Meet the MotoMini: a 6-axis robot from Yaskawa that can take on assembly, inspection, and machine tending jobs, helping manufacturers become more operationally efficient. The robot has a payload of 0.5kg, with horizontal and vertical reach of 350mm and 495mm respectively.
Robots and drones have already been used to deliver to medicine and supplies to remote areas in the past. AHEAD (Autonomous Humanitarian Emergency Aid Devices) is a project involving researchers from the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center that explores the idea of using robot controlled vehicles to deliver supplies to crisis regions.
Meet the Tally 3.0: Simbe’s autonomous inventory robot that uses autofocus, auto-exposure, and HDR camera systems to navigate and analyze store spaces. It has computer vision and RFID capabilities. The robot is powered by the NVIDIA Jetson GPU platform for real-time shelf data analysis.
Meet the SwingBot: a clever robot that learns how stably handle objects by tilting and shaking them. The robot learns physical features of its item through tactile exploration. It can predict the swing angle of new objects. As the researchers explain:
Two exploration actions (tilting and shaking) provide the tactile information used to create a physical feature embedding space. With this embedding, SwingBot is able to predict the swing angle achieved by a robot performing dynamic swing-up manipulations on a previously unseen object. Using these predictions, it is able to search for the optimal control parameters for a desired swing- up angle.
This robot doesn’t have cameras or any vision system. Its grippers have GelSight tactile sensor to measure force distribution.
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In the past few years, we have covered plenty of cool modular robots here. HERMITS explores the idea of using hermit crab inspired shells to enhance table-top robots. Researchers in the Tangible Media group at the Media Lab (Ken Nakagaki, Joanne Leong, Jordan L. Tappa, Joao Wilbert, and Hiroshi Ishii) have developed passive attachment modules (mechanical shells) that can convert the motion of robots into interactions.
Meet the VISTA Drone: a smart quadcopter with an integrated 360-degree camera that captures your adventures from every angle. The VISTA can be flown indoors and outside. It comes with autonomous navigation, LiDAR for smart mapping, swappable battery, GPS for follow me function, and automatic landing and take-off.
ANYmal shouldn’t need any introduction. It can take on challenging terrain for all kinds of inspection tasks. This video from Robotic Systems Lab shows this four legged robot going on a hike through the mountains in Tenna, Switzerland.
Through the journey, the robot overcame 2km of rough, rocky, and uneven hiking path. Pretty impressive, don’t you think?
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The micro:bit platform is wonderful for building programmable robots and toys. The BBC micro:bit v2 is even more powerful. It has a 64 MHz, ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller with FPU, 512KB Flash, 128KB RAM, and a temperature sensor. It comes with Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity to work with your smart devices.
Here is a humanoid robot designed to recognize when you need help to provide assistance. The ARMAR-6 can use speed, haptics, and vision to recognize the need for help. It can help manipulate large objects and handle unknown tools.
So you would like to build your own omnidirectional robot? The Moebius Mecanum Wheel Robot Kit has you covered. It has a 10.24*9.06*2.56inch platform and can bear up to 10kg. It also has 80mm mecanum wheels that are hard to damage.
