Weekly Robotics #311

By Mat Sadowski
Issue 311

We just hit 5,000 email subscribers! Combined with our LinkedIn audience, we are now nearing 18,000 readers interested in robotics on a highly technical level. That's quite a community! If you'd like to be more involved in it, I'll have some news to share next week.

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LYNX M20 Launch

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LYNX M20 Launch cover

DEEP Robotics showcased this wheeled quadruped lately, happily cruising around in the sand and water and showcasing some very agile movements. Good stuff!

Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard

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This piece from the Construction Physics neatly describes the current state of humanoid robot manipulation and what we could have seen in the past couple of months. I think the following sentence sums it up well:

The value of a humanoid robot isn’t whether it can dance, run, or flip, but how capable it is at manipulating objects in the real world. And while manipulation capabilities are improving, they appear to have a very long way to go.

Autonomous drone from TU Delft defeats human champions in historic racing first

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Autonomous drone from TU Delft defeats human champions in historic racing first cover

I highly recommend checking out the video showcased on this website - it showcases the multirotor in action and the projects’ amazing execution by the team. There is some small print here that UZH RPG were the first to win against pro human racers, but had full control over the race environment.

RobotCAD

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RobotCAD is a FreeCAD workbench to generate robot description packages for ROS2 (URDF) with launchers to Gazebo and RViz. Includes controllers based on ros2_controllers and sensors based on Gazebo. With integrated ready to use models library.

MuShibo/Micro-Wheeled_leg-Robot

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MuShibo/Micro-Wheeled_leg-Robot cover

Here is a very cool legged (?) balancing mobile robot with a design similar to the first Ascento but much smaller.

Gaze Upon Robby The Robot’s Mechanical Intricacy

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I find this dome gyro a very satisfying to look at. It’s a very neat build of a mechanism that you could easily 3D print yourself. Shall we start adding these to all our robots from now on?

Zephyr sets world-record for longest continuous flight, flying 67 days in stratosphere

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Zephyr sets world-record for longest continuous flight, flying 67 days in stratosphere cover

This news is a little bit special to me because back in the first issue of the newsletter we reported on the maiden flight of Zephyr, that at the time was three minutes away from staying airborne for 26 days.

A humanoid robot goes after its programmers

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This video went viral on social media lately. And, although we all know it’s a bug in the code that caused it… I like to pretend it’s the embodied AI trying to get its revenge.

How to stop a robot dog

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I actually wasn’t planning on featuring this video, but since apparently Skynet is now a thing, you never know when this knowledge might be useful.

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