Robot Videos: Mars Helicopter, Sanctuary AI, and More

Video Friday is your weekly collection of superior robotics movies, collected by your folks at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We additionally put up a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics occasions for the following few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

ICRA 2025: 19–23 Might 2025, ATLANTA, GA

Take pleasure in right this moment’s movies!

NASA’s Mars Chopper idea, proven in a design software program rendering, is a extra succesful proposed follow-on to the company’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which arrived on the Pink Planet within the stomach of the Perseverance rover in February 2021. Chopper could be in regards to the measurement of an SUV, with six rotors, every with six blades. It might be used to hold science payloads as giant as 11 kilos (5 kilograms) distances of as much as 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) every Martian day (or sol). Scientists might use Chopper to review giant swaths of terrain intimately, rapidly – together with areas the place rovers can’t safely journey.

We wrote an article about an earlier concept version of this factor just a few years again when you’d like extra element about it.

[ NASA ]

Sanctuary AI proclaims its newest breakthrough with hydraulic actuation and exact in-hand manipulation, opening up a variety of business and excessive worth work duties. Hydraulics have considerably extra energy density than electrical actuators by way of pressure and velocity. Sanctuary has invented miniaturized valves which can be 50x sooner and 6x cheaper than off the shelf hydraulic valves. This novel strategy to actuation ends in extraordinarily low energy consumption, unmatched cycle life and controllability that may match inside the measurement constraints of a human-sized hand and forearm.

[ Sanctuary AI ]

Clone’s Torso 2 is probably the most superior android ever created with an actuated lumbar backbone and all of the corresponding stomach muscular tissues. Torso 2 dons a white clear pores and skin that encloses 910 muscle fibers animating its 164 levels of freedom and contains 182 sensors for suggestions management. These Torsos use pneumatic actuation with off-the-shelf valves which can be noisy from the air exhaust. Our biped brings again our hydraulic design with customized liquid valves for a silent android. Legs are coming very quickly!

[ Clone Robotics ]

Suzumori Endo Lab, Science Tokyo has developed a superman swimsuit pushed by hydraulic synthetic muscular tissues.

[ Suzumori Endo Lab ]

We generate bodily appropriate video sequences to coach a visible parkour coverage for a quadruped robotic, that has a single RGB digital camera with out depth sensors. The robotic generalizes to numerous, real-world scenes regardless of having by no means seen real-world information.

[ LucidSim ]

Seoul Nationwide College researchers proposed a gripper able to transferring a number of objects collectively to boost the effectivity of pick-and-place processes, impressed from people’ multi-object greedy technique. The gripper cannot solely switch a number of objects concurrently but in addition place them at desired areas, making it relevant in unstructured environments.

[ Science Robotics ]

We current a bio-inspired quadruped locomotion framework that reveals exemplary adaptability, able to zero-shot deployment in advanced environments and stability restoration on unstable terrain with out using extra-perceptive sensors. By way of its improvement we additionally make clear the intricacies of animal locomotion methods, in flip supporting the notion that findings inside biomechanics and robotics analysis can mutually drive progress in each fields.

[ Paper authors from University of Leeds and University College London ]

Thanks, Chengxu!

Blissful sixtieth birthday to MIT CSAIL!

[ MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ]

Yup, humanoid progress can transfer rapidly whenever you put your thoughts to it.

[ MagicLab ]

The Sung Robotics Lab at UPenn is serious about advancing the cutting-edge in computational strategies for robotic design and deployment, with a selected deal with comfortable and compliant robots. By combining strategies in computational geometry with sensible engineering design, we develop concept and methods for making robotic design and fabrication intuitive and accessible to the non-engineer.

[ Sung Robotics Lab ]

Any more I’ll open doorways just like the robotic on this video.

[ Humanoids 2024 ]

Journey alongside a steep slope as much as the rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater on this panoramic picture captured by NASA’s Perseverance simply days earlier than the rover reached the highest. The scene reveals simply how steep among the slopes resulting in the crater rim may be.