Image Credit: Hackaday
Welcome to February! My Patreon supporters know that I’ve been up to some setting up of the robotics workshop. It’s coming together rather well and in the coming weeks I’ll try to update all of you on the progress and future plans. As usual in the past couple of weeks, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo. The most clicked link last week was the article on cuspidal robots with 19.8% opens.
Stanley - The Capstan Based Quadruped
artysta_automatyk is making a cheaper alternative to MIT Cheetah that is based on a capstan drive. The design looks slick with some leg demos already looking amazing! I’ll be looking forward to seeing this project progress!
LIO-SAM
A real-time lidar-inertial odometry package. The demo featured in the repository shows stunning results using an IMU and a Velodyne VLP-16.
History of the Toy Robot
David Mello has been collecting toy robots from the 1950s and 1960s and in this video he shows some highlights from his collection. It’s nice to see someone being so passionate about something robotics-related!
Robot-Runner
“Robot Runner (RR) is a tool to automatically execute measurement-based experiments on robotics software”. This video shows the tool in action. Being able to log current, CPU and memory usage in a pre-defined mission looks like an interesting feature for developing robot systems.
Learn Science and Engineering with GW
School of Engineering and Applied Science of the George Washington University has some free courses on statistics, modelling and simulation and Aerodynamics. All in Python using Jupyter Notebooks. Don’t know about others but the Aerodynamic course is accompanied by the AeroPython repository, which looks solid!
Yet Another Robot Platform
From the linked page: “YARP supports building a robot control system as a collection of programs communicating in a peer-to-peer way, with an extensible family of connection types (tcp, udp, multicast, local, MPI, mjpg-over-http, XML/RPC, tcpros, …) that can be swapped in and out to match your needs. We also support similarly flexible interfacing with hardware devices. Our strategic goal is to increase the longevity of robot software projects”.
Publication of the Week - Cooperative Perception and Localization for Cooperative Driving (2020)
Soon we will have different vehicles with different levels of autonomy on the roads. This work presents a way for less-advanced cars to incorporate high-fidelity data that comes from more advanced cars (such as Teslas) so both of them can work in cooperation to gather even more data. One of the major challenges in this approach is fusing perception information between different sources and different cars. By using matching techniques and probability, the author could reduce uncertainty and noise to merge both car’s data. This method can bring a lot more safety on the roads, by reducing occlusion and consequently reducing the number of accidents.
Weekly Robotics 2 Years Ago
ROSFlight is a flight controller software for STM32 based autopilots that was built for easy interface with companion computers running ROS. The last release of this stack was in March last year. I couldn’t find too many videos of these used on real drones but here is an autonomous maiden flight from over a year ago.
Robots for aircraft inspection - a neat project from Luleå University of Technology - a mobile robot using air suction to stay attached to aircraft surfaces regardless of the robot orientation.
ROS Navigation Tuning Guide - a classic by Kaiyu Zheng on tunning navigation in ROS. Every now and then I need to come back to this document and always appreciate how nicely it’s written.
Job Seekers
In issue #83 I’ve started this section to try to help out those looking for work in the times of pandemic. If you are currently looking for work then feel free to send me your details in the same format as you can see in the entries below.
Name: Alexander Knemeyer
Location: Looking to relocate to Berlin or another city in Europe. Open to remote work. Currently live in Cape Town, South Africa
Skills: Python, Julia, C, C++, Clojure. Robotics (system modelling, path planning, control, simulation, state estimation), embedded systems, Linux, SolidWorks, HPC
Profile: I am a robotics/mechatronics engineer looking for challenging and varied work. I love R&D, teaching and learning. Looking for an institution where I can work hard and be proud of what I achieve!
Social Profiles: Website, CV (pdf), LinkedIn, GitHub
Email: alknemeyer@hey.com