Source: OpenAI's DALL·E 2 with prompt "a hyperrealistic picture of a robot reading the news on a laptop at a coffee shop" Welcome to the 6th edition of Robo-Insight, a robotics news update! In this post, we are excited to share a range of new advancements in the field and highlight robots' progress in areas like medical assistance, prosthetics, robot flexibility, joint movement, work performance, AI design, and household cleanliness. In the medical world, researchers from Germany have developed a robotic system designed to help nurses relieve the physical strain associated with patient care. Their work explores how robotic technology can assist in such tasks by remotely anchoring patients in a lateral position. The results indicate that the system improved the working posture of nurses by an average of 11.93% and was rated as user-friendly.

In this paper, we introduce the humanoid robot DRACO 3 by providing a high-level description of its design and control. This robot features proximal actuation and mechanical artifacts to provide a high range of hip, knee and ankle motion. Its versatile design brings interesting problems as it requires a more elaborate control system to perform its motions. For this reason, we introduce a whole body controller (WBC) with support for rolling contact joints and show how it can be easily integrated into our previously presented open-source Planning and Control (PnC) framework. We then validate our controller experimentally on DRACO 3 by showing preliminary results carrying out two postural tasks. Lastly, we analyze the impact of the proximal actuation design and show where it stands in comparison to other adult-size humanoids.