Nadia is a humanoid robot designed by IHMC in collaboration with Broadwalk Robotics. It has a power to weight ratio and large range of motion. It is being designed for autonomous and semi-autonomous behaviors. The latest video from the company shows the robot trying its new arms for boxing under virtual reality control.
Meet the Joybee K2: a smart robotic mower with an auto lift camera that mows your lawn with you having to worry about boundary wires. You can set it up by guiding it around your lawn’s edges to have it map the area and plan the best mowing route. This robot relies on RTK & VSLAM for navigation.
Meet the ACFARM Blue RR 500: an app connected robot lawn mower that saves you time keeping your backyard tiny. It can mow up to 0.14 acres every 24 hours. It comes with WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. It has a noise rating of under 60dB. It has a cutting width of 7 inches and cutting height range of 0.8 to 2.4 inches.
There are plenty of smart humanoid robots that can take on a variety of tasks. It is challenging for humanoids with electric drives to move as fast as humans though. This video from German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence shows how researchers got the RH5 humanoid robot dynamically walking at speeds of 0.43 m/s.
This approach shows that a position controlled robot without full state feedback can walk fairly fast without losing its balance.
[HT: Ivan Bergonzani, Mihaela Popescu, Shivesh Kumar and Frank Kirchner]
Here is a biomorphic soft robotic skin with a CPG-based neural controller that enables a hexapod robot to exhibit respiratory-like motions. As the researchers suggest, this was done to improve the robot’s aesthetics and make it more friendly to humans. The below video shows it in action:
[HT: M. B. Christiansen, N. Asawalertsak, C. Danh Do, W. Nantareekurn, A. Rafsanjani, P. Manoonpong, and J. Jørgensen]
This is the EBO X: a smart family robot that can detect falls and cries to alert your family. It supports two way communication. This robot has Alexa and V-SLAM navigation. It has a 4K 8MP stabilized camera with color night vision. It has a self-balancing two-wheeled design, so it can move around your home and turn 360 degrees.
The Jueying X20 from Deep Robotics is a hazard detection and rescue robot dog for complex terrain. It can navigate high risk outdoor and indoor areas. It can step over 20cm high obstacles and climb over 35-degree slopes. In this video, it was used for 1km remote hazard detection test. It successfully tested the density of gases.
In the past few years, we have covered plenty of origami robots here. Researchers from UW have now come up with a solar powered shape-changing origami microflier that can change shape in mid-air. As the researchers explain:
When unfolded and flat, the microfliers exhibit a tumbling behavior that increases lateral displacement in the wind. When folded inward, their orientation is stabilized, resulting in a downward descent that is less influenced by wind.
As the researchers explain, they used an electromagnetic actuator with peak force of 200 millinewtons within 25ms. They also fabricated a circuit on the structure with “a programmable microcontroller, Bluetooth radio, solar power harvesting circuit, a pressure sensor.”
[HT]
It is no secret that robots will fight our wars in the future. This video shows how US Marines have used a robotic goat to test fire an anti-tank weapon. As you can tell, a Unitree Go1 robot dog was used for this.
This robot can carry various payloads. It can acquire and take out targets with the M72 light anti-tank weapon.
[ht: Lance Cpl. Connor Webb]
This is Tangram Vision’s HiFi: a tiny 3D sensor that you can use to take your robots to the next level. It has 8 TOPS of processing power and 8 GB of on-board memory. You will be able to run pre-trained neutral nets using TIDL. You can also train your own models.
