Meet the LoCoBot: ROS research rover for mapping and navigation. It serves as a platform for students and educators interested in robot programming. This robot has a modular open source Python API. IT comes with minimal hardware setup. Users can move the platform and its manipulator with just a few lines of code.
Here is another small robot dog that can take on military, security, and inspection applications. Spirit 40 from Ghost Robotics has an ultra agile design and can recover from kicks and accidents. It can run at a speed of 6.5ft/sec and climb stairs.
Boston Dynamics is behind some of the coolest robots we have seen. Their Spot robot has gotten a lot of coverage in the media already. This video from Simon Zimmermann shows how Spot can be combined with an external robotic arm to pick up and manipulate items.
Observing fish underwater without disturbing them is going to be a whole lot easier with the BlueBot: it is a robot fish with a camera system that lets researchers observe schools of fishes. In this video, you can see it swimming with a Bluegill Sunfish and a school of Rainbow trout, at George Lauder’s Lab.
Here is a bilateral teleoperation haptic system that makes it easy for the operators to control a remote robot with accuracy. This sensorless delay-based controller was programmed using MATLAB. The below video shows how it works:
Meet Dingo: a lightweight compact indoor mobile robot designed for research and education. It has differential and omnidirectional drive systems and is ready for autonomous navigation, mapping, and manipulation applications. It offers ROS and Gazebo integration.
Robotic firefighters are nothing new. We have covered a bunch of them that can take on dangerous fires to save lives and keep humans out of dangers. The Thermite Firefighter Robot from Howe & Howe is also special. It has a flow of up to 2500 gpm, depending on the model. The RS3 has a 36.8 HP Yanmar 3TNV88C engine and speed of up to 8mph. It also has a range of up to 500m.
In the past few years, we have seen plenty of amazing nature inspired robots. A team of MIT researchers has developed tiny agile drones that act and move like actual inspects to operate in cramped spaces. These tiny drones have soft actuators made “of rubber cylinders coated in carbon nanotubes. When voltage is applied to the carbon nanotubes, they produce an electrostatic force that squeezes and elongates the rubber cylinder. Repeated elongation and contraction causes the drone’s wings to beat fast.”
Here is another powerful programmable robot from SuperDroid Robots. The SDR Programmable Vectoring Robot has mecanum wheels, so it can easily move in all directions. It weighs 40 pounds and comes with 4 x 122 RPM gear motors and an Arduino UNO controller.
Meet the StereoPi v2: an open source stereoscopic camera based on Raspberry Pi that can capture and livestream real-time stereoscopic video and images. It is ready for robotics, computer vision, drones, and AR/VR applications. It is ready for hacking with all I2C camera lines on the board available.
