Video Friday: Afghan Girls Robotics Team Reaches Safety
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USAWeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – [Online Event]IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]ROSCon 2021 – October 20-21, 2021 – [Online Event]Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos. Five members of an all-girl Afghan robotics team have arrived in Mexico, fleeing an uncertain future at home after the recent collapse of the U.S.-backed government and takeover by the Taliban.[ Reuters ] via [ FIRST Mexico ]Thanks, Fan!As far as autonomous cars are concerned, there’s suburban Arizona difficulty, San Francisco difficulty, and then Asia rush hour difficulty. This is a 9:38 long video that is actually worth watching in its entirety because it’s a fully autonomous car from AutoX driving through a Shenzhen urban village. Don’t miss the astonished pedestrians, the near-miss with a wandering dog, and the comically one-sided human-vehicle interaction on a single lane road.The AutoX Gen5 system has 50 sensors in total, as well as a vehicle control unit of 2200 TOPS computing power. There are 28 cameras capturing a total of 220 million pixels per second, six high-resolution LiDAR offering 15 million points per second, and 4D RADAR with 0.9-degree resolution encompassing a 360-degree view around the vehicle. Using cameras and LiDAR fusion perception blind spot modules, the Gen5 system covers the entire RoboTaxi body with zero blind spots.[ AutoX ]Sometimes, robots do nice things for humans.[ US Soccer ]Body babbling? Body babbling.[ CVUT ]Thanks, Fan!Matias from the Oxford Robotics Institute writes, “This is a demonstration of our safe visual teach and repeat navigation system running on the ANYmal robot in the Corsham mines/former Cold War bunker in the UK. This is part of some testing we’ve been doing for the DARPA SubT challenge as part of the Cerberus team.”[ Oxford Robotics ]Thanks, Matias!We built a robotic chess player with a universal robot UR5e, a 2D camera, and a deep-learning neural network to illustrate what we do at the Mechatronics, Automation, and Control System Lab at the University of Washington.[ MACS Lab ] via [ UW Engineering ]Thanks, Sarah!Autonomous inspection of powerlines with quadrotors is challenging. Flights require persistent perception to keep a close look at the lines. We propose a method that uses event cameras to robustly track powerlines. The performance is evaluated in real-world flights along a powerline. The tracker is able to persistently track the powerlines, with a mean lifetime of the line 10x longer than existing approaches.[ ETHZ ]I could totally do this, I just choose not to.[ Flexiv ]Thanks, Yunfan!Drone Badminton enables people with low vision to play badminton again using a drone as a ball. This has the potential to diversify the physical activity for people with low vision.[ Digital Nature Group ]Even with the batteries installed, the Open Dynamic Robot Initiative’s quadruped is still super skinny looking.[ ODRI ]At USC’s Center for Advanced Manufacturing, we have developed a space for multidisciplinary human-robot interaction. The Baxter robot collaborates with the user to execute their own customizable tie-dye design.[ USC Viterbi ]I will never understand the impulse that marketing folks have to add bizarre motor noises to robot videos.[ DeepRobotics ]FedEx and Berkshire Grey have teamed up to streamline small package processing.[ FedEx ]ABB robot amalyzing COVID tests in a fully automated, unmanned state, back and forth between the stations Assist in the delivery of specimens between points, 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day, test results of 96 specimens can be completed every 60 minutes, processing more than 1,800 specimens per day.[ ABB ]Thanks, Fan!This is, and I quote, “the best and greatest robot death scene of all time.”[ The Black Hole ]Thanks, Mark!Audrow Nash interviews Melonee Wise for the Sense Think Act podcast.[ Sense Think Act ]Tom Galluzzo interviews Andrew Thomaz for the Crazy Hard Robots podcast.[ Crazy Hard Robots ]Read More
