Video Friday is a weekly compilation of cool robotics videos collected by our friends. IEEE spectrum Robotics. We also publish a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events over the coming months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
ICRA 2025: May 19-23, 2025, Atlanta, Georgia
Enjoy today’s video!
NASA’s Mars Chopper concept, shown in a design software rendering, is a proposed, more capable successor to the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which arrived on the Red Planet in February 2021 in the belly of the Perseverance rover. The chopper is about the size of an SUV and consists of six rotors and six blades. Each Martian day (or solar day) can be used to transport a scientific payload weighing up to 11 pounds (5 kg) a distance of up to 1.9 miles (3 km). Using Chopper, scientists can study a wide range of terrain quickly and in detail, including areas where rovers cannot safely travel.
If you want to know more about this, I wrote an article about an early concept version of this product a few years ago.
(screw)
Sanctuary AI announces its latest innovations featuring hydraulic actuation and precise hand manipulation capabilities to enable a wide range of industrial and high-value operations tasks. Hydraulics have much higher power density than electric actuators in terms of force and speed. Sanctuary has developed a compact valve that is 50 times faster and 6 times cheaper than off-the-shelf hydraulic valves. This new approach to actuation offers extremely low power consumption, unparalleled cycle life, and controllability tailored to the size constraints of the human-sized hand and forearm.
(Sanctuary AI)
Clone’s Torso 2 is the most advanced android ever created with an activated lumbar spine and all the corresponding abdominal muscles. Torso 2 wears a white transparent skin that surrounds 910 muscle fibers that move 164 degrees of freedom and contains 182 sensors for feedback control. These Torsos use pneumatic actuation with off-the-shelf valves that make noise due to air exhaust. Our biped brings back the hydraulic design with custom liquid valves for quiet androids. Legs coming soon!
(Clone Robotics)
Science Tokyo’s Suzumori Endo Lab has developed a Superman suit powered by hydraulic artificial muscles.
(Suzumori Endo Research Institute)
We generate physically correct video sequences to train a visual parkour policy for a quadruped robot with a single RGB camera and no depth sensor. The robot generalizes to a variety of real-world scenes despite never having seen real-world data.
(Lucid Sim)
Inspired by the human multi-object grasping strategy, Seoul National University researchers proposed a gripper that can move multiple objects together to increase the efficiency of the selection and placement process. The gripper can not only transfer multiple objects simultaneously but also place them in the desired location, making it applicable even in irregular environments.
(Scientific Robotics)
We present a bio-inspired quadrupedal walking framework that demonstrates excellent adaptability, allows zero-shot deployment in complex environments, and can restore stability in unstable terrain without using additional perceptual sensors. Our developments also reveal the complexity of animal locomotion strategies and support the notion that discoveries in biomechanics and robotics research can lead to mutual advances in both fields.
(Author of papers from University of Leeds and University of London)
Thank you, Cheongsu!
Happy 60th birthday to MIT CSAIL!
(MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory)
Yes, humanoid development can progress quickly if we put our mind to it.
(Magic Lab)
UPenn’s Sung Robotics Lab is interested in advancing the state of the art in computational methods for robot design and deployment, with a particular focus on soft and compliant robots. By combining methods of computational geometry with practical engineering design, we develop theories and systems that make robot design and fabrication intuitive and accessible even to non-engineers.
(Seong Robotics Lab)
From now on, we will open the door like the robot in the video.
(Humanoid 2024)
Travel along a steep slope to the rim of Jezero Crater on Mars in this panoramic image taken by NASA’s Perseverance just days before the rover reached the summit. This shot shows how steep some of the slopes leading to the crater rim are.
(screw)
(Team Black Sheep)
IIT’s Daniele Pucci discusses iCub and ergoCub as part of an industry panel at Humanoids 2024.
(Ergocube)
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