Weekly Robotics #318

Issue 318

One of the joys of being a self-made robot archivist is looking at how some of the projects develop. This is the case for the first feature today. It's been close to five years since I first featured iCub for the first time. Today is the fifth time you can read about this project in Weekly Robotics. And I'm pretty sure, this won't be the last!

In other news, Weekly Robotics is happy to partner-up with Cracow AI & Robotics Meetup yet again! I’m attending the 7th of July meetup, and if you can make it there, let me know and let's catch up!

iRonCub3: First Liftoff of a Jet-Powered Humanoid Robot

iRonCub3: First Liftoff of a Jet-Powered Humanoid Robot cover

As I mentioned in the intro, I’m really excited about this development! Last time we’ve featured iCub, it was learning to fly in simulation, and now we have a real-world lift-off. If you would like to learn more about this work, check out this pre-print.

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Winners - a Hugging Face Space by LeRobot-worldwide-hackathon

LeRobot hackathon winners were announced! This page showcases video presentations from 30 teams. I really enjoyed some of these projects!

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Building the Robot from the Simulation

Building the Robot from the Simulation cover

Skyentific is back with a new video in his building-a-humanoid series. In this one, the author is connecting all the motors and testing them. Can’t wait to see how this project develops further!

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ros2_focus_peaking: Camera lens focus assist tool

ros2_focus_peaking: Camera lens focus assist tool cover

This ROS 2 package assists in manually focusing lenses on machine vision cameras and evaluating image sharpness. It highlights sharp edges directly in the image display, allowing users to visually determine focus quality and identify which parts of the scene are in focus. An accompanying widget provides a quantitative focus quality score, calculated either from the full image or a user-defined Region of Interest (ROI) that can be selected interactively by clicking and dragging.

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R²D²: Building AI-based 3D Robot Perception and Mapping with NVIDIA Research

R²D²: Building AI-based 3D Robot Perception and Mapping with NVIDIA Research cover

In this blog post, Raffaello Bonghi, describes five interesting projects from NVIDIA Research related to 3D perception. Don’t know about you, but I have quite a bit of FOMO related to all these projects.

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CubePilot Global Intensifies Efforts to Liberate Coaxial Drone Technology from Restrictive Patent Control, Advocates for Open Innovation

Commercial entities producing coaxial multirotors might find themselves in a bit of a pickle; Nordic Unmanned ASA held a patent on coaxial rotor use for drones and since the company had been bankrupt the patent was acquired by another party. CubePilot is fighting a good fight to get the patent invalidated, arguing there is plenty of prior art (Wikipedia says a small scale model had been shown in 1754!). In response to these developments, the ArduPilot team released a mixer for Co-rotating X8 configuration. Big thanks to Pierre Kancir about letting me know about this update!

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