Video Friday: Spot Tripping

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

IROS 2023: 1–5 October 2023, DETROIT

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

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

Enjoy today’s videos!

Two interesting things about this video: First, the “where’s the button” poke at 2:20, and second, the custom Spot-friendly wrench.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

This is one of the more interesting drone designs that I’ve seen recently, since it’s modular, and you can clip on wings and props. And somehow it just flies.

[ AIR Lab ]

This soft robotic gripper is not only 3D printed in one print, it also doesn’t need any electronics to work. The researchers wanted to design a soft gripper that would be ready to use right as it comes off the 3D printer, equipped with built in gravity and touch sensors. As a result, the gripper can pick up, hold, and release objects.

[ UCSD ]

Thanks, Daniel!

Through this powerful collaboration with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), we are proud to donate cutting-edge Skydio drones, complemented by 3D Scan technology and comprehensive professional training. These resources will aid the Office of the Prosecutor General to document the more than 115,000 instances of destroyed civilian infrastructure, and evidence of human rights abuses on frontline communities and liberated territories.

[ Skydio ]

Grasping objects with limited or no prior knowledge about them is a highly relevant skill in assistive robotics. Still, in this general setting, it has remained an open problem. We present a deep learning pipeline consisting of a shape completion module that is based on a single depth image, and followed by a grasp predictor that is based on the predicted object shape.

[ DLR RM ]

This is a video announcing the opening of the MyoChallenge 23, part of the challenge track of the NeurIPS23 conference. This competition merges physiologically realistic musculoskeletal models and AI with the goal of creating controllers for locomotion and manipulation.

[ MyoChallenge ]

Thanks, Guillaume!

The new DJI Air 3 has a transmission range of 20 kilometers and a flight time of 46 minutes. Consumer drones have made a lot of progress in a pretty short time, haven’t they?

[ DJI ]

With [human driving’s track] record of nearly 43,000 deaths and 2.5 million injuries in the U.S. alone in 2021, we believe autonomous driving technology has the potential to save lives and improve mobility options for millions of people. The data to-date indicates that the Waymo Driver is reducing traffic injuries and fatalities in the places where we operate, and we aim to continue safely designing and deploying our Driver to help more people in more places.

Humans are bad drivers for sure, but according to expert Missy Cummings, as quoted by AP, “autonomous vehicles from Waymo, a spinoff of Google, are four times more likely than humans to crash.”

Watch Tanner Lecturers, Fei-Fei Li and Eric Horvitz, discuss the topics of AI and Human Values.

[ Stanford HAI ]

Tin Lun Lam writes, “in the last two months, we have organized a Lecture Series on Multi-robot Systems and invited eight world-renowned scholars to share their wisdom to help promote knowledge sharing and technological advancement in this field.” Here’s two of the lectures, and you can find the other six at the link below.

[ Freeform Robotics ]

Thanks, Tin Lun!

​IEEE Spectrum