Video Friday: Humanoids Building BMWs

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.

RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS

ICRA@40: 23–26 September 2024, ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS

IROS 2024: 14–18 October 2024, ABU DHABI, UAE

ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK

Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH

Enjoy today’s videos!

Figure is making progress toward a humanoid robot that can do something useful, but keep in mind that the “full use case” here is not one continuous shot.

[ Figure ]

Can this robot survive a 1-meter drop? Spoiler alert: it cannot.

[ WVUIRL ]

One of those things that’s a lot harder for robots than it probably looks.

This is a demo of hammering a nail. The instantaneous rebound force from the hammer is absorbed through a combination of the elasticity of the rubber material securing the hammer, the deflection in torque sensors and harmonic gears, back-drivability, and impedance control. This allows the nail to be driven with a certain amount of force.

[ Tokyo Robotics ]

Although bin packing has been a key benchmark task for robotic manipulation, the community has mainly focused on the placement of rigid rectilinear objects within the container. We address this by presenting a soft robotic hand that combines vision, motor-based proprioception, and soft tactile sensors to identify, sort, and pack a stream of unknown objects.

[ MIT CSAIL ]

Status Update: Extending traditional visual servo and compliant control by integrating the latest reinforcement and imitation learning control methodologies, UBTECH gradually trains the embodied intelligence-based “cerebellum” of its humanoid robot Walker S for diverse industrial manipulation tasks.

[ UBTECH ]

If you’re gonna ask a robot to stack bread, better make it flat.

[ FANUC ]

Cassie has to be one of the most distinctive sounding legged robots there is.

[ Paper ]

Twice the robots are by definition twice as capable, right…?

[ Pollen Robotics ]

The Robotic Systems Lab participated in the Advanced Industrial Robotic Applications (AIRA) Challenge at the ACHEMA 2024 process industry trade show, where teams demonstrated their teleoperated robotic solutions for industrial inspection tasks. We competed with the ALMA legged manipulator robot, teleoperated using a second robot arm in a leader-follower configuration, placing us in third place for the competition.

[ ETHZ RSL ]

This is apparently “peak demand” in a single market for Wing delivery drones.

[ Wing ]

Using a new type of surgical intervention and neuroprosthetic interface, MIT researchers, in collaboration with colleagues from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, have shown that a natural walking gait is achievable using a prosthetic leg fully driven by the body’s own nervous system. The surgical amputation procedure reconnects muscles in the residual limb, which allows patients to receive “proprioceptive” feedback about where their prosthetic limb is in space.

[ MIT ]

Coal mining in Forest of Dean (UK) is such a difficult and challenging job. Going into the mine as human is sometimes almost impossible. We did it with our robot while inspecting the mine with our partners (Forestry England) and the local miners!

[ UCL RPL ]

Chill.

[ ABB ]

Would you tango with a robot? Inviting us into the fascinating world of dancing machines, robot choreographer Catie Cuan highlights why teaching robots to move with grace, intention and emotion is essential to creating AI-powered machines we will want to welcome into our daily lives.

[ TED ]