In the past few months, we have covered plenty of smart electrically driven robots like ANYmal here. That particular quadruped is ready for outdoor operation. It has a speed of 1 m/s and max payload of 10kg. You can program it to insect industrial sites and perform other challenging tasks.
Researchers are always looking for new ways to make it easier to teach robots new commands. Anh Nguyen, Dimitrios Kanoulas, Luca Muratore, Darwin G. Caldwell, Nikos and G. Tsagarakis have presented a paper that explores translating videos to commands with deep recurrent neural networks. The framework extracts features from the video and uses two RNN layers with an encoder-decoder architecture to encode the visual features and generate the commands.
[Paper]
Robots are going to make life a lot easier for amputees and people with spinal cord injuries. Take HAL from CYBERDYNE for instance: it is robotic assistive limb that improves patients’ ability to walk. HAL uses sensors to detect signals from the patient’s body to assist with desired movement.
Here is another compact robot that can get your kids familiar with coding in a more interactive fashion. The KicoBox is like a robot Rubik’s Cube with simple lessons for light/motor control, tracking, and OLED screen programming. The robot is compatible with Scratch, so you can program it via drag & drop.
Inspecting live power lines is going to be much easier and safer when you have robots like the LineRanger to do it. As Hydro-Québec explains, this is an easy to deploy robotic system that can moves quickly and can inspect 20 km of line a day. It also crosses over obstacles in its way.
Remember the TIAGo? It is a mobile manipulator with whole body control that can take on a variety of tasks. It has mapping and localization in unstructured indoor environments and can avoid obstacles. The robot can handle pick & place and dexterous manipulation of tools.
It was only a few days ago that we covered how ANYmal can now roller skate like a pro. This quadrupedal robot is ready for autonomous navigation of challenging terrains. It can move in snow, complete search & rescue missions, and do a whole lot more.
There are multiple ways to control robot hands. For instance, you can use an EEG headset or muscle sensors to get it done. This video shows how a robot hand can be programmed to simulate hand motion dynamically with EMG.
Here is another rugged robotic platform for military, police, and hazardous missions. The T7 Multi-Mission Rugged Robot has an automotive-grade track system. It can be used with sensors, disruptors, and tools to complete a variety of missions. T7 also has a pan, tilt, and zoom camera.
Soft robots become more sophisticated all the time. Researchers from the Wyss Institute and Harvard SEAS have developed a platform for 3D printed soft robots with embedded sensors that can feel touch, pressure, motion, and temperature.
