Weekly Robotics turns 3 this week! Sending out a newsletter every single week for the past 3 years (not a single issue missed!) is probably the strongest habit I have managed to build in my life. The experience is very rewarding. I’ve learned a tonne, had a chance to chat with some amazing roboticists during our meetups and on top of all of this knowing that I’ve featured something in the newsletter makes it relatively easy to find.
Strangest Upside-Down 3D Printer Fits In A Filament Box
If you have 13 minutes to spare I highly recommend checking out the video featured in this article. This printer by Kralyn 3D prints upside down and is very compact. The video goes through some of the technical decisions and is thorough. The design is open source and I already can’t wait for follow up videos that will go through the technical side of things in more detail.
Introducing droidlet, a one-stop shop for modularly building intelligent agents
I don’t think I can put it any better than the linked article: “Droidlet is a modular, heterogeneous embodied agent architecture, and a platform for building embodied agents, that sits at the intersection of natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. It simplifies integrating a wide range of state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) algorithms in embodied systems and robotics to facilitate rapid prototyping”. Anyone up for a weekend project?
How to design an enclosure using photogrammetry? – The Complete Guide
I found the approach shown in this blog post inspiring. The author was on a market for ergonomic housing for a joystick. Instead of modelling it from scratch in CAD, the author sculpted it in clay and then generated a model using photogrammetry, describing the whole process in this article. All using free tools.
How Robots Helped Out After the Surfside Condo Collapse
Back in June we’ve shared this article explaining why we shouldn’t count on robots for looking for survivors when buildings collapse. As it turns out, even if current technology is not great for finding people in the rubble, it can provide huge value in supporting emergency services. The above article lists all the tasks the robots were actually able to help with. It turns out there were multiple teams present for days at the site providing lots of value to the mission, often with multiple drones in the air.
Helicopter Seed Robot Can Also Drop Like A Rock
Samara Autorotating Wing (SAW) is a single blade glider inspired by helicopter seed developed by researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design. In the current iteration, the device can switch between diving and autorotation and it can be steered to fly in the desired direction.
Publication of the Week - Principles for the Development and Assurance of Autonomous Systems for Safe Use in Hazardous Environments (2021)
RAIN (Robotics and AI in Nuclear Research Hub) had published a whitepaper with some guidelines on how to design and develop safe autonomous systems. Even though the guidelines are for hazardous environments I think they could easily apply to any other application of robotics. The paper stresses the importance of considering both hardware and software with the target environment in mind, the importance of validation and testing (formal methods, simulation, and physical testing) and many more. The pdf is linked in the first paragraph of the above page, in case you have issues finding it here is the direct link.
Robots Work
Weller WTBR1000 Benchtop Solder Robot
These close-up soldering shots are very satisfying to watch!