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!): HRI 2021 – March 8-11, 2021 – [Online] RoboSoft 2021 – April 12-16, 2021 – [Online] Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

A seminal milestone in the drone industry, American Robotics now meets the safety requirements needed to make drones scalable for widespread commercial use. Source: Robotics Tomorrow

Contemporary robots can move quickly. “The motors are fast, and they’re powerful,” says Sabrina Neuman. Source: Phys Org – Robotics

As part of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future’s series of research briefs, Professor Thomas Malone, Professor Daniela Rus, and Robert Laubacher collaborated on “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work,” a brief that provides a comprehensive overview of AI today and what lies at the AI frontier.  The authors delve into the question of how work will change with AI and provide policy prescriptions that speak to different parts of society. Thomas Malone is director […]

Pavement deterioration takes many forms. It can manifest in almost imperceptible flaws, like surface roughness, to much more evident distresses, such as web-like alligator cracks. While the causes of these distresses are numerous, one cause, in particular, can impose an intractable burden: the weight of a vehicle. In a prize-winning paper, Fengdi Guo, a PhD candidate at the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, helps clarify the layered relationship between traffic weight and pavement deterioration. The machine learning models he proposes have […]

Researchers have developed an automated way to design customized hardware that speeds up a robot’s operation. The system, called robomorphic computing, accounts for the robot’s physical layout in suggesting an optimized hardware architecture. Source: Science Daily – Robotics