As quadrotors take on an increasingly diverse range of roles, researchers often need to develop new hardware platforms tailored for specific tasks, introducing significant engineering overhead. In this article, we introduce the UniQuad series, a unified and versatile quadrotor platform series that offers high flexibility to adapt to a wide range of common tasks, excellent customizability for advanced demands, and easy maintenance in case of crashes. This project is fully open-source at https://hkust-aerial-robotics.github.io/UniQuad.

The third step entails many repetitive and menial tasks, such as inserting parts and creating joints between them. Especially when comparing and implementing design alternatives, this issue is compounded. We propose a use-case agnostic knowledge-driven framework to automate the implementation step. In particular, the framework catalogues the acquired knowledge and the design concept, as well as utilizes Combinatory Logic Synthesis to synthesize concrete design alternatives. This minimizes the effort required to create designs, allowing the design space to be thoroughly explored. We implemented the framework as a plugin for the CAD software Autodesk Fusion 360. We conducted a case study in which robotic arms were synthesized from a set of 28 modular components. Based on the case study, the applicability of the framework is analyzed and discussed.

Source: AvularSince its founding six years ago, Eindhoven, Netherlands-based Avular has built aerial drones for industrial and agricultural clients. Business was good, but for the first several years, there was a frustrating limitation: "We started to get a lot of customers asking, 'Can I do this with a drone? Can I do that with a drone?'" said Albert Maas, co-founder and CEO of Avular. "We often had to say, 'I'm sorry, it's too complicated to take this very niche, dedicated system and build something else with it.'" Two years ago, Avular decided to flip that script.

Written by Dr. Kirk Borne I recently learned about the rule of least power in computer programming. The principle expresses the notion that one should use the least powerful programming language to code a given task, while still meeting the business requirements. It occurred to me that a similar concept can apply to data analytics tasks, specifically in data science modeling using machine learning algorithms. In this post, this "doctor of analytics" prescribes this approach for your next analytics project. We have often defined analytics as the products of data science activities that apply machine learning and statistical algorithms on data in order to achieve one or more business requirements.

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 few 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. We wrote about HAMR back in February, and it's now grown some cute lil' footpads that allow it to walk on water, and also sink (on purpose). In nature, cockroaches can survive underwater for up to 30 minutes.