Video Friday: Project GR00T

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.Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDSEnjoy today’s videos! See NVIDIA’s journey from pioneering advanced autonomous vehicle hardware and simulation tools to accelerated perception and manipulation for autonomous mobile robots and industrial arms, culminating in the next wave of cutting-edge AI for humanoid robots.[ NVIDIA ]In re..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Electroadhesion Heralds New Implant and Robot Tech

Applying electricity for a few seconds to a soft material, such as a slice of raw tomato or chicken, can strongly bond it to a hard object, such as a graphite slab, without any tape or glue, a new study finds. This unexpected effect is also reversible—switching the direction of the electric current often easily separates the materials, scientists at the University of Maryland say. Potential applications for such “electroadhesion,” which can even work underwater, may include improved biomedical implants and biologically inspired robots.“It is surprising that this effect was not discovered earlier,” says Srinivasa Raghavan, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the ..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Nvidia Announces GR00T, a Foundation Model for Humanoids

Nvidia’s ongoing GTC developer conference in San Jose is, unsurprisingly, almost entirely about AI this year. But in between the AI developments, Nvidia has also made a couple of significant robotics announcements.First, there’s Project GR00T (with each letter and number pronounced individually so as not to invoke the wrath of Disney), a foundation model for humanoid robots. And secondly, Nvidia has committed to be the founding platinum member of the Open Source Robotics Alliance, a new initiative from the Open Source Robotics Foundation intended to make sure that the Robot Operating System (ROS), a collection of open-source software libraries and tools, has the support that it needs to ..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

How Zipline Designed Its Droid Delivery System

About a year ago, Zipline introduced Platform 2, an approach to precision urban drone delivery that combines a large hovering drone with a smaller package-delivery “Droid.” Lowered on a tether from the belly of its parent Zip drone, the Droid contains thrusters and sensors (plus a 2.5- to 3.5-kilogram payload) to reliably navigate itself to a delivery area of just one meter in diameter. The Zip, meanwhile, safely remains hundreds of meters up. After depositing its payload, the Droid rises back up to the drone on its tether, and off they go.At first glance, the sensor and thruster-packed Droid seems complicated enough to be bordering on impractical, especially when you consider the relati..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

The Heart and the Chip: What Could Go Wrong?

Legendary MIT roboticist Daniela Rus has published a new book called The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots. “There is a robotics revolution underway,” Rus says in the book’s introduction, “one that is already causing massive changes in our society and in our lives.” She’s quite right, of course, and although some of us have been feeling that this is true for decades, it’s arguably more true right now than it ever has been. But robots are difficult and complicated, and the way that their progress is intertwined with the humans that make them and work with them means that these changes won’t come quickly or easily. Rus’ experience gives her a deep and nuanced ..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Video Friday: Many Quadrupeds

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videosVideo 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.HRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, COLO.Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANEnjoy today’s videos! How many quadrupeds can you control with one single locomotion policy? Apparently, the answer is “all of the quadrupeds.”Look for this at ICRA 2024 in a couple of months![ EPFL ]Thanks, Milad!Very impressive performance from Figure 01,..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Covariant Announces a Universal AI Platform for Robots

When IEEE Spectrum first wrote about Covariant in 2020, it was a new-ish robotics startup looking to apply robotics to warehouse picking at scale through the magic of a single end-to-end neural network. At the time, Covariant was focused on this picking use case, because it represents an application that could provide immediate value—warehouse companies pay Covariant for its robots to pick items in their warehouses. But for Covariant, the exciting part was that picking items in warehouses has, over the last four years, yielded a massive amount of real-world manipulation data—and you can probably guess where this is going.Today, Covariant is announcing RFM-1, which the company describes a..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Diminutive Deep Sea Drone Dives for Wrecks and Reefs

The global ocean is difficult to explore—the common refrain is that we know less about the deep ocean than we do about the surface of the moon. Australian company Advanced Navigation wants to change that with a pint-sized autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that it hopes will become the maritime equivalent of a consumer drone. And the new AUV is already getting to work mapping and monitoring Australia’s coral reefs and diving for shipwrecks. The Sydney-based company has been developing underwater navigation technology for more than a decade. In 2022, Advanced Navigation unveiled its first in-house AUV, called Hydrus. At less than half a meter long, the vehicle is considerably smaller th..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Video Friday: Human to Humanoid

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.HRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, COLO.Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDSEnjoy today’s videos! We present Human to Humanoid (H2O), a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework that enables real-time, whole-body teleoperation of a full-sized humanoid robot with only an RGB camera. We successfully achieve teleoperation of d..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Anyware Robotics’ Pixmo Takes Unique Approach to Trailer Unloading

You’ve seen this before: a truck unloading robot that’s made up of a mobile base with an arm on it that drives up into the back of a trailer and then uses suction to grab stacked boxes and put them onto a conveyor belt. We’ve written about a couple of the companies doing this, and there are even more out there. It’s easy to understand why—trailer unloading involves a fairly structured and controlled environment with a very repetitive task, it’s a hard job that sucks for humans, and there’s an enormous amount of demand. While it’s likely true that there’s enough room for a whole bunch of different robotics companies in the trailer unloading space, a given customer is probab..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Video Friday: $2.6 Billion

