technology 24 for you: Video Friday: Robot vs. Door

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, SOUTH KOREA

IROS 2023: 1–5 October 2023, DETROIT

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

ROSCon 2023: 18–20 October 2023, NEW ORLEANS

Humanoids 2023: 12–14 December 2023, AUSTIN, TEXAS

Enjoy today’s videos!

Loco-manipulation planning skills are pivotal for expanding the utility of robots in everyday environments. Here, we propose a minimally guided framework that automatically discovers whole-body trajectories jointly with contact schedules for solving general loco-manipulation tasks in premodeled environments. We showcase emergent behaviors for a quadrupedal mobile manipulator exploiting both prehensile and nonprehensile interactions to perform real-world tasks such as opening/closing heavy dishwashers and traversing spring-loaded doors.

I swear the cuteness of a quadrupedsusing a lil foot to hold open a spring-loaded door just never gets old.

[ Science Robotics ] via [ RSL ]

In 2019, Susie Sensmeier became one of the first customers in the United States to receive a commercial drone delivery. She was hooked. Four years later, Susie and her husband, Paul, have had over 1,200 orders delivered to their front yard in Christiansburg, Va., via Wing’s drone delivery service. We believe this sets a world record.

[ Wing ]

At the RoboCup 2023, one challenge was the Dynamic Ball Handling Challenge. The defending team used a static image with the sole purpose of intercepting the ball. The attacking team’s goal was to do at least two passes followed by a goal. This procedure was repeated three times on three different days and fields.

[ B-Human ]

When it comes to space, humans and robots go way back. We rely heavily on our mechanical friends to perform tasks that are too dangerous, difficult, or out of reach for us humans. We’re even working on a new generation of robots that will help us explore in advanced and novel ways.

[ NASA ]

The KUKA Innovation Award has been held annually since 2014 and is addressed to developers, graduates, and research teams from universities and companies. For this year’s award, the applicants were asked to use open interfaces in our newly introduced robot operating system iiQKA and to add their own hardware and software components. Team SPIRIT from the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center worked on the automation of maintenance and inspection tasks in the oil and gas industry.

[ Kuka ]

We present tasks of traversing challenging terrain that requires discovering a contact schedule, navigating non-convex obstacles, and coordinating many degrees of freedom. Our hybrid planner has been applied to three different robots: a quadruped, a wheeled quadruped, and a legged excavator. We validate our hybrid locomotion planner in the real world and simulation, generating behaviors we could not achieve with previous methods.

[ ETHZ ]

Giving drones hummingbird performance with no GPS, no motion capture, no cloud computing, and no prior map.

[ Ajna ]

In this video we introduce a new option for our Ridgeback Omnidirectional Indoor Mobile Platform, available through Clearpath Robotics integration services. This height-adjustable lift column is programmable through ROS and configure with MoveIt!

[ Clearpath ]

How do robots understand their surroundings? How do they decide what to pick up next? And how do they learn how to pick it up?

[ Covariant ]

Our Phoenix robots can successfully and accurately perform tasks that require the dexterity of two hands simultaneously, also known as bimanual object manipulation!