Part of the reason for the long hiatus from posting is that I’ve been supremely busy with a few things. One of them is that I’ve cofounded a robotics company – Ghost Robotics!

You’re probably wondering what the name is about. One of the main things that sets our actuators apart is that they are transparent. No, that doesn’t mean that you can see through them, but rather that the motors can feel forces applied on them by the world. This is important, for things like reacting to perturbations, like when the robot leg touches the ground (demo of that in the gif below), or for safety if the motors are running near humans. And, well, ghosts are transparent?

Minitaur

The robot that I’ve spent most of my time working on since last summer is called Minitaur. We’ve written one journal paper about its design and the open-access preprint is now up.

Official Ghost video:

The video above got picked up by a lot of media (at least for the time for Ghost Robotics). However, everyone does now assume our robots can climb fences, so maybe we shouldn’t have put that so out there.

Some of my own stupid clips from 2016: