Video Friday: Massive Manipulator, Soft Exoskeleton, and Jetpack Augmentation

Tomorrow, at a ridiculously early hour, we're flying to Chicago to cover the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). As we've mentioned, IROS 2014 is going to be unlike any IEEE conference that we've covered so far. Instead of eight or ten or twelve tracks of researchers giving PowerPoint presentations nearly non-stop, simultaneously, from what feels like 4 a.m. to 9 p.m., slowly killing us (with, um, happiness) over the course of three days, now everything is interactive sessions. This means that instead of relentless PowerPoint in overcrowded rooms, there will be a bunch of roboticists with tables, monitors, and (we hope) robots that we can actually, you know, interact with. It's a bit of a risk, since IROS has never tried this before, but we're hoping that it'll result in more time for us to talk to people, and more chances for the people actually doing the interesting robot stuff to tell us what they're up to directly.