Only when I sent out the newsletter last week did I realize we already have over 15,000 subscribers (15,337, to be exact) across LinkedIn and the e-mail newsletter. If you enjoy the hard work that goes into this newsletter, I’d appreciate it if you could share it with anyone who might find it interesting! I found yesterday’s April Fools interesting: I did not see any not-so-truthful news related to robotics. Did I miss out on something, or is the industry getting serious? Scratch that; just when I was typing this, I saw these announcements from Boston Dynamics and Tangram Vision. As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo.
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Enhance Your Robotics Skills: Learn, Build, and Win With The Viam Challenge
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Looking for a way to get hands-on with AI, learn new skills from engineers, flex your creativity, and possibly win prizes for it? Look no further than the Viam Challenge, offering $4,000 in awards. Transform everyday devices into AI-powered solutions for sustainability, home automation, or any vision you have. This ends April 21—join while you can.
AlexanderKoch-Koch/low_cost_robot
Alexander Koch created a low-cost robot arm based on Dynamixel Servos. It should cost around $250 in parts to make. Currently, the robot is controlled using Python script and Dynamixel SDK.
A Kinematically Coupled, Nanometer-Resolution Piezo Focus Stage
What do you do if you want to build a piezo-focus stage for non-destructive chip inspection but the off-the-shelf actuators that match your required precision (less than 8.5 micrometers) cost over $1,000 a piece? Of course, you build your own setup based on $20 off-the-shelf piezo actuators. I really appreciate Bunnie’s write-up and his thoughts on why a commercialization effort of a tool like this would probably not pan out.
Robotic police dog shot multiple times, credited with avoiding potential bloodshed
There were times when I was on the fence about using robots by police or armored forces, but the use case described in this article is something I can get behind. Well done, Spot!
DROID: A Large-Scale In-the-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset
“In this work, we introduce DROID (Distributed Robot Interaction Dataset), a diverse robot manipulation dataset with 76k demonstration trajectories or 350h of interaction data, collected across 564 scenes and 86 tasks by 50 data collectors in North America, Asia, and Europe over the course of 12 months. We demonstrate that training with DROID leads to policies with higher performance, greater robustness, and improved generalization ability. We open source the full dataset, code for policy training, and a detailed guide for reproducing our robot hardware setup”.
awesome-2d-lidars: Awesome 2D LiDAR list - specs, protocols, wiring, code, identification photos videos
The folks from Kaia.ai published this awesome list of low-cost 2D LiDARs. I love having a compact list like this, as it should make life easier when choosing candidates for your next DIY project.
REDEMPTION at Battlebots! (Round #2)
Last week I featured the first part of this series, where Hacksmith Industries were rebuilding their BattleBot. In this video, you can see how the robot did in the arena, and yes, I’m BattleBot deprived because the show is not available anywhere in my region!
Publication of the Week - RoboDuet: A Framework Affording Mobile-Manipulation and Cross-Embodiment
Several videos showcase the amazing combination of quadruped robots with robotic arms doing all sorts of things. This paper presents a framework that uses two policies for computing locomotion and manipulation to achieve whole-body control. The most exciting bit is that the method’s flexibility can be extrapolated to different robots and other actuated arms. You can check the video and code on the paper’s website.
Business
Launch YC: K-Scale Labs; Open-source humanoid robots for everyone
I wondered if I should put this in the Business section, but here it is. Here are the most interesting excerpts:
“At K-Scale Labs, we are building the world’s first open-source general-purpose humanoid robot. […] Our robot, Stompy, is a 4-foot humanoid robot featuring the claw gripper from the recent Universal Manipulation Interface paper, designed so that each part fits on a 256 × 256 3D printer bed, with a total bill of materials costing less than $10,000. We’re using carbon fiber PAHT, but in principle, any reasonably strong plastic could be used instead. Our actuators are quasi-direct drives with between 6:1 and 8:1 reduction ratios, meaning that all the joints on our robot are low-inertia and back-drivable, with nominal torque values from 3-12 Nm. Each robot features a hot-swappable 48V 15Ah battery pack, which can power it for over an hour.”
Events
- 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
- Robotics Summit & Expo: May 01 - May 02, 2024. Boston, United States of America
- Open Hardware Summit 2024: May 03 - May 04, 2024. Montreal, Canada
- Automate: May 06 - May 09, 2024. Chicago, United States of America
- Eurobot Open 2024: May 08 - May 11, 2024. La Roche-sur-Yon, France
- ICCRE 2024: May 10 - May 12, 2024. Osaka, Japan
- ICRA 2024: May 13 - May 17, 2024. Yokohama, Japan
- ISMR (Medical Robotics) 2024: Jun 03 - Jun 05, 2024. Atlanta, Georgia, United States
- ICUAS (UAVs) 2024: Jun 04 - Jun 07, 2024. Chania, Crete, Greece
For more robotic events, check out our event page.