Weekly Robotics #44 23 Jun 2019

Hi! In the previous issue we messed up the link to the first part of “How To Build a Lithium Battery”. In case you missed it Here is the working link! Please accept this video of robot being fed up of being abused by humans as a token of apology.

1) Autonomous Drone Tutorials.

GAAS

INFO: This set of tutorials in English and Chinese from Generalized Autonomy Aviation System (GAAS). The tutorials cover offboard control, 3D reconstruction from images, indoor SLAM, path planning and vision based autolanding. The tutorials use ROS, PX4 autopilot and Gazebo simulator.

2) Georgia Tech SlothBot Goes Slow to Save Energy for Environmental Monitoring.

The Robot Report

INFO: SlothBot is a wire traversing robot designed by Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The robot is recharged by photovoltaic cells and a wire switch mechanism that allows it to crawl through a network of wires.

3) Red Planet Rovers and Insights.

YouTube

INFO: This lecture was published by NASA JPL as part of the von Kármán Lecture Series 2019. The first part of the lecture by Abigail Fraeman offers interesting insights on MARS rovers Curiosity, Opportunity and Mars 2020 rover. We really enjoyed learning about the evolution of dust storm that ended up incapacitating the rover (as you could learn in the issue 26), a geology of Mars and the project timescales. The second part of the lecture by Elizabeth Barrett is about InSight lander and how it’s going to help us understand Mars interior better.

4) The High-tech Farming Revolution.

BBC

INFO: In this 23 minutes long video from BBC we can see some examples of robotics that are used on the farms. We can learn about multicopters being used for crop surveying and pollination, fitting tractors with sensors and performing real time data processing and autonomous robots.

5) Look, No Hands! NASA’s First Astrobee Robot “Bumble” Starts Flying in Space.

NASA

INFO: We’ve mentioned Astrobee’s for the first time back in the issue #35 and included a paper on the topic in issue #39. On 20th of June NASA reported that the first Astrobee performed the first successful flight on the ISS.

6) Inside The First-Ever Self-Driving Race Cars.

YouTube

INFO: This video by Business Insider offers some insights on Roborace and their Formula-1 like all electric self driving race cars.

7) Publication of the Week - Kugle - Modelling and Control of a Ball-balancing Robot (2019).

GitHub

INFO: The above repository contains source code information of Kugle, a self ball-balancing robot. In the first section of readme file you will find a link to Thomas Kølbæk Jespersen’s master thesis on the robot (warning: the file is 100 Mb in size). Kuggle uses 3 omniwheels spaced 120 degrees apart from one another driven by Maxon motors with encoders and controlled using ESCON motor drivers. We’ve found the thesis to be solidly written and recommend going through it! Here you can find a YouTube playlist showing the project progress.

Careers

1) Rapyuta Robotics (Tokyo, Japan) - Software Engineer - Robotics.

INFO: Rapyuta Robotics is developing an enterprise-level Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for robots.

2) Plus One Robotics (San Antonio, TX, US) - Artificial Intelligence Software Engineer.

INFO: Plus One Robotics is a San Antonio-based 3D vision and controls developer for robotic automation in the logistics and e-commerce markets.