In the past few months, we have covered how Soft Robotics’ soft grippers can be used to automate a variety of tasks that involve fragile items. In their latest video, you can see how robots can handle dough, frozen pizzas, cheese, onions, and other pizza ingredients.
Meet the Robowranglers Uppercut: a robot designed to perform fast in cube scoring. It can quickly grab and move cubes. It comes with a fast lift that goes from ground to scoring height fast. The robot is also optimized to keep hold of each cube.
Here is another affordable drone that you can fly at night to put on a show. The UFO 3000 LED Drone is easy to fly for beginners to more advanced users. It can perform 360-degree flips with the push of a button. With 2 batteries, you can get up to 18 minutes.
It was just a few days ago that we saw Boston Dynamic’s robodog opening and walking through a door. As it turns out, SpotMini is well capable of adapting to disturbances. It uses a camera in its hand to find the door handle. Cameras on the body determine the status of the door.
Meet the Swift Trainer Autonomous Drone: a plane that can be launched by hand and lets you conduct mapping missions with better control. It also helps beginners get a better handle on what it takes to handle an unmanned aircraft. The Swift Trainer Drone has flight management software, survey-grade camera, and touch controls.
Here is a robotic system that can help with warehouse sorting, picking, and clearing tasks. MIT and Princeton University engineers have developed this pick & place system with a robotic arm, custom gripper and suction cup. The object-agnostic grasping algorithm allows the robot to assess random objects and determine the best way to handle them.
Here is a robotic video streaming car you can use with your Raspberry Pi and program with Python or Dragit. The SunFounder Video Car has a 120-degree USB camera. You can control it from your PC or web browser running on your mobile phone or tablet.
There is no better way to learn robotics and improve as a maker than 3D printing and building your own robots. Vorpal the Hexapod is a 3D printable robot that you can control with a simple gamepad to complete 60 different motions. You can program it via drag & drop.
TIAGo is a wonderful robot platform with navigation, sensors, and a whole host of smart features for researchers. As this video shows, it can be programmed with a NVIDIA Jetson TX2 to open a fridge, grab a beer, and deliver it.
Here is how these guys pulled it off:
we integrated the semantic segmentation into a practical use case where we propose a state dependent segmentation method. The robot navigates to a fridge, searches for a handle to open it. Once the the fridge is open, the robot takes an other look for segmenting beer bottles and cans inside the fridge and grasps them. In the end the fridge is closed and the beer is delivered.
You can vote for this cool project here.
Plenty of companies are working on sophisticated drone defense system. Black Sage’s UASX System is another one that can be deployed to detect and defeat unauthorized drones with radio frequency detection, radars, thermal cameras and non-kinetic effectors.
Black Sage will demonstrate drone defense on the State Capitol in Boise, Idaho in a couple of days. During the experiment:
“Black Sage will create a virtual fence around the capitol, fly a swarm of drones directly into the protected area, and demonstrate the counter-UAS system to safely defeat the threat using a handheld or stationary disruptor.”
[HT]
