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.

IEEE RO-MAN 2023: 28–31 August 2023, BUSAN, SOUTH KOREA

IROS 2023: 1–5 October 2023, DETROIT

CLAWAR 2023: 2–4 October 2023, FLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL

Humanoids 2023: 12–14 December 2023, AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA

Enjoy today’s videos!

NASA’s Curiosity rover recently made its most challenging climb on Mars. Curiosity faced a steep, slippery slope on its journey up Mount Sharp, so rover drivers had to come up with a creative detour.

[ JPL ]

Wheel knees for ANYmal! We should learn more about this at IROS 2023 this fall.

[ RSL ]

Hard vision and manipulation problem? Solve it by making it less hard!

[ Covariant ]

Oh good, drones are learning to open doors now.

[ ASL ]

If you look closely, you’ll see that Sanctuary’s robot has fingernails, a detail that I always appreciate on robotic hands.

[ Sanctuary AI ]

This summer, the University of Mary Washington (UMW) in Fredericksburg, Va. became the official home for Virginia’s SMART Community STEM Camp. The camp hosted over 30 local high school students for a full week to learn about cybersecurity, e-sports, [and] the drone industry—as well as [participating in] a hands-on flying experience.

[ Skydio ]

O_o

[ Pollen Robotics ]

Agility CEO and Co-Founder Damion Shelton talks with Pras Velagapudi, VP of Innovation and Chief Architect, about the best methods for robot control. Comparing Reinforcement Learning to what we can now do using LLMs.

[ Agility Robotics ]

In this episode of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter speaks with John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI.

[ Robot Brains ]

This week, Geordie Rose (CEO) and Suzanne Gildert (CTO) continue the discussion about their co-authored position paper, now that it has been published. Titled “Building and Testing a General Intelligence Embodied in a Humanoid Robot,” the paper touches on metrics of intelligence, robotics, machine learning, and more. They round off by answering more audience questions.

[ Sanctuary AI ]