Weekly Robotics #313

By Mat Sadowski
Issue 313

Today's issue is on the longer side - had some difficulties coming with the final selection, but that's good, means there is a lot going on in Robotics. Probably a good sign if you are involved in our industry.

Cartwheel Robotics Wants to Build Humanoids that People Love

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Cartwheel Robotics Wants to Build Humanoids that People Love cover

This piece introduces Yogi, a humanoid robot by Cartwheel Robotics that looks very much like a cartoon character. What comes across to me from this article is Scott LaValley’s strategy of treating general purpose robots as a north start, but meanwhile, targeting museums and science centers.

Students shatter Guinness World Record for fastest puzzle cube-solving robot

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Last year, we featured news about Mitsubishi Electric beating the Guiness World Record for the fastest robot to solve a Rubik’s cube at 0.305 seconds. The students from Purdue University just smashed the previous record with a solve in 0.103 seconds. If you blink, you will miss it!

Welcome Your New AI (LEGO) Overlord

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Welcome Your New AI (LEGO) Overlord cover

This is a fun project, where an LLM creates a LEGO structure based on a prompt, and some YASKAWA manipulators can then build it.

Design for 3D-Printing

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Design for 3D-Printing cover

You know this feeling when you see a time read estimate on a website, and you know you are in for a treat? That’s the case with this 80-minute article describing some lessons learned over the years.

$1 Robot vs $200,000 Robot

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Hacksmith Industries made this video going through various robots for any budget. Good entertainment, and a serious workshop envy!

Wrist Mounted CD Launcher - Built to DESTROY!

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If we are doing a YouTube party, then we are doing a YouTube party. In this video, Aaed Musa builds a CD Launcher, that reminds me of a disk launcher from the Unreal Game.

Orient - Ball Balancing Robot

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Orient - Ball Balancing Robot cover

Sahil Sharma and Nishit Mittal created this neat ball-balancing robot. This GitHub repository contains a project video, source code and CAD parts. Well done!

Robot-Manipulation.org

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Robot-Manipulation.org cover

The COMPARE ecosystem aims to create a greater cohesion between open-source products that improves the modularity of open-source components in the robot manipulation pipeline for more effective performance benchmarking. COMPARE seeks to unite the existing community of users and developers to build upon and integrate existing open-source products as well as improve and evolve the future of robot manipulation research. This is achieved through the generation of community-driven standards for components of software pipelines, benchmarking practices, objects, datasets, and hardware designs.

OpenLoong

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If you like rabbit holes for exploration, then you might love this one! It’s an open-source hardware for a humanoid robot. Most of the material is still available in Chinese, but once you go through it, you should be able to build a very capable platform!

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