various indoor and outdoor settings.

[ Paper ]

For bipedal humanoid robots to successfully operate in the real world, they must be competent at simultaneously executing multiple motion tasks while reacting to unforeseen external disturbances in real-time. We propose Kinodynamic Fabrics as an approach for the specification, solution and simultaneous execution of multiple motion tasks in real-time while being reactive to dynamism in the environment.

[ Michigan Robotics ]

The RPD 35 from Built Robotics is the world’s first autonomous piling system. It combines four steps—layout, pile distribution, pile driving, and as-builts—into one package. With the RPD 35, a two-person crew can install pile more productivity than traditional methods.

[ Built Robotics ]

This work contributes a novel and modularized learning-based method for aerial robots navigating cluttered environments containing hard-to-perceive, thin obstacles without assuming access to a map or the full pose estimation of the robot.

[ ARL ]

Thanks, Kostas!

The video shows a use case that was developed by the FZI with assistance of the KIT: the multi-robot retrieval of hazardous materials using two FZI robots as well as a KIT virtual reality environment.

[ FZI ]

Satisfying.

[ Soft Robtics ]

A year has passed since the launch of the ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission was put on hold, but the work has not stopped for the ExoMars teams in Europe. In this program, the ESA Web TV crew travel back to Turin, Italy to talk to the teams and watch as new tests are being conducted with the rover’s Earth twin Amalia while the real rover remains carefully stored in an ultra-clean room.

[ ESA ]

Camilo Buscaron, Chief Technologist, AWS Robotics sits down with Ramon Roche in this Behind the Tech episode to share his storied career in the robotics industry. Camilo explains how AWS provides a host of services for robotics developers from simulation and streaming to basic realtime cloud storage.

[ Behind the Tech ]

​IEEE Spectrum