I have some fantastic news from the Weekly Robotics world. It is my pleasure to welcome two new long-term sponsors of the newsletter! MacroFab is an electronics manufacturing platform with online tools for engineering and supply chain teams to build high-quality PCBA and complete product assembly in North America, from prototype to production scale. Formant creates software that helps robotics companies easily deploy, scale, and manage their fleet. Thanks to the support, Weekly Robotics can grow and be improved. As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo.
This issue arrives a bit later than usual as I’m on my way to ROSCon. It’s still being determined if Weekly Robotics will organize a meetup like last year. Just in case we end up doing something, follow the event app for more details.
Sponsored
Weekly Robotics is being developed thanks to the Patreon supporters and the following business sponsors:
Taming the Tail-sitter: Hover to Forward Flight
It’s been a while since Nicholas had appeared in the Weekly Robotics Newsletter. This time, the author talks about his Tail-Sitter UAV and, as always, provides heaps of information behind the build from the control perspective.
Extreme Parkour
Doing Parkour with legged robots is gaining in popularity. This research from CMU does it all: jumping, trotting, ‘handstands’, going through obstacles, and more!
RTS-GT: Robotic Total Stations Ground Truthing dataset
I’m a sucker for solid ground truth, and I’ve been really bullish on using total stations for mobile robotics where precision matters, so I got pretty excited about this paper. The dataset provides 6DoF ground truth using robotic total stations (RTS) working in a dynamic mode. The data was captured during 17 months in various conditions and contains 49 km (!!) of trajectories with a nominal accuracy of 4 mm. For more information about the project, check out the project repo.
3D Printed Mini Drone Test Gimbal
This brings back memories because during my first internship, I was building a gimbal for attitude control PID tuning. The contraption Tristan and Suryansh fits a BitCraze quadrotor, and allows it to rotate freely in 3 dimensions.
ROS 2 Technical Steering Committee Community Representative Election
ROS 2 Technical Steering Committee representative election is up! There are six kick-ass roboticists candidates that you can vote on until October 20th.
Rosbag-tools : A ROS-agnostic toolbox for common rosbag operations
“I would like to share rosbag-tools 13, a Python package I’ve been working on during the last months. This package works on bag files for both ROS 1 and ROS 2, by providing a CLI with different tools to remove topics from rosbags, extract a section from it, compare rosbag topics and to compute the total recording time in a dataset”.
Publication of the Week - Saturation-Aware Angular Velocity Estimation: Extending the Robustness of SLAM to Aggressive Motions
This paper presents an angular velocity estimator that is robust for aggressive motions. Gyroscopes are a fundamental part of most SLAM algorithms, and when they saturate due to some impact or other vigorous motion, the estimations can get wrong. The authors created a method for calculating the uncertainty of the estimated velocity of the gyro saturation periods using the robot’s center of mass. The results are impressive, and you can check their dataset in their GitHub repo.
Business
Saronic brings in $55M for autonomous vessels - The Robot Report
“Saronic, a maritime autonomy company focused on surface vessels, has brought in $55 million in Series A funding. With the funding, the company plans to accelerate research and development while also expanding its in-house manufacturing capacity for rapid production”.
Formant Raises $21M Funding To Support Explosive Enterprise Growth
“Formant, a company that offers a robotics data and operations platform, brought in $21 million in funding. The round comes after a year of record growth for the company, during which Formant increased revenue by more than 500% year-over-year”.