Weekly Robotics #160
As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo. The most clicked link last week was the solar panel cleaning robot from Robots Work section with 10.9% opens.
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Announcing the latest Pixhawk
https://www.dronecode.org/announcing-the-pixhawk-fmuv5x-open-standard/The latest Pixhawk Open Standard was released this morning by the Dronecode Foundation. The Pixhawk FMUv5X is the newest addition to the Pixhawk family of flight controllers. Designed by the Pixhawk SIG, formed by Dronecode Foundation members. The updated design can be implemented as a System-On-Module or single board, bringing tons of performance with increased reliability. The Pixhawk FMUv5X will be featured in the PX4 Developer Summit starting tomorrow. Get FREE tickets if you are a student or faculty member with a valid ID or use code PX421WR20 for a 20% discount on professional tickets.
Humble Book Bundle
Humble Bundle: Level up your engineering and electronics knowledgeIn this Humble Bundle you can snatch up to 31 books related to DIY electronic projects by Make. As usualy with the featured Humble Bundle links - by using the link above you can choose to support this newsletter. Happy making! If you are looking for something more software-y then you can check out this machine learning bundle by No Starch Press.
Robot at 100
It has been 100 years since Karel Čapek’s book “R.U.R.” was published, introducing the word ‘robot’ (from Czech: robota - hard work) that caught on rather well. This article will give you some background on the author and his work.
Ultimate Weed Killing Robot
Here is a nice ‘little’ (with a 135kg mobile robot) weed-killing robot project by Dave’s Armoury. I like the style of the videos, even though at times explanations are oversimplified. If you are thinking of developing a weed-killing robot, perhaps consider using electricity or laser instead of direct fire to your lawn.
How To Keep Your RealSense Sensors Alive
If you were caught in Intel’s recent announcement about terminating some of their sensing products, then you might want to give the above article a read as it might help you consider your options.
Gentle Guide to Get Started With tmux
Years ago, when I started working with ROS, tmux was a game-changer for me as it allowed me to use a single terminal instance with mutiple tabs/panes. This article is a nice intro to this tool, and if you have issues with running multiple terminals at once I highly recommend giving tmux a go. Once you do and it’s working out nicely for you you can take a look at tmuxp that will allow you to script some tmux sessions (for me one tmuxp session will open a directory for a given project, source all the required files, display my source code status and open an editor for the project).
Rodney Brooks: Robotics | Lex Fridman Podcast #217
Earlier this month Lex Fridman was hosting Rodney Brooks on his podcast. I didn’t finish the whole thing yet but found the discussion captivating. The advice for young people towards the end of the video is golden.
Release: rust ROS2 library r2r
“r2r is an easy to use, runtime-agnostic, async rust bindings for ROS2. r2r can be built using colcon but do not require hooking into the ROS2 build infrastructure if you do not need to. cargo build is all you need. This library differs a bit in style from rclpy and rclcpp, as it eliminates all synchronous callbacks in favor for rust futures and streams. Coupled with the rust await syntax, this makes it very pleasant to work with ROS services and actions. The library purposefully does not choose an async runtime – this means that any runtime, such as tokio or async-std can be used”.
Publication of the Week - RI Seminar: Andrew E. Johnson: The Search for Ancient Life on Mars Began with a Safe Landing (2021)
In this week’s publication, we have a must-see video with Dr Andrew E. Johnson, a principal robotics systems engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He talks in detail about the vision system that was responsible for locating and pointing the Perseverance rover to a safe place to land. The seminar presents how the system was developed, ranging from hundreds of simulations to field tests with helicopters. Dr Johnson also shows some very exclusive footage during the landing phase and the main outcomes of the mission.
Robots Work
Sandvik DU412i Longhole Drill
I confess I don’t know about robotics for mining but this Sandvik drill with an offboard mode looks interesting. The controller for manual operation seems like a solid piece of kit. Next time, you will be looking to buy some longhole drills you will know where to start.