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Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

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.

Humanoids 2023: 12–14 December 2023, AUSTIN, TEX.Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 2024, ZURICH, SWITZERLANDEurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN

Enjoy today’s videos!

This magnetically actuated soft robot is perhaps barely a robot by most definitions, but I can’t stop watching it flop around.

In this work, Ahmad Rafsanjani, Ahmet F. Demirörs, and co‐workers from SDU (DK) and ETH (CH) introduce kirigami into a soft magnetic sheet to achieve bidirectional crawling under rotating magnetic fields. Experimentally characterized crawling and deformation profiles, combined with numerical simulations, reveal programmable motion through changes in cut shape, magnet orientation, and translational motion. This work offers a simple approach toward untethered soft robots.

[ Paper ] via [ SDU ]

Thanks, Ahmad!

Winner of the earliest holiday video is the LARSEN team at Inria!

[ Inria ]

Thanks, Serena!

Even though this is just a rendering, I really appreciate Apptronik being like, “we’re into the humanoid thing, but sometimes you just don’t need legs.”

[ Apptronik ]

We’re not allowed to discuss unmentionables here at IEEE Spectrum, so I can only tell you that Digit has started working in a warehouse handling, uh, things.

[ Agility ]

Unitree’s sub-$90k H1 Humanoid suffering some abuse in a non-PR video.

[ Impress ]

Unlike me, ANYmal can perform 24/7 in all weather.

[ ANYbotics ]

Most of the world will need to turn on subtitles for this, but it’s cool to see how industrial robots can be used to make art.

[ Kuka ]

I was only 12 when this episode of Scientific American Frontiers aired, but I totally remember Alan Alda meeting Flakey!

And here’s the segment, it’s pretty great.

[ SRI ]

Agility CEO Damion Shelton talks about the hierarchy of robot control and draws similarities to the process of riding a horse.

[ Agility ]

Seeking to instill students with real-life workforce skills through hands-on learning, teachers at Central High School in Louisville, Ky., incorporated Spot into their curriculum. For students at CHS, a magnet school for Jefferson County Public Schools district, getting experience with an industrial robot has sparked a passion for engineering and robotics, kickstarted advancement into university engineering programs, and built lifelong career skills. See how students learn to operate Spot, program new behaviors for the robot, and inspire their peers with the school’s “emotional support robot” and unofficial mascot.

[ Boston Dynamics ]



This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

Thanks to eons of evolution, vines have the ability to seek out light sources, growing in the direction that will optimize their chances of absorbing sunlight and thriving. Now, researchers have succeeded in creating a vine-inspired crawling bot that can achieve similar feats, seeking out and moving towards light and heat sources. It’s described in a study published last month in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

Shivani Deglurkar, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, helped co-design these automated “vines.” Because of its light- and heat-seeking abilities, the system doesn’t require a complex centralized controller. Instead, the “vines” automatically move towards a desired target. “[Also], if some of the vines or roots are damaged or removed, the others remain fully functional,” she notes.

While the tech is still in its infancy, Deglurkar says she envisions it helping in different applications related to solar tracking, or perhaps even in detecting and fighting smoldering fires.

It uses a novel actuator that contracts in the presence of light, causing it to gravitate towards the source. Shivani Deglurkar et al.

To help the device automatically gravitate towards heat and light, Deglurkar’s team developed a novel actuator. It uses a photo absorber in low-boiling-point fluid, which is contained in many small, individual pouches along the sides of the vine’s body. They called this novel actuator a Photothermal Phase-change Series Actuator (PPSA).

When exposed to light, the PPSAs absorb light, heat up, inflate with vapor, and contract. As the PPSAs are pressurized, they elongate, by unfurling material from inside its tip. “At the same time, the PPSAs on the side exposed to light contract, shortening that portion of the robot, and steering it toward the [light or heat] source,” explains Deglurkar.

Her team then tested the system, placing it at different distances from an infrared light source, and confirmed that it will gravitate towards the source at short distances. Its ability to do so depends on the light intensity, whereby stronger light sources allow the device to bend more towards the heat source.

Full turning of the vine by the PPSAs takes about 90 seconds. Strikingly, the device was even able to navigate around obstacles thanks to its inherent need to seek out light and heat sources.

Charles Xiao, a Ph. D. candidate in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, helped co-design the vine. He says he was surprised to see its responsiveness in even very low lighting. “Sunlight is about 1000 W/m2, and our robot has been shown to work at a fraction of solar intensity,” he explains, noting that a lot of comparable systems require illumination greater than that of one Sun.

Xiao says that the main strength of the automated vine is its simplicity and low cost to make. But more work is needed before it can hit the market—or makes its debut fighting fires. “It is slow to respond to light and heat signals and not yet designed for high temperature applications,” explains Xiao.

Therefore future prototypes would need better performance at high temperatures and ability to sense fires in order to be deployed in a real-world environment. Moving forward, Deglurkar says her team’s next steps include designing the actuators to be more selective to the wavelengths emitted by a fire, and developing actuators with a faster response time.



This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

Thanks to eons of evolution, vines have the ability to seek out light sources, growing in the direction that will optimize their chances of absorbing sunlight and thriving. Now, researchers have succeeded in creating a vine-inspired crawling bot that can achieve similar feats, seeking out and moving towards light and heat sources. It’s described in a study published last month in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

Shivani Deglurkar, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, helped co-design these automated “vines.” Because of its light- and heat-seeking abilities, the system doesn’t require a complex centralized controller. Instead, the “vines” automatically move towards a desired target. “[Also], if some of the vines or roots are damaged or removed, the others remain fully functional,” she notes.

While the tech is still in its infancy, Deglurkar says she envisions it helping in different applications related to solar tracking, or perhaps even in detecting and fighting smoldering fires.

It uses a novel actuator that contracts in the presence of light, causing it to gravitate towards the source. Shivani Deglurkar et al.

To help the device automatically gravitate towards heat and light, Deglurkar’s team developed a novel actuator. It uses a photo absorber in low-boiling-point fluid, which is contained in many small, individual pouches along the sides of the vine’s body. They called this novel actuator a Photothermal Phase-change Series Actuator (PPSA).

When exposed to light, the PPSAs absorb light, heat up, inflate with vapor, and contract. As the PPSAs are pressurized, they elongate, by unfurling material from inside its tip. “At the same time, the PPSAs on the side exposed to light contract, shortening that portion of the robot, and steering it toward the [light or heat] source,” explains Deglurkar.

Her team then tested the system, placing it at different distances from an infrared light source, and confirmed that it will gravitate towards the source at short distances. Its ability to do so depends on the light intensity, whereby stronger light sources allow the device to bend more towards the heat source.

Full turning of the vine by the PPSAs takes about 90 seconds. Strikingly, the device was even able to navigate around obstacles thanks to its inherent need to seek out light and heat sources.

Charles Xiao, a Ph. D. candidate in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, helped co-design the vine. He says he was surprised to see its responsiveness in even very low lighting. “Sunlight is about 1000 W/m2, and our robot has been shown to work at a fraction of solar intensity,” he explains, noting that a lot of comparable systems require illumination greater than that of one Sun.

Xiao says that the main strength of the automated vine is its simplicity and low cost to make. But more work is needed before it can hit the market—or makes its debut fighting fires. “It is slow to respond to light and heat signals and not yet designed for high temperature applications,” explains Xiao.

Therefore future prototypes would need better performance at high temperatures and ability to sense fires in order to be deployed in a real-world environment. Moving forward, Deglurkar says her team’s next steps include designing the actuators to be more selective to the wavelengths emitted by a fire, and developing actuators with a faster response time.

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