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. HRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, COLORADO, USAEurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Enjoy today’s videos! Figure has raised a $675 million Series B, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. [ Figure ] Meanwhile, here’s how things are going at Agility Robotics, whose last raise was a $150M Series B in April of 2022. [ Agility..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Figure Raises $675M for Its Humanoid Robot Development

Today, Figure is announcing an astonishing US $675 million Series B raise, which values the company at an even more astonishing $2.6 billion. Figure is one of the companies working towards a multi or general purpose (depending on who you ask) bipedal or humanoid (depending on who you ask) robot. The astonishing thing about this valuation is that Figure’s robot is still very much in the development phase—although they’re making rapid progress, which they demonstrate in a new video posted this week.This round of funding comes from Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest. Figure ..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Video Friday: Pedipulate

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.HRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, COLO.Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDSEnjoy today’s videos! Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, wh..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Let Robots Do Your Lab Work

Dina Genkina: Hi. I’m Dina Genkina for IEEE Spectrum‘s Fixing the Future. Before we start, I want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage from some of Spectrum’s most important beeps, including AI, Change, and Robotics, by signing up for one of our free newsletters. Just go to spectrum.ieee.orgewsletters to subscribe. Today, a guest is Dr. Benji Maruyama, a Principal Materials Research Engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL. Dr. Maruyama is a materials scientist, and his research focuses on carbon nanotubes and making research go faster. But he’s also a man with a dream, a dream of a world where science isn’t something done by a select few locked away in a..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Video Friday: Acrobot Error

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. Cybathlon Challenges: 2 February 2024, ZURICHHRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, COLO.Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN Enjoy today’s videos! Just like a real human, Acrobot will sometimes kick you in the face. [ Acrobotics ] Thanks, Elizabeth! You had me at “wormlike, limbless robots.” [ GitHub ] via [ Georgia Tech ] Filmed in July 2017, this video shows us using Atlas ..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Stretch 3 Brings Us Closer to Realistic Home Robots

A lot has happened in robotics over the last year. Everyone is wondering how AI will transform robotics, and everyone else is wondering whether humanoids are going to blow it or not, and the rest of us are busy trying not to get completely run over as things shake out however they’re going to shake out. Meanwhile, over at Hello Robot, they’ve been focused on making their Stretch robot do useful things while also being affordable and reliable and affordable and expandable and affordable and community-friendly and affordable. Which are some really hard and important problems that can sometimes get overwhelmed by flashier things.Today, Hello Robot is announcing Stretch 3, which provides a s..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

What It’s Like to Eat a Robot

Odorigui is a type of Japanese cuisine in which people consume live seafood while it’s still moving, making movement part of the experience. You may have some feelings about this (I definitely do), but from a research perspective, getting into what those feelings are and what they mean isn’t really practical. To do so in a controlled way would be both morally and technically complicated, which is why Japanese researchers have started developing robots that can be eaten as they move, wriggling around in your mouth as you chomp down on them. Welcome to HERI: Human-Edible Robot Interaction. That happy little robot that got its head ripped off by a hungry human (who, we have to say, was exce..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Everything You Wanted to Know About 1X’s Latest Video

Just last month, Oslo, Norway-based 1X (formerly Halodi Robotics) announced a massive $100 million Series B, and clearly they’ve been putting the work in. A new video posted last week shows a [insert collective noun for humanoid robots here] of EVE android-ish mobile manipulators doing a wide variety of tasks leveraging end-to-end neural networks (pixels to actions). And best of all, the video seems to be more or less an honest one: a single take, at (appropriately) 1X speed, and full autonomy. But we still had questions! And 1X has answers. If, like me, you had some very important questions after watching this video, including whether that plant is actually dead and the fate of the weight..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Disney’s Newest Robot Demonstrates Collaborative Cuteness

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. If Disney’s history of storytelling has taught us anything, it’s to never underestimate the power of a great sidekick. Even though sidekicks aren’t the stars of the show, they provide life and energy and move the story along in important ways. It’s hard to imagine Aladdin without the Genie, or Peter Pan without Tinker Bell. In robotics, however, solo acts proliferate. Even when multiple robots are used, they usually act in parallel. One key reason for this is that most robots are designed in ways that make direct collaboration with other robots d..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Video Friday: Monocycle Robot With Legs

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.Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 2024, ZURICHHRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, COLO.Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANEnjoy today’s videos! In this video, we present Ringbot, a novel leg-wheel transformer robot incorporating a monocycle mechanism with legs. Ringbot aims to provide versatile mobility by replacing the driver and driving components of a conventional monocycle ve..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds

