Weekly Robotics #315

Issue 315

For quite some time now, the Weekly Robotics website layout was bugging me. It was a bit all-over the place with many legacy issues, so I spent the last two weeks redesigning it. You can see the result here. Applying the 80-20 rule to it, I believe I'm 80% done, and the remaining 20% are these things that take a long time to narrow down and fix, and I'm looking forward to some continuous improvements here.

Another big change that's coming is that I'll be sunsetting the current LinkedIn format of the newsletter in about two weeks. You might be thinking, "There are close to 13,000 subscribers on LinkedIn and you are going to nuke it. Are you stupid?". Well, maybe, but it's time to take a leap and make the Weekly Robotics stand on its own two legs!

Perception and Adaptability | Inside the Lab with Atlas

Perception and Adaptability | Inside the Lab with Atlas cover

Boston Dynamics showcased this demo, where you can see the world through Atlas eyes. There are a couple of things that I found interesting in this feature:

  • The engine cover mesh reconstruction and pose estimation
  • Full-body trajectory planning when picking a cover from the floor
  • All the cameras present in the head
  • A view of some internal tooling and at least one dev using Ubuntu 22 (I’m basing this on a wallpaper visible at one point)
  • The hand manipulation versatility visible in 4:22

All in all, it’s an interesting look at the perception capabilities of this robot.

Source

Learning coordinated badminton skills for legged manipulators

Learning coordinated badminton skills for legged manipulators cover

Researchers from the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich taught the ANYmal quadruped to play badminton, with some excellent results. The system utilizes all robot joints when playing and everything is done through the onboard perception. You can find a summary video of this research on YouTube.

Source

Controlling a 6DOF Robot Arm with ros2_control

Controlling a 6DOF Robot Arm with ros2_control cover

In this article, Michael Hart describes a ros2_control code example for a manipulator following a trajectory with a robot manipulator. This might be a great intro, if you want to start looking into this library.

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How Self Balancing Robots Work! (Theory, Components, Design, PID)

How Self Balancing Robots Work! (Theory, Components, Design, PID) cover

This is a very high-quality video with an overview of what’s needed to create a self-balancing robot. Very neat!

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Transformer & Optimization Based High Altitude GPS-Denied Fusion

In this ArduPilot forum post, Sanket Sharma describes his work on implementing vision-based position estimation for GPS-denied cases, with some very interesting results. Huge thanks to Pierre Kancir for sending this link over.

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Congratulations to the #ICRA2025 best paper award winners

Robohub has a concise list of the ICRA2025 papers. Have a nice read!

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Amazon Drone Crash Lands in Arizona Apartment Complex

Amazon Drone Crash Lands in Arizona Apartment Complex cover

Just last week, I featured the news of Amazon delivery drones crashing during testing, and I said I wouldn’t be too worried about that incident. This one sounds quite a bit more dangerous, and I would love to see a detailed report on this incident.

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Events

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