The most clicked link last week was the Tangram Vision Depth Sensor Visualizer with 18.4% opens. As usual in the past couple of weeks, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo.
RPG Visual Odometry Releases
Lately, the Robotics & Perception Group had released two interesting projects related to visual odometry. EVO is a pipeline for using event cameras for visual odometry. SVO is an implementation of Semi-direct Visual Odometry. The results featured in both repositories look great. Each of the repositories features some bagfiles that you can use to reproduce the results from logged data. Both packages are licenced under GPL 3.0.
OpenAI disbands its robotics research team
“OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubik’s Cube. Company cofounder Wojciech Zaremba quietly revealed on a podcast hosted by startup Weights & Biases that OpenAI has shifted its focus to other domains, where data is more readily available”.
The Demise Of Robotics Companies: Learning From Past Mistakes
Since we are on the business side of things, here is an article that features 3 lessons on why AI-powered robotics startups can fail.
SOBY Bipedal-wheeled Robot
I don’t understand anything from the description or featured text but SOBY seems to be a bipedal-wheeled robot, resembling Ascento a lot when it comes to kinematic linkages. I’m curious to see what will come out of this project.
Get Yourself A Pupper (For Education)
Stanford Pupper, an open source legged robot just got a lot smaller. As with the original Pupper, according to this article, everything will be open source, so you should be able to build your own should you be on the market for a small robot dog.
How many robots does it take to run a grocery store?
In this 5 minute video, Tom Scott is visiting Ocado grocery packing warehouse, where thousands of robots work on bagging groceries. Naming this warehouse a ‘hive’ is spot on.
Publication of the Week - Efficient and Reactive Planning for High Speed Robot Air Hockey (2021)
Air Hockey is by far one of my favorite games. It requires fast and precise movements to predict the trajectory of the puck with an excellent strategy to use the table’s borders in your favor. All of that can be accomplished by, of course, robots. To be more specific, the authors used two Kuka Liwa 14 robot arms and present a novel trajectory optimization that generates a high-speed motion by pushing the arms limits.
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BladeInsight (Lisbon, Portugal) - Various Positions
BladeInsight is a tech start-up that is revolutionizing how wind turbines are inspected worldwide by developing autonomous drone inspection solutions. We are one of the front runners of the wind blade inspection industry, having inspected over 20,000 blades in 16 countries.