Discover 3D-Printed Robots and More on Video Friday

Your weekly number of superior robot videos

Video Friday is your weekly number of superior robotics movies, collected by your mates at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We additionally put up a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics occasions for the subsequent few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

RoboSoft 2025: 23–26 April 2025, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND

ICUAS 2025: 14–17 Could 2025, CHARLOTTE, NC

ICRA 2025: 19–23 Could 2025, ATLANTA, GA

London Humanoids Summit: 29–30 Could 2025, LONDON

IEEE RCAR 2025: 1–6 June 2025, TOYAMA, JAPAN

2025 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: 16–18 June 2025, HOUSTON, TX

RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELES

ETH Robotics Summer School: 21–27 June 2025, GENEVA

IAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY

ICRES 2025: 3–4 July 2025, PORTO, PORTUGAL

IEEE World Haptics: 8–11 July 2025, SUWON, KOREA

IFAC Symposium on Robotics: 15–18 July 2025, PARIS

RoboCup 2025: 15–21 July 2025, BAHIA, BRAZIL

RO-MAN 2025: 25–29 August 2025, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS

Get pleasure from as we speak’s movies!

This robotic can stroll, with out electronics, and solely with the addition of a cartridge of compressed gasoline, proper off the 3D-printer. It can be printed in a single go, from one materials. Researchers from the College of California San Diego and BASF, describe how they developed the robotic in a complicated on-line publication within the journal Superior Intelligent Systems. They used the only expertise obtainable: a desktop 3D-printer and an off-the-shelf printing materials. This design strategy just isn’t solely sturdy, additionally it is low cost—every robotic prices about $20 to fabricate.

And particulars!

[ Paper ] through [ University of California San Diego ]

Why would you like a humanoid robot to stroll like a human? In order that it doesn’t look bizarre, I suppose, nevertheless it’s laborious to think about {that a} system that doesn’t have the identical association of joints and muscle tissues that we do will transfer optimally by simply making an attempt to imitate us.

[ Figure ]

I don’t know the way it manages it, however this little comfortable robotic worm in some way strikes with an unbelievable quantity of character.

Soft actuators are essential for enabling soft robots, medical devices, and haptic methods. Many comfortable actuators, nonetheless, require energy to carry a configuration and depend on laborious circuitry for management, limiting their potential purposes. On this work, the primary comfortable electromagnetic system is demonstrated for externally-controlled bistable actuation or self-regulated astable oscillation.

[ Paper ] through [ Georgia Tech ]

Thanks, Ellen!

A 180-degree pelvis rotation would put the “break” in “breakdancing” if this had been a human doing it.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

My colleagues had been impressed by this cooking robotic, however which may be as a result of journalists are all the time impressed by free meals.

[ Posha ]

That is our newest work a couple of hybrid aerial-terrestrial quadruped robotic referred to as SPIDAR, which exhibits distinctive and complicated locomotion types in each aerial and terrestrial domains together with thrust-assisted crawling movement. This work has been offered within the Worldwide Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR) 2024.

[ Paper ] through [ Dragon Lab ]

Thanks, Moju!

This recent, newly captured video from Unitree’s testing grounds showcases the breakneck velocity of humanoid intelligence development. Day-after-day brings one thing thrilling!

[ Unitree ]

There ought to be extra robots you can journey round on.

[ AgileX Robotics ]

There ought to be extra robots that put on hats at work.

[ Ugo ]

iRobot, who pioneered big docks for robot vacuums, is now shifting away from big docks for robotic vacuums.

[ iRobot ]

There’s a well-known experiment the place should you put a lifeless fish in present, it begins swimming, simply due to its biomechanical design. By some means, you are able to do the identical factor with an unactuated quadruped robotic on a treadmill.

[ Delft University of Technology ]

Mush! Narrowly!

[ Hybrid Robotics ]

It’s freaking me out just a little bit that this couple is seemingly wandering round an enormous mall that’s populated solely by robots and nil different people.

[ MagicLab ]

I’m making an attempt, I actually am, however the yellow is simply not working for me.

[ Kepler ]

By having Stretch tackle the bodily demanding activity of unloading trailers stacked ground to ceiling with bins, Hole Inc has decreased accidents, lowered turnover, and watched staff get enthusiastic about automation meant to maintain them protected.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Since arriving at Mars in 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been ingesting samples of Martian rock, soil, and air to raised perceive the previous and current habitability of the Pink Planet. Of explicit curiosity to its search are organic molecules: the constructing blocks of life. Now, Curiosity’s onboard chemistry lab has detected long-chain hydrocarbons in a mudstone referred to as “Cumberland,” the biggest organics but found on Mars.

[ NASA ]

This College of Toronto Robotics Institute Seminar is from Sergey Levine at UC Berkeley, on Robotics Foundation Models.

Normal-purpose pretrained fashions have reworked natural language processing, computer vision, and different fields. In precept, such approaches ought to be ideally suited in robotics: since gathering massive quantities of information for any given robotic platform and software is more likely to be tough, basic pretrained fashions that present broad capabilities current a super recipe to allow robotic studying at scale for real-world purposes.
From the attitude of basic AI analysis, such approaches additionally provide a promising and intriguing strategy to a number of the grandest AI challenges: if large-scale coaching on embodied expertise can present various bodily capabilities, this might shed mild not solely on the sensible questions round designing broadly succesful robots, however the foundations of located problem-solving, bodily understanding, and determination making. Nevertheless, realizing this potential requires dealing with a variety of difficult obstacles. What information we could use to coach robotic basis fashions? What would be the coaching goal? How ought to alignment or post-training be performed? On this discuss, I’ll talk about how we are able to strategy a few of these challenges.

[ University of Toronto ]