Weekly Robotics #301

By Mat Sadowski
Issue 301

No time to write an intro. Let’s roll with the issue. I will overcompensate with an extended intro next week. As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo.

Building a Robot Roller Coaster

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In this video, Dave from Dave’s Armoury sets up a ginormous Kuka manipulator as a ‘robotcoaster’. I think Dave shows a very reasonable approach to safety, and I understand why he was so hesitant to try the robot for the first time. Would you step on this kind of robot?

Humanoid Robots: Dollars and GPTs

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Benjie Holson is back with a second article on the recent uptick of interest in humanoid robots. This blog post is more business-oriented than the previous one in this series. What I find refreshing in this article is how open Benjie is about the idea that the value brought by the robotic companies is usually savings in human labor. Not many companies in our industry are saying this out loud. The Robotics Startup CEO Simulator is useful!

Interactive Design of Stylized Walking Gaits for Robotic Characters

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I’m a sucker for animatronics, and this video presents a fascinating gait editor that can turn animators into robotics power users. It looks like an elegant tool for Disney!

Congratulations to the ICRA2024 best paper winners

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Look no further if you’d like to find the best ICRA 2024 papers!

LiDAR Visualizer and Comparison Tool: Velodyne, Ouster, Hesai, RoboSense

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Our friends at Tangram Vision created this tool to compare some selected multi-beam LIDARs. This tool should be handy for a quick comparison if you are shopping around for a sensor for your project.

ROS 2 Jazzy Jalisco Released!

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ROS 2 Jazzy Jalisco is ON! I’m looking forward to start integrating it into some robots! In this post, you will learn more about this release. Unfortunately, the rmw_zenoh that many community members look forward to is in preview until some bugs are ironed out.

Publication of the Week - URDFormer: A Pipeline for Constructing Articulated Simulation Environments from Real-World Images

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Imagine creating an environment in gazebo with physical and visual realism using images from the internet. This paper presents URDFormer, a pipeline that scraps real-world images and generates the urdf with dynamic and kinematic properties. One of the pipeline’s features is understanding the objects’ relationship, such as understanding the drawer articulations and generating the URDF for those joints. Their repository contains the code and a video with the results.

Events

For more robotic events, check out our event page.