I missed ROS World this year. I have this theory forming that no matter how many tasks I have they will take all allocated time, no matter what happens. Anyways, I’ve heard some interesting things are coming out from that event. I’ve heard rumours of Space ROS and I can’t wait to learn more about it. On a slightly different note, the ROSShow lightning talk (WR #32) blew my mind. As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo. The most clicked link last week was the swarm game with 15.7% opens.
DeepMind acquires and open-sources robotics simulator MuJoCo
DeepMind had purchased MuJoCo simulator with plans to make it open source for all of us to enjoy. You can already download the binaries for free on MuJoCo website. Thanks, DeepMind and Roboti LLC!
Treexy
Davide Faconti started working on this Voxel Grid library recently with a promise to make it blazing fast. I appreciate Davide investing so much time in open source projects. I had made frequent use of PlotJuggler and BehaviorTree.CPP in my work. If you find Davide’s work useful I highly recommend you consider voicing your support through a GitHub Sponsorship - I’ve been modestly doing that for the past couple of months.
Announcing the iRobot® Create® 3 Educational Robot
iRobot announced Create 3 robot that will be fully ROS2 based. To me, it looks like we are going to have a quality test platform soon. Through cooperation with Open Robotics and Clearpath Robotics, this platform will be used as a base to TurtleBot 4. If you like the platform then iRobot is looking for beta testers for Create 3 robot.
Three hours to save Integral
On the 22nd of September, Integral (International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory) satellite, experienced a Single Event Upset (SEU) - a charged particle hitting electrical equipment and causing a one-off change of state. The event caused one of the three reaction wheels to stop, causing the aircraft to spin up at an average speed of 17 degrees per minute. The Engineers responsible for the project had to act fast, as they only had 3 hours before the satellite run out of charge.
Artificial Muscles Robotic Arm Full Range of Motion + Static Strength Test (V11)
This video of artificial robotic forearm made it to both Reddit and Hackernews. They did a really good job with the movement appearing so human-like, probably because all muscles are hydraulic.
Mechanical Linkage CAD For Everyone
Linkage is a free tool for designing and simulating the movement of 2-dimensional mechanisms.
Publication of the Week - ReachBot: A Small Robot for Large Mobile Manipulation Tasks (2021)
With the advent of robotics in future space missions, more and more solutions will come to fulfil this gap. This paper proposes a novel robotics concept that combines both mobile manipulation and extreme reach lengths. This solution works with booms and spool mechanisms that enable high manipulation forces for tasks that require pulling or pushing objects. The robot can leverage its capabilities in microgravity because of its small footprint and mass. Soon, we might see robots like this one operating in space missions that must sustain for long periods uncrewed.
Robots Work
EasyGrinder - Deburring & Grinding Metal Parts with Vision Guided Robots
Here is a video by Teqram showing some vision-guided finishing of metal parts.