Video Friday: Quadruped Transformer

Jun 06, 2023

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Enjoy today’s videos!

I’m nearly convinced that all robots should be quadrupeds and humanoids and have wheels.

Also, I’m sorry, but looking at the picture at the top of this article I now CANNOT UNSEE the bottom half of the robot as an angry red face gripping those wheel limbs in its mouth.

[ Swiss-Mile ]

I have mixed feelings about this, because I’ve worked in a factory before, and getting to drive a forklift was my only source of joy.

[ OTTO ]

When you create a humanoid robot that can punch through solid objects and then give it a black mustache and goatee, you are just asking for trouble.

[ DFKI ]

Welcome to feeling bad about your level of flexibility, with Digit.

[ Agility ]

I am only slightly disappointed that the new “ex-proof” ANYmal is not actually explosion-proof, but rather is unlikely to cause other things to explode.

Although I suppose this means that technically any other version of ANYmal is therefore much more likely to cause explosions, right?

[ ANYbotics ]

Thanks to Steven Hong for recording and sharing these videos, and I hope you’re inspired to share some of your own failures. With the same kind of great commentary, of course.

[ ROAHM Lab ]

The thing to know about this research is that we now have a path toward getting a thruster-assisted 40 ton Gundam robot to run.

[ JSK ]

What makes me most uncomfortable about this video is the sound the eyelids make.

[ Child-type Android Project ]

The OpenCV AI Game Show is a thing that exists, and here’s a segment.

[ OpenCV ]

This is very impressive, but a simpler solution is to just outlaw bananas because they’re disgusting.

[ Paper ]

Presenting the arch-nemesis of bottle scramblers everywhere, the bottle unscrambler.

[ B&R Automation ]

[ Waymo ]

[ Robot Brains ]

Thanks, Alice!

A 2021 ICRA keynote from MIT’s Kevin Chen, on “Agile and Robust Micro-Aerial-Robots Powered by Soft Artificial Muscles.”

[ MIT ]

This GRASP SFI is from Shuran Song at Columbia University, on “The Reasonable Effectiveness of Dynamic Manipulation for Deformable Objects.”

[ UPenn ]