Drone Spotlight: Morphy Drone

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.

RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS

ICRA@40: 23–26 September 2024, ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS

IROS 2024: 14–18 October 2024, ABU DHABI, UAE

ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK

Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH

Enjoy today’s videos!

We present Morphy, a novel compliant and morphologically-aware Flying Robot that integrates sensorized flexible joints in its arms, thus enabling resilient collisions at high speeds and the ability to squeeze through openings more narrow than its nominal dimensions.

Morphy represents a new class of soft-flying robots that can facilitate unprecedented resilience through innovations both in the “body” and “brain.” The novel soft body can, in turn, enable new avenues for autonomy. Collisions that previously had to be avoided have now become acceptable risks, while areas that are untraversable for a certain robot size can now be negotiated through self-squeezing. These novel bodily interactions with the environment can give rise to new types of embodied intelligence.

[ ARL ]

Thanks, Kostas!

Segments of daily training for robots driven by reinforcement learning. Multiple tests done in advance for friendly service humans. The training includes some extreme tests, please do not imitate!

[ Unitree ]

Sphero is not only still around, they’re making new STEM robots!

[ Sphero ]

Googly eyes mitigate all robot failures.

[ WVUIRL ]

Here I am, without the ability or equipment (or desire) required to iron anything that I own, and Flexiv’s got robots out there ironing fancy leather car seats.

[ Flexiv ]

Thanks, Noah!

We unveiled a significant leap forward in perception technology for our humanoid robot GR-1. The newly adapted pure vision solution integrates bird’s eye view, transformer models, and occupancy network for precise and efficient environmental perception.

[ Fourier ]

Thanks, Serin!

LimX Dynamics’ humanoid robot CL-1 was launched in Dec 2023. It climbed stairs based on real-time terrain perception, 2 steps per stair. 4 months later, in Apr 2024, the 2nd demo video showcased CL-1 in the same scenario. It advanced to climb the same stair 1 step per stair.

[ LimX Dynamics ]

Thanks, Ou Yan!

New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows that programming robots to create their own teams and voluntarily wait for their teammates results in faster task completion, with the potential to improve manufacturing, agriculture and warehouse automation.

[ HCRL ] via [ UMass Amherst ]

Thanks, Julia!

LASDRA (Large-size Aerial Skeleton with Distributed Rotor Actuation system (ICRA18) is a scalable and modular aerial robot, can assume a very slender, long and dexterous form-factor and very light weight.

[ SNU INRoL ]

We propose augmenting initially passive structures built from simple repeated cells, with novel active units to enable dynamic, shape-changing, and robotic applications. Inspired by metamaterials that can employ mechanisms, we build a framework that allows users to configure cells of this passive structure to allow it to perform complex tasks.

[ CMU ]

Testing autonomous exploration at the Exyn Office using Spot from Boston Dynamics. In this demo, Spot autonomous explores our flight space while on the hunt for one of our engineers.

[ Exyn ]

Meet Heavy Picker, the strongest robot in bulky waste sorting and an absolute pro at lifting and sorting waste. With skills that would make a concert pianist jealous and a work ethic that never needs coffee breaks, Heavy Picker was on the lookout for new challenges.

[ Zen Robotics ]

AI is the biggest and most consequential business, financial, legal, technological, and cultural story of our time. In this panel, you will hear from the underrepresented community of women scientists who have been leading the AI revolution — from the beginning to now.