
Innovative robotics developments of the past year - dnetesn
https://techxplore.com/news/2019-01-ten-robotics-year.html
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msadowski
If you've enjoyed this article then you might also like my compilation of what
I think were the most important/interesting news or projects that I've found
about in 2018: [http://weeklyrobotics.com/weekly-
robotics-2018](http://weeklyrobotics.com/weekly-robotics-2018)

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genericone
Does someone have a list that is more about actual innovations and less about
products not even developed in 2018?

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Eridrus
sim2real research for robotics is super exciting.

For all the work Boston Dynamics has done making carefully hand-tuned
locomotion controllers, recent work has made that basically learnable in
simulation, and then transferable to the real world:
[https://youtu.be/aTDkYFZFWug](https://youtu.be/aTDkYFZFWug)

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jcims
That’s _super_ interesting, thank you for sharing.

Lex Fridman has a recording of the CEO of Boston Dynamics on his podcast. It
was from a lecture Q&A at MIT I believe. And in there he talks about the
control challenges as though they are likely the bigger problem to tackle vs.
the mechanical (which seems obvious on one hand but interesting to hear him
say).

In an off-handed comment he said how hooking the mechanics up to a person (so
they could run the robot in a fly by wire way) shows just how fast the machine
is and how much the software/sensor/controller stacks are slowing them down.

He also discusses their simulation capabilities a bit. It definitely sounds
like there is some software training going on, but this obviously cranks the
fidelity up quite a bit.

Would be cool to see how they train it.

