Image Credit: Unity
Today’s issue is short and to the point. Towards the end of the issue, I will digress from robotics quite a bit to talk about geoscience. The most clicked link last week was the multirotor with a tensegrity shell with 13.1% opens.
Robotics Simulation in Unity Is as Easy as 1, 2, 3!
Unity is capitalizing on ROS, with a new set of tools for importing URDFs and communicating with ROS based systems. The demonstration in the article is a pick-and-place application, you can find the tutorial on it on GitHub
Enclosure design for 3D printing: A step-by-step guide
If you find yourself 3D printing some enclosures every now and then then you might find this article by John Wall helpful.
Why We Need a Robot Registry
A thought-provoking piece by Stacey Higginbotham, in which she makes a point on putting a ‘licence plates’ on the robot you might find in public spaces.
ROS World Talks Are Posted!
ROS World 2020 sessions have been published! You will find the links to all the videos in this blog post by Katherine Scott.
Elios 2 Helps Researchers Inspect Reactor Five at Chernobyl
Flyability took part in some Research at Chernobyl, resulting in the above video. If you like the idea of using Robotics in irradiated places then you might like this coverage of Researchers deploying Spot in Chernobyl.
Pulling Power from the Sky: The Story of Makani [Feature Film]
YouTube (X, the moonshot factory)
Makani was a moonshot project by X, aiming to harness wind power using kites/drones, that was shut down this year. I’ve only started watching this documentary about Makami project, but I already know that I can fully recommend it. If you enjoy seeing an applied iterative process in Robotics with some drones occasionally crashing then this film is definitely for you.
Publication of the Week - HOPPY: An open-source and low-cost kit for dynamic robotics education (2020)
Hoppy is an open source kit for robot education that dynamically hops around a rotating gantry, developed by researches from the University of Illinois. From the paper, it looks like you can teach students lots of concepts using just this kind of robot.
Robotics, Python and Geoscience
Last week I was heavily looking into using USVs for mapping water body depth. When it comes to requirements I wanted to use Python to quickly visualise some of the data. In my quest, I came across two interesting libraries: pyproj for geographic projections and verde, a package for processing and gridding spatial data. A very useful set of tutorials that really helped me wrap my head around many aspects of geoscience with Python was the xlines repository by Agile Geoscience. I’ve also learned that if you are not 100% sure what you are doing Jupyter Notebook will speed up your development 10x. Thanks to this exercise I can appreciate the amount of work that goes into projects like these.
Sponsored
Huge thanks to all of the Weekly Robotics supporters helping this project through Patreon and the following business partners:
