Weekly Robotics #341

Issue 341

The schedule for the Robotics & Simulation devroom is out. We ended up with a very nice talk line-up. I'm really looking forward to it! If you make it to Brussels for this event, let me know and let's catch up!

Next week, I'm taking a time off from the newsletter. I'll see you next year! Happy holidays!

Luxonis Launches OAK 4 Standalone Vision System [Sponsored]

Luxonis released OAK 4, a standalone AI vision device that bundles high-res RGB and depth sensors with 52 TOPS of on-device compute and an IP67 rated enclosure. There’s no cloud or host PC required; it runs inference locally, and integrates with their Hub management software, simplifying deployment into real world robotics and industrial automation.

Explore OAK 4

A look at iRobot’s 35-year robotics journey

A look at iRobot’s 35-year robotics journey cover

The news of iRobot filing for bankruptcy marks an end of an era in robotics (source: myself). The linked article showcases some of the projects iRobot undertook during its journey. I think some good points are also being made in The Robot Report article: “Robotics industry reacts to iRobot’s bankruptcy”.

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Why Fighter Jets Ban 90% of C++ Features

If you like engineering stories and looking back on why some decisions were made, you might like this video, where you can learn some background on why certain C++ features were banned from the fighter jet codebase. The standard itself is also a good read!

Source

Vine-inspired robotic gripper gently lifts heavy and fragile objects

Vine-inspired robotic gripper gently lifts heavy and fragile objects cover

Inspired by vines’ twisty tenacity, engineers at MIT and Stanford University have developed a robotic gripper that can snake around and lift a variety of objects, including a glass vase and a watermelon, offering a gentler approach compared to conventional gripper designs. A larger version of the robo-tendrils can also safely lift a human out of bed.

Source

Olaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World

Olaf: Bringing an Animated Character to Life in the Physical World cover

A couple of weeks ago, we reported on Disney’s new bipedal robot, but they have now released some hard data on the design. The video goes quite deep into the design of the character, and for even more information about this build, you can find this pre-print informative.

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Pogobot: an Open-Source, Low-Cost Robot for Swarm Robotics and Programmable Active Matter

Pogobot: an Open-Source, Low-Cost Robot for Swarm Robotics and Programmable Active Matter cover

I saw these robots while visiting ISIR (thanks again for the tour, Eloïse), and they quickly grabbed my attention. These are open-source swarm mobile robots developed by researchers at Sorbonne Université. Some of the highlights of these platforms for me were using brushes for locomotion (surprisingly faster than I anticipated) and having an FPGA onboard. If you are working on robot swarms, you might want to check out this project!

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Emergence of Human to Robot Transfer in Vision-Language-Action Models

Researchers at Physical Intelligence found that as VLA models grow and incorporate diverse data, they naturally begin to understand and use human video data to improve robot behavior. These will come in handy the next time you are building a general robot.

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DDS in ROS 2: Consolidated User Insights

If you work with ROS (and more specifically DDS), you might want to check out this thread on Open Robotics Discourse for a set of links to high-quality resources on DDS.

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Events

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