Sometime today we shold hear about the Ingenuity first flight on Mars. The live feed from the mission control should be available here. Hoping for some good news! 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 robot arm achieving amazing accuracy with DIY grade servos with 23.1% opens.
DSEC: A Stereo Event Camera Dataset for Driving Scenarios + CVPRW 2021 Competition
Robotics and Perception Group had released a stereo event camera dataset for driving scenarios. I always found event cameras to be an interesting concept, with lots of robotics showcasing its usage coming from RPG.
Paul McWhorter YouTube Tutorials
Last week, I’ve stumbled on what might be the most wholesome tech-teaching channel on YouTube. Presenting Paul McWhorter. I would say his videos are more geared towards beginners but they might also serve as a nice refresher on some ideas. I enjoy Paul’s reactions to uloading the code.
NASA’s next lunar rover will run open-source software
Likely, VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) that will be launched in 2023 will be running ROS. The article suggests that using open source software will be a good thing for the space industry thanks to reuse and contributions from external developers.
Teaching a Robot Dog to Pee Beer (NSFW)
Michael Reeves at it again. The rest I will leave without a comment.
A Review of Physics Simulators for Robotic Applications
In this work, Cyber-Physical Systems Program Researchers review the simulator most often used in Robotics for mobile ground robots, manipulation, medical, aerial, marine and soft robotics.
Sougwen Chung
Via linked website: “Chung’s work explores the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems. Chung is a former research fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration. In 2019, she was selected as the Woman of the Year in Monaco for achievement in the Arts & Sciences”. There are some great pictures linked on the website. Many thanks to Myroslav for letting me know about it!
Publication of the Week - Autonomous Spot: Long-Range Autonomous Exploration of Extreme Environments with Legged Locomotion (2020)
CoSTAR team, the winners of the last DARPA Subterranean Challenge, presents in this paper all the challenges associated with the exploration of an unknown, GPS-denied, and perceptually-degrade environment. To overcome those hard conditions, the team used NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy) module attached on top of Boston Dynamics’ Spot quadrupedal robot. The paper describes all the modules inside NeBula regarding odometry, localization, traversability, and coverage planning. This is an enormous step towards the actual use of robots in search and rescue operations.
WR Community Meeting #7 - mjbots with Josh Pieper
This week, on Thursday at 7 PM CEST we are hosting Josh Pieper from mjbots. If you would like to learn something about making servos from BLDC motors for quadrupeds or mjbots philosophy on open source hardware then feel free to sign up. If you would like to present your robotics-related projects or ideas in one of the meetings or know someone that would be interested then please let me know!
Previous Meeting #6 - RoboCup@Home with team TechUnited
Last week Loy gave a great presentation about his experience taking part in RoboCup@Home together with his team TechUnited. I’ve never looked into 3D World Modelling for Robotics and TechUnited’s approach looks very interesting and robust, enabling constraint-based navigation (“Go to room X”).