Weekly Robotics #71 29 Dec 2019

Last year, right around this time, I run a special edition of the newsletter: Robotics in 2018. Unfortunately, this time I didn’t have nowhere enough time to create something of this magnitude. I’ll discuss my time constraints in the Q4 report that I should feature in the next newsletter issue but if you’d like a teaser then I would like to take this newsletter to a next level. Hang tight!

1) Anki Assets Acquired by Edtech Startup Digital Dream Labs.

The Robot Report

INFO: Anki was the company behind Vector and Cozmo robots that close down last year (I’ve mentioned that in issue #37). As The Robot Report reports the company’s assets were acquired by Digital Dream Labs. I like the idea of Open Source Vector 2.0!

2) UrbanLoco: A Full Sensor Suite Dataset for Mapping and Localization in Urban Scenes.

advdataset2019

INFO: If you would like to play back some robotic car data then this dataset might be for you. One of the car platforms is equipped with a LiDAR (Velodyne HDL 32E), an IMU (Xsens Mti 10), GNSS receiver, Fish-eye Camera (FLIR Grasshopper3) and RTK GNSS/INS integrated navigation system (NovAtel SPAN-CPT) used for ground truth measurement. All data is provided as ROS bags.

3) Apollo Flight Controller 101: Every Console Explained.

Ars Technica

INFO: In this article Lee Hutchinson goes over the Apollo Mission Control room. I found the article to be very detailed and I love the feel the Eidophor projectors give to the room.

4) Driving Sideways to Move Forward: Stanford Engineers Show How an Autonomous, Drifting DeLorean Can Improve Driver Safety.

Stanford

INFO: I like everything about this project but I think it might be mostly about the car. I really recommend you take a look at the gifs featured in the article. They are stunning!

5) Building All The Robots.

buildits

INFO: In this blog post Ben Katz makes a photo dump from assembling the herd of Mini Cheetahs.

6) A New Concept of Future Robot Manipulators Will Be Developed from Studying Elephants.

Sant’Anna News

INFO: EU project PROBOSCIS aims at studying the trunk of African bush elephant species and use this information to create bio-inspired robot manipulator. The project’s end date is October 2023. I’ll try to follow it and keep you posted on any results that I find out about!

7) Dusty Robotics FieldPrinter Automates Building Layout.

The Robot Report

INFO: Building Information Modeling(BIM) is a process of generating and storing all information on a building in a single place. Field Printer by DustyRobotics aims at laying out the building information directly on the build sites. The services will be offered as a robot-as-a-service (RaaS) model.