2023 was the very best 12 months ever for robotics. I say this each 12 months, however yearly it’s true, as a result of the robotics subject appears to be all the time poised on the sting of adjusting completely every thing. Is 2024 going to be even higher? Will it’s the 12 months the place humanoids, or AI, or one thing else makes our lives superb? Possibly! Who is aware of! However both manner, it’ll be thrilling, and we’ll be right here because it occurs.
As we look ahead to 2024, right here’s a glance again at a few of our hottest tales of 2023. I hope you loved studying them as a lot as I loved writing them!
Roombas at the End of the World
My favourite story to report and write in 2023 was this story of the weird existence of the Roombas that stay and work on the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. A single image that I noticed whereas casually looking by the blog of a South Pole infrastructure engineer took me down a loopy rabbit gap of Antarctic hijinks, the place a small variety of people relied on some robotic vacuums to assist maintain themselves sane in essentially the most remoted place on Earth.
This Robot Could Be the Key to Empowering People With Disabilities
This story about Henry and Jane Evans, Willow Storage, and Hi there Robotic fantastically tied collectively one thing like a decade and a half of my historical past as a robotics journalist. I acquired to know the oldsters at Willow early on in my profession, and noticed the PR2 performing some superb work, together with with Henry and Jane. However the PR2 was by no means going to be a sensible robotic for anybody, and it took the expertise and fervour of Hi there Robotic to design the {hardware} and software program to make PR2’s guarantees into one thing real-world helpful.
What Flight 50 Means for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is at the moment trying ahead to its seventieth flight, which is astonishing for a expertise demo that was solely actually anticipated to fly 5 occasions. Arguably, this little helicopter is likely one of the most excessive autonomous techniques that people have ever constructed. I’ve written a bunch about Ginny over the previous couple of years and talked to a number of totally different members of her group. However Flight 50 was a particular milestone, and on this interview, Ingenuity group lead Teddy Tzanetos talks about why.
It’s Totally Fine for Humanoid Robots to Fall Down
We’re going to be seeing much more robots strolling round over the subsequent 12 months, and that additionally means we’re going to be seeing much more robots failing to stroll round in a technique or one other. Movies of robots falling are likely to go loopy on social media, however most people who see them gained’t have any thought concerning the underlying context. On this article, two of the businesses with essentially the most expertise constructing humanoids (Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics) clarify why robots falling down is definitely not an enormous deal in any respect.
Watch This Giant Chopstick Robot Handle Boxes With Ease
It’s not usually {that a} robotic is ready to mix a very novel design with an instantly sensible business utility, however Dextrous Robotics was in a position to do it with their large chopstick field manipulator, and our readers definitely appreciated it. Containers are a compelling near-term utility for robots, however the go-to manipulation approach that we see time and again is suction. Dextrous’ method is completely distinctive, and it looks as if a gimmick—till you see it in motion.
Superhuman Speed: How Autonomous Drones Beat the Best Human Racers
People can do some fairly unbelievable issues, and watching a human demonstrating some ability that they’re the precise greatest on this planet at is fascinating—particularly in the event that they’re prone to shedding that high spot to a robotic. This race between world champion drone racers and autonomous drones from ETH Zurich passed off in 2022, however I needed to anticipate the underlying analysis to be printed earlier than I used to be allowed to inform the entire story.
How Disney Packed Big Emotion Into a Little Robot
It’s refreshing to jot down about Disney’s robots, as a result of considerably uniquely, they’re designed for the first objective of bringing people pleasure. Disney goes about this methodically, although, and we’re all the time excited to have the ability to share the analysis underlying every thing that they do. These are a few of my favourite tales to inform, the place there’s a brilliant cool robotic that simply will get cooler when the folks behind it clarify the way it does what it does.
Stowing Is a “Beautiful Problem” That Amazon Is Solving With Robots
Robotics is stuffed with issues which might be laborious, and a type of issues is stowing—the method of packing gadgets into bins in a warehouse. Stowing is the alternative of choosing, which is one thing that warehouse robots are getting fairly good at, however stowing can be far more troublesome. “For me, it’s laborious, however it’s not too laborious,” Amazon senior supervisor of utilized sciences Aaron Parness informed us for this text. “It’s on the reducing fringe of what’s possible for robots, and it’s loopy enjoyable to work on.”
Your Robotic Avatar Is Almost Ready
As a lot as we love robots, people are nonetheless a lot, significantly better at a whole lot of stuff. One factor that people are notably dangerous at, although, is being bodily current in far-off locations. The Avatar XPrize competitors mixed human brains with robotic embodiments, and the outcomes had been actually significantly better than anticipated. With the correct {hardware} and the correct interface, the competitors confirmed that people and robots could make a improbable group.
All of the Humanoid Robots
And at last, our high robotics protection space for 2023 was humanoid robots. Or, extra particularly, humanoid robots which might be (supposedly) poised to enter the labor power. The final time we had this a lot humanoid robot protection was in all probability in 2015 surrounding the DARPA Robotics Problem Finals, and it’s not like there’s been a gradual improve or something—humanoids simply went completely bonkers in 2023, with one thing like a dozen firms creating human-scale bipedal robots with near-term business aspirations.