As I’m creating this issue, YouTube RSS feeds stopped working. I’m not sure if it’s a temporary outage, but if Google stops the RSS feeds, it will be a big blow to this newsletter and cause me to miss out on some future robotics videos. RSS is a bit of an old-school format, but I never came across anything better for consuming all content in one place. I highly recommend this approach to anyone - I love knowing about every article my sources publish. As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo.
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After Three Years on Mars, NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Mission Ends
And just like that, Ingenuity’s mission came to an end. NASA believes that during the last flight there weren’t enough features for the optical-flow tracking resulting in an emergency landing and potentially a rotor striking the terrain causing a power burnout. Following this project over the years was a fantastic journey, and it’s still mind-blowing to me that we were flying a drone on another planet. For more detailed coverage of the incident and the mission, check out this IEE Spectrum article.
Japan: Moon lander Slim comes back to life and resumes mission
Space is such a roller coaster these days. JAXA engineers managed to contact the Slim lander and resume the mission.
dora-rs
dora-rs is a still work-in-progress robotics framework that uses a shared memory server and Apache Arrow for zero-copy data sharing. The project page boasts 17x faster performance than ROS 2 Python code for very large messages and a comparable performance for ROS 2 C++ projects using shared memory. I’m looking forward to seeing this project grow!
ROS 2 and VSCode
The folks at Picknik published a very helpful guide for setting up VSCode to work efficiently with ROS 2. I’ll be right back; I must check all the listed extensions!
In Praise Of “Simple” Projects
I liked this short article by Elliot Williams about ‘simple’ projects that end up being open-ended and have only 10% chance of actually remaining simple.
Researchers demonstrate rapid 3D printing with liquid metal
“MIT researchers have developed an additive manufacturing technique that can print rapidly with liquid metal, producing large-scale parts like table legs and chair frames in a matter of minutes. Their technique, called liquid metal printing (LMP), involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads. The aluminum quickly hardens into a 3D structure”.
FOSDEM 2024 schedule - Open-source embedded, mobile, IoT, robotics, RISC-V, etc.. - CNX Software
If you attend FOSDEM this year, you might want to check out this list of selected sessions to help you decide. During the event, folks from Bitcraze are planning a robotics Birds of Feather session, which you probably should join if you are in Brussels this weekend.
Utilizing LLMs as a Task Planning Agent for Robotics
Keith, one of our readers, forwarded me his project the other day, and it fits the newsletter well! With this work, Keith could perform task planning for complex tasks using natural language. I recommend checking out the demos section to give you a good idea of how the system works.
Publication of the Week - Nigel – Mechatronic Design and Robust Sim2Real Control of an Over-Actuated Autonomous Vehicle
I love to explore different robot architectures and capabilities. This paper presents the mechatronic design of Nigel, a 4WD4WS mobile robot, and shows a generalizable sim2real method. The robot can move and rotate all wheels, giving it a high maneuverability. The authors use Nigel to explore a robust controller and validate it with the sim2real framework proposed. You can check the code and the video of the robot in action.
Business
Amazon terminates iRobot deal, Roomba maker to lay off 31% of staff
Amazon and iRobot called off the planned acquisition due to a lack of regulatory approval. iRobot announced that it will lay off around 350 employees, and Colin Angle, the company’s CEO, will be stepping down.
San Francisco files lawsuit to pump brakes on robotaxis
“Robotaxis have had a bumpy ride in San Francisco since companies first began giving public rides in February 2022. Now, the city of San Francisco has filed a lawsuit against the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the organization responsible for regulating autonomous vehicles in the state, to drastically reduce the number of robotaxis on the city’s roads, according to The Washington Post”.
Robotic Tire Changing Business Goes Bust
Robotire had filed for bankruptcy. It’s hard to tell if the issue was the technology itself or the business side of things, but the author of the article notes that the system took quite some time to remove the wheel and insists they could probably do all four in a shorter time.
Events
- ROS Meetup Lagos 2024: Feb 03, 2024. Lagos, Nigeria
- FOSdem 2024: Feb 03 - Feb 04, 2024. Brussels, Belgium
- ROS Meetup Singapore 2024: Feb 07, 2024. Singapore, Singapore
- ROS Meetup Munich 2024: Feb 07, 2024. Munich, Germany
- ICARA 2024: Feb 22 - Feb 24, 2024. Athens, Greece
- European Robotics Forum 2024: Mar 13 - Mar 15, 2024. Remini, Italy
- R-24 Robots, Automation and Drones 2024: Mar 13 - Mar 15, 2024. Odense, Denmark
- RoboSoft 2024: Apr 14 - Apr 17, 2024. San Diego, United States of America
- Xponential: Apr 22 - Apr 25, 2024. San Diego, United States of America
- Open Hardware Summit 2024: Apr 26 - Apr 27, 2024. Montreal, Canada
For more robotic events, check out our event page.