I didn’t share the newly formulated mission of Weekly Robotics with you, did I? To champion open-source projects and high-quality, informative content related to robotics. It took me over four years to formulate this but doing so was a game changer that made everything fall in place. Acting on the mission statement, I’m excited to share that we are starting an article section, as you will see in the first feature. The second outcome was sponsoring open-source robotic developers on GitHub. If you know any other developers or organizations WR should support, let me know! As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo. Last week’s most clicked link was the open-access course Introduction to Robotics from Princeton, with 13.8% opens.
Sponsored
Weekly Robotics is being developed thanks to the Patreon supporters and the following business sponsors:
How to Integrate Isaac Sim with ROS
NVIDIA® Isaac Sim is a scalable robotics simulation application and synthetic data-generation tool that powers photorealistic, physically accurate virtual environments. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to integrate Isaac Sim into your ROS workflows to support robotics apps including navigation, manipulation and more.
Robotics in 2022 - the most interesting applications, research and DIY projects
This article is my subjective list of the most interesting features covered in the newsletter last year. It’s on the longer side, so you should arm yourself with some coffee and snacks!
2023 robotics predictions from industry experts
With 2022 behind us, let’s focus on the future and consider what industry experts think 2023 will bring for robotics.
Testing Shoes That Make You Walk 250% Faster
Shift Robotics is building these robotized shoes called Moonwalkers that are meant to work like a conveyor belt under your feet. In this video, Brent Rose tests these, and you can glimpse how they work.
NASA Crash Tests eVTOL Concept
If we can assume gigantic multirotors are robots, then let’s dive into this crash test of the air taxi developed by Revolutionary Vertical Left Technology (RVLT). According to the article, the subfloor and energy-absorbing seats did their job and limited the impact on test dummies. I wonder if in the future we will have a standardized set of crash tests for this vehicle type and if they will handle crashing in multiple orientations.
All Aboard The Garbage Express
The other day, I enjoyed the process of building this automated system for taking out the garbage presented by Max Maker. Using a garden hose for connecting the motor to a gearbox is a nice hack for a flexible linkage.
Roboflow 100: A New Object Detection Benchmark
“In this paper we introduce the Roboflow 100 object detection benchmark consisting of 100 projects that span a wide array of imagery domains and task targets. We derived our benchmark selection from over 90000 public datasets, 60 million public images that are actively being worked on in the open on Roboflow”.
Publication of the Week - A Distance-Geometric Method for Recovering Robot Joint Angles From an RGB Image (2023)
This paper, one of the first robotic-related publications of 2023, presents a method for recovering the joint angles from robotic arms using only a single RGB camera. The authors used the system whenever a robot arm encounters an emergency where the actual joint can’t be estimated, and the robot needs help to steer back to a desired/safe state. The method predicts the joint angles based on a distance-geometric representation instead of spatial constraints, resulting in a solid generalization ability and efficiency. The only pre-required information for the estimation is the configuration space and the robot kinematic model.
Business
Aerones raises $38.9M for robots to clean wind turbines
“Aerones, a company that creates robots that scrub and inspect wind turbines, brought in $38.9 million in funding, according to TechCrunch. The funding came from dozens of undisclosed investors, and the company hopes to bring in $2.5 million more, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission”.
Announcements
Geo Week
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