As you will soon see, the sponsored post today is brought to you by Manning, a technical books and projects publisher. If you are subscribed to our mailing list and would like to have a chance to get one of the three Build Your Own Robot guides as an ebook, fill in your e-mail address in this form(I won’t share it with anyone). As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo. Last week’s most clicked link was the General Robot’s article on technical debt, with 14.2% opens.
Sponsored
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Build your first robot with Python and some cheap, basic components!
Build Your Own Robot by Marwan Alsabbagh is a DIY guide for bringing Pythonic robots to life. Start with the basics; teach your new friend how to spin, move around, find its way, and by the end, you’ll have a robot that can take photos, fetch items, search for a QR code, and more. Use code nlwkrobot23 for a 35% discount for all products in all formats at Manning.
ROS Aerial Robotics WG meeting May 2023 - 1 - Aerostack2
I recently attended the beginning of this working group meeting where Miguel Fernandez Cortizas presented Aerostack2, a framework for designing and building control architectures for drones. In the video, you will see a handful of simulated setups. Aerostack2 supports Behavior Trees and, therefore, can be a good choice if you want to model complex logic for an aerial platform.
Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide
In this article, Badar Jahangir Kayani showcases his electronics bench setup and provides solid recommendations for setting up your one. You must admire how well-organized this small setup is and how well everything fits in a small space.
Why Are Home Robots Harder Than Self-Driving Cars to Build?
If you are reading this newsletter, chances are you have a good intuition about why making general-purpose robots is difficult. In this thought-provoking essay, the author compares self-driving cars to home robots and tries to find out why we don’t have universal home droids yet.
OpenSimpleLidar
Recently, this repository with a $30 DIY LiDAR with a maximum range of 4m and doing a 5Hz update rate started receiving some updates from the author.
Raspberry Turk
Since we are looking at ancient open-source projects, here is a Raspberry Pi-based SCARA-like manipulator built by Joey Meyer to play chess. The project repository contains a notebook directory that contains code for the most challenging problems this software has to solve.
CI/CD with KiCad and Gitlab
In this blog post, Stefan Schüller describes his pipelines for automating some of the tasks for PCB production. I appreciate Stefan sharing all of his setups in such detail. I’m sure lots of people could find it helpful.
Publication of the Week - Reducing Onboard Processing Time for Path Planning in Dynamically Evolving Polygonal Maps (2023)
A common task for autonomous agents is finding a route from one point to another and following it while avoiding obstacles. This paper presents a method to reduce the processing time for path planning in dynamic paths. The proposed solution relies on polygonal maps, a promising alternative to grid-based, as they are more suited to represent moving objects. You can test their code in this repo, as the results show a reduction of 4 times in the processing time.
Business
AeroVironment was awarded $10 Million contract by NASA/JPL to co-design and develop two helicopters for Mars sample return mission
“AeroVironment, Inc. (NASDAQ: AVAV) has been awarded a $10 million contract by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to co-design and co-develop conceptual designs and engineering development units of Mars Sample Recovery Helicopter flight systems. Future efforts could include detailed design, build, and test of qualification and flight hardware. The helicopters build upon the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter design heritage and feature upgraded robotics to supplement aerial mobility”.
AMP Robotics attracts investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund
“AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems that can automatically sort recyclable material, today announced that it extended its Series C round to $99 million, thanks to an investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. That’s up from $91 million when the round closed in November”.