Video Friday: Lunar Transport

Aug 17, 2023

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Enjoy today's videos!

LATTICE is an undergrad project from Caltech that's developing a modular robotic transportation system for the lunar surface that uses autonomous rovers to set up a sort of cable car system to haul things like ice out of deep craters to someplace more useful. The prototype is fully functional, and pretty cool to watch in action.

We’re told that the team will be targeting a full system demonstration deploying across a "crater" on Earth this time next year. As to what those quotes around "crater" mean, your guess is as good as mine.

[ Caltech ]

Thanks, Lucas!

Happy World Cocktail Day from Flexiv!

[ Flexiv ]

Here's what Optimus has been up to lately.

As per usual, the robot is moderately interesting, but it's probably best to mostly just ignore Musk.

[ Tesla ]

[ Paper ]

Thanks, Poramate!

Congratulations to ANYbotics on their $50 million Series B!

And from 10 years ago (!) at ICRA 2013, here is video I took of StarlETH, one of ANYmal's ancestors.

[ ANYbotics ]

[ DigiForest ]

The Robotics and Perception Group at UZH will be presenting some new work on agile autonomous high-speed flight through cluttered environments at ICRA 2023.

[ Paper ]

[ Sanctuary AI ]

[ Cybathlon ]