Weekly Robotics #202
There is a meaningful discussion going on on ROS Discourse about the default DDS in Humble. As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo. The most clicked link last week was an article about Amazon’s new warehouse robots with 11.7% opens.
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Amazon re:MARS 2022 - Open space: A Revolution in Robots for Space Exploration
Last week, I promised that we would cover something from re:MARS 2022. In this talk, Michael Jeronimo talks about space robots, open-source packages and ROS in space. According to the talk, VIPER is using ROS in ground software systems and Gazebo for mission development. The rest of the talk focuses on the space-certifiable robotics framework and how Space ROS came to be.
Elements of Robotics
Elements of Robotics is an open-access textbook on robotics by Mordechai Ben-Ari and Francesco Mondada. The book covers everything I would expect to find in an introductory book: sensors, state machines, robot motion and control, navigation, mapping and localization, and more. The book was already added to our Awesome Weekly Robotics list
Cruise Robotaxis Blocked Traffic for Hours on This San Francisco Street
Last week, multiple Cruise autonomous cars suffered an issue, blocking traffic in San Francisco. I could not find any comments from the company at this time but I’m hoping we will get to learn something from this through some postmortem analysis.
Here’s a Home Robot That Actually Looks Useful: A Self-Driving Shelf
A great write-up on actually-useful household robots from Labrador Systems. The robots act as shelves that can drive around the house to the locations specified by the user. Having a lifting mechanism, I can see how it can be useful for people with reduced mobility. In the article, we can learn that the company is planning to keep things simple and they believe there is too much hype in robotics, which sounds like a promising approach to me.
pyrobosim
pyrobosim is a “ROS2 enabled 2D mobile robot simulator for behavior prototyping” developed by Sebastian Castro. You can learn more about it from Sebastian’s latest blog post
Intersection over Union (IoU) in Object Detection and Segmentation
A great article with Python code snippets on implementing IoU in OpenCV.
Publication of the Week - Design and Motion Planning for a Reconfigurable Robotic Base (2022)
We’ve covered many types of mobile robot architectures, and this time will be no different. This article presents a robotic platform for mobile manipulation that can reconfigure itself at runtime. The robot can change its footprint using passive leg joints with brakes that can lock the joint into a secured position. The legs can move and re-configure with steerable wheels at their tips. Each configuration offers a unique advantage by supporting more weight, having more precision, or even navigating through narrow places. The best configuration is given by an open-source model predictive control (MPC) implemented in the ROS framework. You can check a video of the mobile robotic base here and code here.
Business
Impossible Mining raises $10.1M for underwater mining robot
Impossible Mining, a company developing an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that uses a pick and place manipulator to harvest battery materials from the deep seabed, announced that it brought in $10.1 million in seed funding.