Image Credit: keke.dev
I’m looking forward to this week’s community meeting with Ascento! You will find more details about the event in the announcement section. If you have any interesting projects or insights to present in the future meetups then feel free to reach out! 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 interactive Kalman Filter Assignment from UoC with 16.3% opens.
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Collecting RGB-D Datasets on LiDAR Enabled iOS devices
Kenneth Blomqvist had released his iOS RGB-D collection tool that he presented in the WR Meeting #1. I have to say that the results look really good! I’m looking forward to putting my hands on some LiDAR enabled iPhone and testing it out!
The (robotic) doctor will see you now
Researchers had performed a study to see how receptive patients are for being evaluated by a doctor through a tablet carried by a robot (in this case Spot). The article mentions that the long term hope is to develop robots that can interact with patients - perform swabs, turning them over in bed. I expect that as soon as your robot touches a patient your robot turns into a medical device, which requires you to start looking into some serious safety certification.
Flapping Wings And The Science Of How Bees Can Fly
An interesting article from Hackaday on how flapping wings work for insects. The article sent me down the rabbit hole on the theory that bees disobey physics and then this TEDx talk by Michael Dickinson showing how flies fly.
OpenKAI
OpenKAI (Kinetic AI) is an open-source framework that realize rapid development of unmanned vehicles and robots that incorporate AI, sensors, actuators, etc.. OpenKAI is light weight to run on embedded hardwares. A simple and unified multi-threading modular architecture written purely in C++ makes it highly customizable for versatile applications and easily expanded to support new devices.
CMU Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database
Carnegie Mellon University has an open mocap database featuring lots of activities such as social interactions, physical activities and whatnot. According to the website, you can access 2605 trials in the database.
Publication of the Week - RI Seminar: Mac Schwager: Enabling Robots to Cooperate & Compete: Distributed Optimization (2021)
I’m a huge fan of robot collaboration, mainly in the world of autonomous cars. In this seminar promoted by The Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Mac Schwager talks about the relationship between distributed optimization with robotic cooperation. In particular, he presents SOVA (Separable Optimization Variable ADMM) and shows a few simulations of how this optimization method works together with many agents to converge to the primary goal. The presenter also shows actual results applied using drones and RC-cars to autonomously race one another and try to find the best route and overtakes.
Announcements
WR Community Meeting #3 - Ascento
This Thursday at 7 PM CET we will hold yet another community meeting (this time on Zoom). This week Victor Klemm will tell us a bit about Ascento - a wheeled bipedal robot he has been working on with his team. The agenda is the same as always: a short presentation followed by discussions/networking. See you soon!
RoboCup 2021
We are excited to announce that RoboCup 2021 is a fully remote event with RoboCup competitions and activities taking place all over the world. Everyone is invited to participate! The events will take place on June 22-28. For the available leagues check this page.