Video Friday: One-Legged Hopper, Mini Humanoid, and Robot Heads

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. "Current and previous single-legged hopping robots are energetically tethered and lack portability. Here, we present the design and control of an untethered, energetically autonomous single-legged hopping robot. The thrust-producing mechanism of the robot's leg is an actuated prismatic joint, called a linear elastic actuator in parallel (LEAP). The LEAP mechanism comprises a voice coil actuator in parallel with two compression springs, which gives our robot passive compliance. An actuated gimbal hip joint is realized by two standard servomotors. To control the robot, we adapt Raibert's hopping controller, and find we can maintain balance roughly in-place for up to approx. If you have a robot that runs ROS and makes maps, you've likely been using GMapping, which gives you very GMapping-y results. Google has just released its own open source ROS-based real-time 2D/3D SLAM library called Cartographer, and it already has support for PR2, TurtleBot, Revo LDS (aka Neato's lidar), and even TRI's HSR: POW! For more details, read this 2016 ICRA paper. "Toyota Motor Corporation plans to launch sales of its compact and cuddlesome'Kirobo Mini' communication partner through Toyota vehicle dealers across Japan in 2017.