This week you will have a chance to join the last WR meetup this season. Hopefully, we will resume the talks in September, if we can build a solid lineup of presenters! 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 online PID Tuner with 17.4% opens.
Punyo
Toyota Research Institute had released Punyo, an open-source soft-bubble gripper. Check this video to see how it works. Interestingly the design uses tactile sensing using cameras and depth sensors. On the above page, you will find papers, video instructions, a BOM etc. This work has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 licence.
Internal Combustion Engine
Bartosz Ciechanowski is creating an interesting series of interactive tutorials related to mechanical engineering. In this article, he explores an internal combustion engine. What I admire about Bartosz’s work the most are its stunning visuals. I highly recommend you to go through the Archive on the linked page if you liked this article.
Differential Drive Doesn’t Quite Work As Expected
Levi Janssen was developing a prototype gearbox that would sum the speed of the two inputs. The process of developing the prototype is nicely explained in the featured video.
High Speed Autonomous Aerial Navigation Through Trees
In this video, Near Earth Autonomy is showcasing their autonomous UAV navigation in an environment with lots of trees. According to the description a 3D LiDAR is used in this project and no prior knowledge of the environment is available.
All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people
This article by Marianne Bellotti, even though not directly related to robotics, is full of useful advice that I believe can be applied in all kinds of ways in engineering, especially in the context of team management.
Somehow This Robot Sticks to Ceilings by Vibrating a Flexible Disc
Researchers from Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab at UCSD developed a method to attach a robot to smooth surfaces using a disk vibrating at 200Hz. Due to the vibration, a 1mm thick layer of low pressure is created between the disk and the surface. Interestingly, the disk can resist 5N pulling force.
Publication of the Week - Vector Detection Network: An Application Study on Robots Reading Analog Meters in the Wild (2021)
With the advent of quadruped robots such as Boston Dynamics’ Spot, many industries in construction, oil & gas, mining, and others are adopting these robots for safer, efficient, and reliable operations. One of the most common use-cases is gauge reading, in which the robot navigates around industrial sites and takes high-resolution images from different analogue gauges. This paper presents a Vector Detection Network (VDN) to detect pointers within the images taken by the robot and calculates the respective readings of each gauge. The technique applied uses a learning-based approach that detects the pinpoint and points along the tail direction to build the vector. This work is also being developed in the field of agriculture to detect pedicels for automatic trimming and even precise harvesting.
Announcements
Space Traffic Management and Resilient Space Environment conference.
The Space Traffic Management and Resilient Space Environment conference (September 13, 2021) is an international event organized by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and the University of Strathclyde. It will be held entirely online and is free of charge. It is open to everyone wanting to present their work on topics such as space debris, active debris removal, on-orbit servicing, future missions, etc. To participate in the conference only an extended abstract is required while an option will be offered after the event to submit a full paper to the special issue of the Advances in Space Research journal.
WR Community Meeting #12 - Cuspidal Robots with Achille Verheye
In this presentation, Achille will explain how he stumbled upon a very niche class of robots capable of making singularity-avoiding moves while creating motion planning algorithms. The study of these peculiar robots has provided a unique view into the present and future of robotic motion planning algorithms. Knowing how to spot a cuspidal robot and what their impact is is an essential skill in the toolbox of every robotics engineer and robot designer. See you on Thursday!