It’s kind of astonishing how quadrotors have scaled over the last decade. Like, we’re now at the point where they’re verging on disposable, at least from a commercial or research perspective—for a bit over US $200, you can buy a little 27-gram, completely open source drone, and all you have to do is teach it to fly. That’s where things do get a bit more challenging, though, because teaching drones to fly is not a straightforward process. Thanks to good simulation and techniques like reinforcement learning, it’s much easier to imbue drones with autonomy than it used to be. But it’s not typically a fast process, and it can be finicky to make a smooth transition from simulation t..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Robotic Tongue Licks Gecko Gripper Clean

About a decade ago, there was a lot of excitement in the robotics world around gecko-inspired directional adhesives, which are materials that stick without being sticky using the same van der Waals forces that allow geckos to scamper around on vertical panes of glass. They were used extensively in different sorts of climbing robots, some of them quite lovely. Gecko adhesives are uniquely able to stick to very smooth things where your only other option might be suction, which requires all kinds of extra infrastructure to work.We haven’t seen gecko adhesives around as much of late, for a couple of reasons. First, the ability to only stick to smooth surfaces (which is what gecko adhesives are..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Video Friday: Agile but Safe

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. Cybathlon Challenges: 2 February 2024, ZURICHEurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN Enjoy today’s videos! Is “scamperiest” a word? If not, it should be, because this is the scamperiest robot I’ve ever seen. [ ABS ] GITAI is pleased to announce that its 1.5-meter-long autonomous dual robotic arm system (S2) has successfully arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) aboar..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Infrared Sensors Can Now Peer Around Corners

Just because an object is around a corner doesn’t mean it has to be hidden. Non-line-of-sight imaging can peek around corners and spot those objects, but it has so far been limited to a narrow band of frequencies. Now a new sensor can help extend this technique from working with visible light to infrared. This advance could prove help make autonomous vehicles safer, among other potential applications.Non-line-of-sight imaging relies on the faint signals of light beams that have reflected off of surfaces in order to reconstruct images. The ability to see around corners may prove useful for machine vision—for instance, helping autonomous vehicles foresee hidden dangers to better predict ho..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Amazon's Acquisition of iRobot Falls Through

Citing “no path to regulatory approval in the European Union,” Amazon and iRobot have announced the termination of an acquisition deal first announced in August of 2022 that would have made iRobot a part of Amazon and valued the robotics company at US $1.4 billion.The European Commission released a statement today that explained some of their concerns, which to be fair, seem like reasonable things to be concerned about:Our in-depth investigation preliminarily showed that the acquisition of iRobot would have enabled Amazon to foreclose iRobot’s rivals by restricting or degrading access to the Amazon Stores. …We also preliminarily found that Amazon would have had the incentive to forec..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Blade Strike on Landing Ends Mars Helicopter’s Epic Journey

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made its 72nd and final flight on 18 January. “While the helicopter remains upright and in communication with ground controllers,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab said in a press release this afternoon, “imagery of its Jan. 18 flight sent to Earth this week indicates one or more of its rotor blades sustained damage during landing, and it is no longer capable of flight.” That’s what you’re seeing in the picture above: the shadow of a broken tip of one of the helicopter’s four two-foot long carbon fiber rotor blades. NASA is assuming that at least one blade struck the Martian surface during a “rough landing,” and this is not the kind of damage that ..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Video Friday: Medusai

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.Cybathlon Challenges: 2 February 2024, ZURICHEurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDSEnjoy today’s videos! Made from beautifully fabricated steel and eight mobile arms, medusai can play percussion and strings with human musicians, dance with human dancers, and move in time to multiple human observers. It uses AI-driven computer visio..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

That Awesome Robot Demo Could Have a Human in the Loop

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a couple of high-profile videos of robotic systems doing really impressive things. And I mean, that’s what we’re all here for, right? Being impressed by the awesomeness of robots! But sometimes the awesomeness of robots is more complicated than what you see in a video making the rounds on social media—any robot has a lot of things going on behind the scenes to make it successful, but if you can’t tell what those things are, what you see at first glance might be deceiving you. Earlier this month, a group of researchers from Stanford’s IRIS Lab introduced Mobile ALOHA, which (if you read the YouTube video description) is described as “a low-co..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Liquid RAM Flexes for Wearables, Robots, Implants

While organic thin-film transistors built on flexible plastic have been around long enough for people to start discussing a Moore’s Law for bendable ICs, memory devices for these flexible electronics have been a bit more elusive. Now researchers from Tsinghua University in China have developed a fully flexible resistive random access memory device, dubbed FlexRAM, that offers another approach: a liquid one.In research described in the journal Advanced Materials, the researchers have used a gallium-based liquid metal to achieve FlexRAM’s data writing and reading process. In an example of biomimicry, the gallium-based liquid metal (GLM) droplets undergo oxidation and reduction mechanisms w..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics

Video Friday: Swiss-Mile

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.Cybathlon Challenges: 2 February 2024, ZURICHEurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDSEnjoy today’s videos! You may not be familiar with Swiss-Mile, but you’d almost certainly recognize its robot: it’s the ANYmal with wheels on its feet that can do all kinds of amazing things. Swiss-Mile has just announced a seed round to commerci..

IEEE Spectrum > Robotics