Our robotics meetups are back! Scroll down to the meetups section to learn more about the ROS2 Control meetup we are having next week! This time, the meetups will be spread further apart. If you have any ideas on something to present or improving the meetups experience please don’t hesitate to let me know. Today’s issue might be rather light on descriptions, as I’m trying to enjoy the last chance to hike in reasonable weather, but all should be back to normal starting with the next issue! As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo. The most clicked link last week was the Insert High Speed Inspection Sorting System with 12.1% opens.
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A Byte of Coding
abyteofcoding.comThere is a high probability that lots of readers of this newsletter are interested in programming. If that's you you should check out Alex's newsletter, in which he delivers a curated list of 3 links with a short summary every day from Monday through Thursday. I highly recommend checking the past issues and subscribing if programming is your cup of tea.
DARPA SubT Finals: Meet the Teams
DARPA Subterranean Challenge had wrapped up last week. The article above presents the systems teams taking part in the physical challenge. Evan Ackerman did a great job covering the finals, organizing videos of finals, interviewing robot operators and, most importantly, showing us how much abuse did some of the robots get if not from a plastic bag, then from fellow robotic team mates.
The First Rule of Machine Learning: Start without Machine Learning
A very thoughtful article on why you might want to wait with using machine learning for your project and instead focus on getting data or using direct methods.
2,400 LED icosahedron (20 sided)
Not a robotics project, but I think you might appreciate the write up on this blog post where the author described how they build an LED icosahedron. The build (and the blog post content) seem to be of very high quality.
PX4 Developer Summit 2021 Talks
The talks from the PX4 Developer Summit had been uploaded online and are accessible in the above playlist. Happy learning!
Spotlight: Ryan Govostes on Exploring a New Frontier with Foxglove Studio
Very interesting interview with Ryan Govostes about building and working with autonomous underwater vehicles as an embedded software engineer.
Publication of the Week - Autonomous Cooperative Transportation System involving Multi-Aerial Robots with Variable Attachment Mechanism (DATE)
This paper proposes an autonomous cooperative transportation system powered by aerial robots. The agents can estimate the physical parameters of the payload to best fit the attachment positions. They take into consideration the center of gravity to reduce the chances of dropping the cargo, which a single drone is not capable of handling. The proposed method was able to carry a weight of 3.2 kg using eight robots that can attach to a rail mechanism.
WR Community Meeting #13 - ROS 2 Control
As mentioned in the intro - we are back! Starting with Denis Stogl and Bence Magyar presenting ROS2 Control. In this talk, they will discuss concepts of ros2_control framework compared to ros(1)_control framework and show examples of their use in the wild. 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!
Robots Work
Automatic multi-layer welding on construction sites
Here is a prototype work from Fraunhofer IPA on automatic welding of structural columns. If you would like to learn more about this project then you can start with this page.