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, KOREA

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

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

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

ICRA 2023: 29 May–2 June 2023, LONDON

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

Enjoy today’s videos!

Sometimes, watching a robot almost but not quite fail is way cooler than watching it succeed.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Simulation-based reinforcement learning approaches are leading the next innovations in legged robot control. However, the resulting control policies are still not applicable on soft and deformable terrains, especially at high speed. To this end, we introduce a versatile and computationally efficient granular media model for reinforcement learning. We applied our techniques to the Raibo robot, a dynamic quadrupedal robot developed in-house. The trained networks demonstrated high-speed locomotion capabilities on deformable terrains.

[ Kaist ]

A lonely badminton player’s best friend.

[ YouTube ]

Come along for the (autonomous) ride with Yorai Shaoul, and see what a day is like for a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute.

[ AirLab ]

In this video we showcase a Husky-based robot that’s preparing for its journey across the continent to live with a family of alpacas on Formant’s farm in Denver, Colorado.

[ Clearpath ]

Arm prostheses are becoming smarter, more customized and more versatile. We’re closer to replicating everyday movements than ever before, but we’re not there yet. Can you do better? Join teams to revolutionize prosthetics and build a world without barriers.

[ Cybathlon 2024 ]

RB-VOGUI is the robot developed for this success story and is mainly responsible for the navigation and collection of high quality data, which is transferred in real time to the relevant personnel. After the implementation of the fleet of autonomous mobile robots, only one operator is needed to monitor the fleet from a control centre.

[ Robotnik ]

Bagging groceries isn’t only a physical task: knowing how to order the items to prevent damage requires human-like intelligence. Also … bin packing.

[ Sanctuary AI ]

Seems like lidar is everywhere nowadays, but it started at NASA back in the 1980s.

[ NASA ]

This GRASP on Robotics talk is by Frank Dellaert at Georgia Tech, on “Factor Graphs for Perception and Action.”

Factor graphs have been very successful in providing a lingua franca in which to phrase robotics perception and navigation problems. In this talk I will revisit some of those successes, also discussed in depth in a recent review article. However, I will focus on our more recent work in the talk, centered on using factor graphs for action. I will discuss our efforts in motion planning, trajectory optimization, optimal control, and model-predictive control, highlighting SCATE, our recent work on collision avoidance for autonomous spacecraft.

[ UPenn ]

Source: IEEE Spectrum Robotics