Uncover 3D-Printed Robots and Extra on Video Friday

Your weekly choice of superior robotic movies

Video Friday is your weekly choice 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 ship us your occasions for inclusion.

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

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

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

London Humanoids Summit: 29–30 Might 2025, LONDON

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

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

RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELES

ETH Robotics Summer time Faculty: 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 at this time’s movies!

This robotic can stroll, with out electronics, and solely with the addition of a cartridge of compressed fuel, 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 sophisticated on-line publication within the journal Superior Clever Techniques. They used the best expertise obtainable: a desktop 3D-printer and an off-the-shelf printing materials. This design strategy is just not solely strong, it is usually low cost—every robotic prices about $20 to fabricate.

And particulars!

[ Paper ] by way of [ University of California San Diego ]

Why would you like a humanoid robotic to stroll like a human? In order that it doesn’t look bizarre, I suppose, however it’s arduous to think about {that a} system that doesn’t have the identical association of joints and muscular tissues that we do will transfer optimally by simply attempting to imitate us.

[ Figure ]

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

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

[ Paper ] by way of [ 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 that could be as a result of journalists are at all times impressed by free meals.

[ Posha ]

That is our newest work a few hybrid aerial-terrestrial quadruped robotic referred to as SPIDAR, which reveals 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 Analysis (ISRR) 2024.

[ Paper ] by way of [ Dragon Lab ]

Thanks, Moju!

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

[ Unitree ]

There must be extra robots you could journey round on.

[ AgileX Robotics ]

There must be extra robots that put on hats at work.

[ Ugo ]

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

[ iRobot ]

There’s a well-known experiment the place in case you put a useless fish in present, it begins swimming, simply due to its biomechanical design. In some way, 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 outwardly wandering round an enormous mall that’s populated solely by robots and 0 different people.

[ MagicLab ]

I’m attempting, 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 flooring to ceiling with containers, Hole Inc has diminished accidents, lowered turnover, and watched staff get enthusiastic about automation meant to maintain them secure.

[ 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 Crimson Planet. Of explicit curiosity to its search are natural 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 Basis Fashions.

Basic-purpose pretrained fashions have reworked pure language processing, pc imaginative and prescient, and different fields. In precept, such approaches must be ultimate in robotics: since gathering giant quantities of information for any given robotic platform and software is prone to be troublesome, normal pretrained fashions that present broad capabilities current an excellent recipe to allow robotic studying at scale for real-world purposes.
From the angle of normal 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 numerous bodily capabilities, this might shed gentle not solely on the sensible questions round designing broadly succesful robots, however the foundations of located problem-solving, bodily understanding, and resolution making. Nonetheless, realizing this potential requires dealing with quite a few 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 accomplished? On this speak, I’ll focus on how we will strategy a few of these challenges.

[ University of Toronto ]