Image Credit: BusinessInsider
Welcome to the 7th issue of Weekly Robotics (sorry, it was my last chance for a binary pun in the next 17 years). What I’m learning the hard way these days is that moving houses always takes longer than anticipated. This is the reason for this issue being very brief, from the next week onwards I should fully return to my usual flow. The most clicked last week was Microsoft’s Computer Vision Recipies with 18.4% opens.
Explosive Amazon Warehouse Data Suggests Serious Injuries Have Been on the Rise for Years and Robots Have Made the Job More Dangerous
According to Reveal, Amazon’s warehouses where the robots were introduced showed a 50% higher rate of injury than other warehouses between 2016 and 2019. You can see the full report with statistics here. According to the Business Insider article, Amazon believes that the data has been misinterpreted.
Michael Ossmann’s Wheel Robot
Michael Ossmann had published a twitter thread with an interesting robot design where the robot is the wheel. The thread contains many pictures and videos showing the robot being build and running.
Robots to Be Introduced in UK Care Homes to Allay Loneliness – That’s Inhuman
In this post, Fay Bound Alberti suggests that deploying robots to care homes might be a slippery slope that is only superficially helpful.
[Nav2] Keep Out Zone Support Now Available!
Navigation2 (the navigation stack of ROS2) now supports keep-out zones. It looks like adding custom costmaps to you robot stack is going to be a breeze very soon!
Faze4 - Open Source Robotic Arm
Faze4 is a small fully 3d printable Open source 6 axis robotic arm. It is functionally and esthetically similar to robotic arms in the industry but is aimed for research, education and anyone interested in making his own robot arm. The project is now featured in the Awesome Weekly Robotics list.
Researchers Develop Versatile Robotic Fabric
“The lab of Prof. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio has created a robotic fabric that includes actuation, sensing, and variable stiffness fibers while retaining all the qualities that make fabric so useful—flexibility, breathability, small storage footprint, and low weight. They demonstrated their robotic fabric going from a flat, ordinary fabric to a standing, load-bearing structure. They also showed a wearable robotic tourniquet and a small airplane with stowable/deployable fabric wings. The results are published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”.
Sponsored
Huge thanks to all of the Weekly Robotics supporters helping this project through Patreon and the following business partners:
Careers
Starship (Estonia, Tallinn)
At Starship, we are redefining how goods flow through the places in which we live. We see a future where a new generation of convenience services become available to everyone – made possible by our constellation of autonomous neighbourhood robots. Come join us to make autonomous robots happen at scale and re-invent a more convenient and efficient version of logistics.
Announcements
Drone X Challenge 2020
US$1.5+ Million Global Challenge (US$1 Million Final Prize and US$500,000+ in R&D Grants) that is pushing the frontiers of R&D and innovation in drone technologies. DXC 2020 aims at accelerating the practical deployment of drones/UAVs in key applications focusing on transportation and delivery. DXC 2020 will support innovative commercial applications/solutions that tackle two major challenges: payload capacity and flight endurance.
Partnerbot Research Grant
The PartnerBot Research Grant was established to help academic and corporate researchers kick start their innovative robotics research and development. The funding is split between two categories, Academic and Corporate Research, and includes two (2) Husky Unmanned Ground Vehicles and two (2) Dingo Indoor Research Platforms, as well as discounts on mobile robotic platforms and a wide range of robotics sensors and components.