Video Friday: Robot Blows Up a Land Mine

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos We have a relatively brief Video Friday for you this week, because we’ve spent all week at ICRA in Montreal. Next week, look for lots of ICRA content, along with a special ICRA edition Video Friday. URC 2019 – May 30-1, 2019 – Hanksville, Utah Dynamic Walking 2019 – June 3-6, 2019 – Canmore, Alberta, Canada 2nd Annual Robotics Summit & Expo – June 4-6, 2019 – Boston, Mass., USA ICUAS 2019 – June 11-14, 2019 – Atlanta, GA, USA Energy Drone Coalition Summit – June 12-13, 2019 – Woodlands, Texas, USA RSS 2019 – June 22-26, 2019 – Freiburg, Germany Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics – June 23-26, 2019 – London, UK ETH Robotics Summer School – June 27-1, 2019 – Zurich, Switzerland MARSS 2019 – July 1-5, 2019 – Helsinki, Finland Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Sandia’s Robots Pull Apart Warheads to Recycle Thousands of Micro-Grenades

More than 700,000 bomblets have been turned into recyclable metal thanks to hard-working robots The United States builds a lot of weapons. Unless a lot of really bad stuff happens all at once, we build more weapons than we can possibly use, and since we keep inventing new ones that are better and doing what weapons do, all the old stuff tends to just pile up. These piles of old explosives aren’t aging particularly well, leaving us with few options, which include forgetting about them for longer than is probably safe, or blowing them up. A third option is disassembly and recycling, but that’s dangerous for humans, because these weapons can be very old, and very lethal. Sandia National Labs has been helping the Department of Defense deal with some of its stockpile of M26 rockets, which are packed full of tiny little grenades and need to be taken apart Continuer la lecture Sandia’s Robots Pull Apart Warheads to Recycle Thousands of Micro-Grenades

DARPA’s Semi-Disposable Gremlin Drones Will Fly by 2019

Dynetics gets funding from DARPA to launch and recover multiple reusable drones from a C-130 Image: DyneticsThis artist’s rendering shows how Dynetics plans to release and catch a swarm of Gremlin drones. We first reported on Gremlins back in 2015, as one of those “DARPA wants” projects that seems like it might be a bit far-fetched—in this case, DARPA wanted swarms of nearly disposable UAVs that could launch and be retrieved from flying aircraft carrier motherships in mid-air. Over the last few years, we’ve seen some progress towards disposable drones, but the tricky part was always going to be the mid-air retrieval. We speculated a bit in our original post about how it might be done, but we didn’t get it quite right, which we know because DARPA has given a company called Dynetics a US $38.6 million contract to make Gremlins real. The picture at the top of this Continuer la lecture DARPA’s Semi-Disposable Gremlin Drones Will Fly by 2019