Best Robot Videos of the Week: Jibo High Five, Burger-Flipping Robot

A look at the week’s best robotics videos for your weekend viewing pleasure.

Welcome to a new feature on Robotics Trends where each Saturday we share our favorite robotics videos of the past week for your weekend viewing pleasure. If you come across a cool video, send it our way for consideration for next week’s roundup.

Atop this page is our favorite video of the week, and it comes from the folks at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Boston University who have built brain-controlled robots by using a person’s electroencephalography (EEG) brain signals. The human needs to wear an EEG cap that measures their brain signals.

The system looks for brain signals called “error-related potentials” (ErrPs) that are generated when the brain notices a mistake has been made. As the robot indicates which choice it plans to make, the system uses ErrPs to determine if the human agrees with the decision.

New Video from Jibo

Jibo checked in with a new video this week. The voice sounds a tad different than previous iterations, so it’s good to see things are still progressing for Jibo.

Robot breaks world record solving Rubik’s cube in 0.637 seconds

This six-armed robot solves a Rubik’s cube in 21 perfect moves in just 0.637 seconds. Here’s how the robot works, according to Guinness Book of World Records:

“The computer receives two pictures of the cube, identifies the color of each piece and calculates a solution with Tom Rokicki’s extremely fast implementation of Herbert Kociemba’s Two Phase Algorithm. The solution is then handed over to an Arduino-compatible Infineon AURIX microcontroller board which orchestrates the 21 moves of six high performance steppers, to turn each side of the cube.”

Meet Flippy the Burger-Flipping Robot

Flippy is an AI-powered kitchen assistant that its makers say is designed to work alongside humans. We’ll check back on that in a few years, as Flippy can flip burgers and place them on buns. Flippy uses cameras, sensors and deep learning software to locate ingredients. It also tracks the temperatures of the burgers as their cooking alerts humans when the burgers are done to put on the cheese and other toppings.

Airbus Pop.Up Self-Driving, Flying Car

Words can’t describe how badly we want Pop.Up to be rolled out.

What’s Inside STEM Robots

What’s Inside is a popular YouTube channel that cuts open random things to see, you guessed it, what’s inside. This week they chose to cut open the Dash Robot and a Darkside Ollie, two of the more popular STEM robots for kids. Fast forward to the 7-minute mark to see the destruction begin. We’re sad to see the robots treated this poorly, but at least the kids we’re exposed to coding.