Autonomous vehicles are going to help businesses deal with labor shortages and inefficiencies in the future. Take Honda’s Autonomous Work Vehicle for instance: it is designed to perform repetitive tasks. This fully electric vehicle operates autonomously. It can attach and carry sensors and a camera. As this video shows, this robot recently performed a perimeter fence inspection autonomously.
Robot dogs are going to do many things for us. They are already capable of taking care of inspection and maintenance tasks. US Navy researchers are exploring the idea of using a robotic dog with an arm to perform routine maintenance tasks. The challenge is for this robot to get used to the movement and sway of the ship. The below video shows it in action:
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This is the RobotLAB Botinkit Max: a smart kitchen robot with precise digital controls that enables restaurants to replicate recipes. Thanks to a smart digital cooking algorithm and a FMP taste modeling platform, this robot can replicate any cuisine. This robot can perform temperature control, stir-frying, seasoning, and pot sterilization. This robot can cook 24 hours a day.
The TALOS is a walking humanoid robot that is fully torque controllable. It has torque sensor feedback in all its joints. It has 6kg payload per arm, so it can pick up all kinds of industrial tools. In this video, you can see this robot walking using Model Predictive Control send to a Whole-Body Inverse Dynamics (WBID) controller.
Robot mowers are getting smarter and more silent all the time. The SUNSEEKER L22 is a robot lawn mower with app control. It comes with intelligent mapping and app control. It has a rain sensor to detect when it needs to stop. This quiet robot lawn mower has a noise rating of 52dB.
This is the Dobot Magician E6: a desktop grade 6-axis collaborative robot for computer science and engineering students. It comes with collision detection for safe operation. It can be installed on a desk and has a control box with simple external wiring.
Robots are getting smarter all the time. No matter how many sensors and advanced processors they get, they need to be able to recover from falls. This video shows how Digit can now self-right and stand back up after it falls. For this test, obstacle avoidance was turned off.
There are plenty of advanced robots that are used in search & rescue and other missions. They are not much of help if they get stuck on clothes. This video from SuperDroid Robots shows how the LT2-F Bulldog robot can handle clothes piles. This robot comes with a multi-axis robotic arm. It has a set of rear flipper arms to lift the robot up and over.
Here is another gripper inspired by nature. Inspired by the gripping behavior of chameleons, this gripper can pick distant and tilted objects without sensing. It can pick up objects of different heights from the same picking height. It has a cylindrical chamber with a compression spring in its body.
Here is an upcoming Kickstarter project for those of you who want to get your hands on a highly programmable robotic arm. The Ti5 Arm has 1kg payload capacity and 0.05mm repeatability. It weighs only 2.3kg, so you can easily move it around. This robot is ready for Python and C+ programming.
You can find this project on Kickstarter soon.
