Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
IROS was officially opened by His Majesty King Felipe VI, setting a precedent for every robotics conference from now on. And the King actually bothered to give an interesting and surprisingly well informed speech about the future of robotics in society, which was a very kingly thing to do.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
If you need a roboticist to follow up the King of Spain, it would be hard to choose someone better than Marc Raibert from Boston Dynamics.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
Marc brought a SpotMini along with him to perform some tricks, and also showed some new footage of the robot conducting autonomous construction inspections in Japan, which seems like it could be the first real use-case for a commercial version of the robot.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
This iCub comes from Daniele Pucci’s lab at IIT— they’re the ones trying to get the little robot to fly by strapping jet engines to it. They’re also working on immersive telepresence, so you can control a physical iCub through virtual reality.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
With the iCub VR system, you see through the robot’s eyes, and when you walk, the iCub walks. When you wave, the iCub waves, too.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum Kinova announced a brand new robot arm at IROS, the Gen3. It’s lighter, more powerful, inherently safe, and comes with an integrated vision system.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
We finally got to meet Haru in person! Honda Research’s experimental social robot will be part of a larger project as a hardware platform in the Socially Intelligent Robotics Consortium, and we’ll have more on this for you in the near future.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
ANYmal has been busy lately—at IROS, we saw a whole bunch of pictures of recent testing that ANYbotics has been conducting at an offshore wind farm, with the goal of replacing human workers who are otherwise stuck out there for weeks at a time.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
This incredibly awesome steampunk-ish chest belongs to diverBOT, a transforming humanoid robot submarine from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Check out those thrusters and gauges! We’ll have more on this thing for you soon.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
Sweaty, from Hochschule Offenburg in Germany, normally competes in RoboCup. But at IROS, it was performing a classic cups and balls magic trick as part of the Robot Magic competition.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
The qb SoftHand is something you might need if you visit Spain, because it knows how to drive stick. One motor powers 19 degrees of freedom in the fingers for underactuated, flexible grasping.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
Toyota’s newer, smaller, sleeker, and smarter HSR practices its grasping—if you want to know what time it is, the robot will happily locate a clock and bring it to you. It’s the future, folks.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum Teo was born in 2012 at Carlos III University of Madrid. It has 24 degrees of freedom, a slick chestpiece, and a plate stapled to its forearm, because tapas, I assume.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum PAL Robotics brought a whole bunch of robots to the IROS expo. Along with REEM-C, they also had TALOS and a big pile of TIAGos.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
Sneaking up behind this poor little giraffe is SQUIRREL, a robot designed to tidy up rooms. Tested out earlier this year in the place that defines all rooms, IKEA, SQUIRREL can locate out-of-place objects on the floor and place them where they belong.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum Shadow Robots ’ hand spent most of IROS ineffectively force-squeezing the heads of far away security guards between its dexterous fingers.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum QTrobot is such a QT. There’s both a research version and a version designed for interaction with autistic children, and the robot has been shown to increase attention while decreasing anxiety.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum SIAR (Sewer Inspection Autonomous Robot) inspects sewers so that you don’t have to. It can expand and contract its wheelbase to keep itself out of the grossness as much as possible.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
Pepper also participated in some IROS competitions, including the European Robotics League’s Consumer Service Robots tournament. I don’t think the tournament challenged the robots to accurately interpret mirrors, although that would certainly have made things interesting.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum EXOTrainer is a little exoskeleton designed for children with spinal muscular atrophy. It can walk and balance on its own, and provide physical therapy for anyone strapped into it.
Photo: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum
A human shares a moment with Seed Robotics’ RH7D robotic hand.
