Online Mini-Symposium Tuesday May 19 2020 9:30-1:30 PT – free and open to the public

Robotics Today Seminar May 15: Andrew Davison, Imperial College London

The Intel RealSense cameras have been gaining in popularity for the past few years for use as a 3D camera and for visual odometry. I had the chance to hear a presentation from Daniel Piro about using the Intel RealSense cameras generally and for SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). The following post is based on his talk.

Hydraulics are sometimes looked at as an alternative to electric motors.

This summer we used our Strider optimizer coupled with rapid prototyping in LEGO to refine its 10-bar linkage.

I had somebody ask me questions this week about underwater photography and videography with robots (well, now it is a few weeks ago…). I am not an expert at underwater robotics, however as a SCUBA diver I have some experience that can be applicable towards robotics.

Lithium battery safety is an important issue as there are more and more reports of fires and explosions. Fires have been reported in everything from cell phones to airplanes to robots.

I had the opportunity to attend the National Robot Safety Conference for Industrial Robots today in Pittsburgh, PA (USA). Today was the first day of a three-day conference. While I mostly cover technical content on this site; I felt that this was an important conference to attend since safety and safety standards are becoming more and more important in robot system design. This conference focused specifically on industrial robots. That means the standards discussed were not directly related to self-driving cars, personal robotics, or space robots (you still don’t want to crash into a martian and start an inter-galactic war).

Cyberbotics Ltd. is launching https://robotbenchmark.net to allow everyone to program simulated robots online for free.

Robot butchers, cake decorator and pizza-baking manipulators. Here are our six favorite robot applications which are changing the food industry.

It was a return to the source for RoboCup 2017, which took place last week in Nagoya Japan, 20 years after its launch in the same city.

We are only in the earliest stages of so-called algorithmic regulation – intelligent machines deploying big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to regulate human behaviour and enforce laws – but it already has profound implications for the relationship between private citizens and the state.

by Nicholas Charron

The need for fast, accurate 3D mapping solutions has quickly become a reality for many industries wanting to adopt new technologies in AI and automation. New applications requiring these 3D mapping platforms include surveillance, mining, automated measurement & inspection, construction management & decommissioning, and photo-realistic rendering. Here at Clearpath Robotics, we decided to team up with Mandala Robotics to show how easily you can implement 3D mapping on a Clearpath robot.

Update: The response to Tertill’s crowdfunding campaign has amazed and delighted us! Pledges totalling over $250,000 have come from 1000+ backers. We’re shipping to all countries, with over a fifth of Tertill’s supporters coming from outside the United States. But the end is near; Tuesday (11 July) is the last full day of the campaign. After that Tertill’s discounted campaign price will no longer be available and delivery in time for next year’s (northern hemisphere) growing season cannot be assured.

Franklin Robotics has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Tertill, their solar-powered, garden-weeding robot.

By Tully Foote

We are excited to show off a simulation of a Prius in Mcity using ROS Kinetic and Gazebo 8. ROS enabled the simulation to be developed faster by using existing software and libraries. The vehicle’s throttle, brake, steering, and transmission are controlled by publishing to a ROS topic. All sensor data is published using ROS, and can be visualized with RViz.