Video Friday: Mars Chopper

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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.

ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA, GA

Enjoy today’s videos!

NASA’s Mars Chopper concept, shown in a design software rendering, is a more capable proposed follow-on to the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which arrived at the Red Planet in the belly of the Perseverance rover in February 2021. Chopper would be about the size of an SUV, with six rotors, each with six blades. It could be used to carry science payloads as large as 11 pounds (5 kilograms) distances of up to 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) each Martian day (or sol). Scientists could use Chopper to study large swaths of terrain in detail, quickly – including areas where rovers cannot safely travel.

We wrote an article about an earlier concept version of this thing a few years back if you’d like more detail about it.

[ NASA ]

Sanctuary AI announces its latest breakthrough with hydraulic actuation and precise in-hand manipulation, opening up a wide range of industrial and high value work tasks. Hydraulics have significantly more power density than electric actuators in terms of force and velocity. Sanctuary has invented miniaturized valves that are 50x faster and 6x cheaper than off the shelf hydraulic valves. This novel approach to actuation results in extremely low power consumption, unmatched cycle life and controllability that can fit within the size constraints of a human-sized hand and forearm.

[ Sanctuary AI ]

Clone’s Torso 2 is the most advanced android ever created with an actuated lumbar spine and all the corresponding abdominal muscles. Torso 2 dons a white transparent skin that encloses 910 muscle fibers animating its 164 degrees of freedom and includes 182 sensors for feedback control. These Torsos use pneumatic actuation with off-the-shelf valves that are noisy from the air exhaust. Our biped brings back our hydraulic design with custom liquid valves for a silent android. Legs are coming very soon!

[ Clone Robotics ]

Suzumori Endo Lab, Science Tokyo has developed a superman suit driven by hydraulic artificial muscles.

[ Suzumori Endo Lab ]

We generate physically correct video sequences to train a visual parkour policy for a quadruped robot, that has a single RGB camera without depth sensors. The robot generalizes to diverse, real-world scenes despite having never seen real-world data.

[ LucidSim ]

Seoul National University researchers proposed a gripper capable of moving multiple objects together to enhance the efficiency of pick-and-place processes, inspired from humans’ multi-object grasping strategy. The gripper can not only transfer multiple objects simultaneously but also place them at desired locations, making it applicable in unstructured environments.

[ Science Robotics ]

We present a bio-inspired quadruped locomotion framework that exhibits exemplary adaptability, capable of zero-shot deployment in complex environments and stability recovery on unstable terrain without the use of extra-perceptive sensors. Through its development we also shed light on the intricacies of animal locomotion strategies, in turn supporting the notion that findings within biomechanics and robotics research can mutually drive progress in both fields.

[ Paper authors from University of Leeds and University College London ]

Thanks, Chengxu!

Happy 60th birthday to MIT CSAIL!

[ MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ]

Yup, humanoid progress can move quickly when you put your mind to it.

[ MagicLab ]

The Sung Robotics Lab at UPenn is interested in advancing the state of the art in computational methods for robot design and deployment, with a particular focus on soft and compliant robots. By combining methods in computational geometry with practical engineering design, we develop theory and systems for making robot design and fabrication intuitive and accessible to the non-engineer.

[ Sung Robotics Lab ]

From now on I will open doors like the robot in this video.

[ Humanoids 2024 ]

Travel along a steep slope up to the rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater in this panoramic image captured by NASA’s Perseverance just days before the rover reached the top. The scene shows just how steep some of the slopes leading to the crater rim can be.