Video Friday: Loco-Manipulation

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. Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH Enjoy today’s videos! In this work, we present LocoMan, a dexterous quadrupedal robot with a novel morphology to perform versatile manipulation in diverse constrained environments. By equipping a Unitree Go1 robot with two low-cost and lightweight modular 3-DoF loco-manipulators on its front calves, LocoMan leverages the combined mobility and functionality of the legs and grippers for complex manipulation tasks that require precise 6D positioning of the end effector in a wide workspace. [ CMU ] Thanks, Changyi! Object manipulation has been Continue reading Video Friday: Loco-Manipulation

Video Friday: RACER Heavy

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. Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH Enjoy today’s videos! DARPA’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program recently conducted its fourth experiment (E4) to assess the performance of off-road unmanned vehicles. These tests, conducted in Texas in late 2023, were the first time the program tested its new vehicle, the RACER Heavy Platform (RHP). The video shows autonomous route following for mobility testing and demonstration, including sensor point cloud visualizations. The 12-ton RHP is significantly larger than the 2-ton RACER Fleet Vehicles (RFVs) already in Continue reading Video Friday: RACER Heavy

Video Friday: SpaceHopper

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. RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 2024, KASSEL, GERMANY AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2024: 22–25 April 2024, SAN DIEGO Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Enjoy today’s videos! In the SpaceHopper project, students at ETH Zurich developed a robot capable of moving in low gravity environments through hopping motions. It is intended to be used in future space missions to explore small celestial bodies. The exploration of asteroids and moons could provide insights into the formation of the universe, and they may contain valuable minerals that humanity could use in the future.The project began in 2021 Continue reading Video Friday: SpaceHopper

Hello, Electric Atlas

Yesterday, Boston Dynamics bid farewell to the iconic Atlas humanoid robot. Or, the hydraulically-powered version of Atlas, anyway—if you read between the lines of the video description (or even just read the actual lines of the video description), it was pretty clear that although hydraulic Atlas was retiring, it wasn’t the end of the Atlas humanoid program at Boston Dynamics. In fact, Atlas is already back, and better than ever. Today, Boston Dynamics is introducing a new version of Atlas that’s all-electric. It’s powered by batteries and electric actuators, no more messy hydraulics. It exceeds human performance in terms of both strength and flexibility. And for the first time, Boston Dynamics is calling this humanoid robot a product. We’ll take a look at everything that Boston Dynamics is announcing today, and have even more detail in this Q&A with Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter. Boston Dynamics’ new electric humanoid has Continue reading Hello, Electric Atlas

Video Friday: Robot Dog Can’t Fall

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. RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 2024, KASSEL, GERMANY AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2024: 22–25 April 2024, SAN DIEGO Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH Enjoy today’s videos! I think suggesting that robots can’t fall is much less useful than instead suggesting that robots can fall and get quickly and easily get back up again. [ Deep Robotics ] Sanctuary AI says that this video shows Phoenix operating at “human-equivalent speed,” but they don’t specify which human or under which conditions. Though it’s faster than I would be, that’s for Continue reading Video Friday: Robot Dog Can’t Fall

Video Friday: LASSIE On the Moon

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. RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 2024, KASSEL, GERMANY AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2024: 22–25 April 2024, SAN DIEGO Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Enjoy today’s videos! USC, UPenn, Texas A&M, Oregon State, Georgia Tech, Temple University, and NASA Johnson Space Center are teaching dog-like robots to navigate craters of the moon and other challenging planetary surfaces in research funded by NASA. [ USC ] AMBIDEX is a revolutionary robot that is fast, lightweight, and capable of human-like manipulation. We have added a sensor head and the torso and the waist to greatly expand the Continue reading Video Friday: LASSIE On the Moon

Video Friday: Co-Expression

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. RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 2024, KASSEL, GERMANY AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2024: 22–25 April 2024, SAN DIEGO, CA Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Enjoy today’s videos! Columbia engineers build Emo, a silicon-clad robotic face that makes eye contact and uses two AI models to anticipate and replicate a person’s smile before the person actually smiles—a major advance in robots predicting human facial expressions accurately, improving interactions, and building trust between humans and robots. [ Columbia ] Researchers at Stanford University have invented a way to augment electric motors to make them much more Continue reading Video Friday: Co-Expression

Video Friday: Project GR00T

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. Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Enjoy today’s videos! See NVIDIA’s journey from pioneering advanced autonomous vehicle hardware and simulation tools to accelerated perception and manipulation for autonomous mobile robots and industrial arms, culminating in the next wave of cutting-edge AI for humanoid robots. [ NVIDIA ] In release 4.0, we advanced Spot’s locomotion abilities thanks to the power of reinforcement learning. Paul Domanico, Robotics Engineer at Boston Dynamics talks through how Spot’s hybrid approach of combining reinforcement learning with model predictive control creates an even more stable robot in the most antagonistic Continue reading Video Friday: Project GR00T

Nvidia Announces GR00T, a Foundation Model For Humanoids

Nvidia’s ongoing GTC developer conference in San Jose is, unsurprisingly, almost entirely about AI this year. But in between the AI developments, Nvidia has also made a couple of significant robotics announcements. First, there’s Project GR00T (with each letter and number pronounced individually so as not to invoke the wrath of Disney), a foundation model for humanoid robots. And secondly, Nvidia has committed to be the founding platinum member of the Open Source Robotics Alliance, a new initiative from the Open Source Robotics Foundation intended to make sure that the Robot Operating System (ROS), a collection of open-source software libraries and tools, has the support that it needs to flourish. GR00T First, let’s talk about GR00T (short for “Generalist Robot 00 Technology”). The way that Nvidia presenters enunciated it letter-by-letter during their talks strongly suggests that in private they just say “Groot.” So the rest of us can also just Continue reading Nvidia Announces GR00T, a Foundation Model For Humanoids

Video Friday: Human to Humanoid

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. HRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, COLO. Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Enjoy today’s videos! We present Human to Humanoid (H2O), a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework that enables real-time, whole-body teleoperation of a full-sized humanoid robot with only an RGB camera. We successfully achieve teleoperation of dynamic, whole-body motions in real-world scenarios, including walking, back jumping, kicking, turning, waving, pushing, boxing, etc. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration to achieve learning-based, real-time, whole-body humanoid teleoperation. [ CMU ] Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex Continue reading Video Friday: Human to Humanoid