#Anki overdrive fast and furious youtube series#

And like Sphero before it, the offering borrows plot points from its cinematic inspiration, utilizing aspects of the film to build games around the storyline. The kits will ship with two cars, based on vehicles driven in the film by Vin Diesel and the Rock. We see this partnership as an opportunity to introduce Anki Overdrive to a whole new audience of racing enthusiasts.” “It is one of the most successful and enduring action franchises of all time, and one that has amassed a huge following globally. “For younger players, Fast & Furious is an aspirational brand,” Tappeiner says. It also thinks that the films are a solid match for its demographic. And certainly this marks a different approach than the one it took for Cozmo when it hired a number of Dreamworks and Pixar animators to concoct an original (albeit Wall-E-esque) story for its toy robot. It’s also an undeniable bit of synergy for a company that makes racing cars.Ĭo-founder Hanns Tappeiner tells me that the company has been searching for a good franchising team up for Overdrive. More to the point for Anki, however, it presents an opportunity for the line to have its highest profile platform since it made an early stage debut at an Apple event. The notable tonal shift of the films does, perhaps, put them in line with the higher end of Anki’s tween and younger teen demographic.

#Anki overdrive fast and furious youtube series#

That’s more of a byproduct of later films as the series jump the proverbial shark (or submarine), moving from car racing heist film to all-out action cartoon. Nor does it have the longstanding merchandising cache.

The deal echoes the serendipitous team up between Disney and Sphero that brought the world the wildly popular BB-8 toy - though the Fast & Furious franchise doesn’t have quite the same sort of all-ages appeal as a Star Wars. In September, the company will be launching Anki Overdrive: Fast & Furious Edition, a racing kit based on the film series. The hardware startup’s robotic race car line Overdrive is getting a pretty high profile promotional boost in the form one of the most profitable franchises in film history. By learning how the environment can change over time, we can enable robots to operate in the complex, cluttered environments of our daily lives.Before its adorable little robot Cozmo arrived on the scene, Anki was in the business of making smart toy cars. I will show how we can apply this idea of understanding changes to a number of robotics problems, such as object segmentation, tracking, and velocity estimation for autonomous driving as well as various object manipulation tasks. I argue that, in order to handle these variations, robots need to learn to understand how the world changes over time: how the environment can change as a result of the robot’s own actions or from the actions of other agents in the environment. One reason for these limitation is that current methods for robotic perception and control tend to break down when faced with occlusions, viewpoint changes, poor lighting, unmodeled dynamics, and other challenging but common situations that occur when robots are placed in the real world. Robots today are typically confined to operate in relatively simple, controlled environments. This week’s CMU Robotics Institute Seminar comes from assistant professor David Held, on Robots Learning to Understand Environmental Changes: Via computer controls, the autonomous unit is capable of performing motion tasks in almost any design. It was tested in a variety of robotic applications where it showed significant expansion-contraction ability, being capable of expansion up to 900% when electrically heated to 80☌. The solution combined the elastic properties and extreme volume change attributes of other material systems while also being easy to fabricate, low cost, and made of environmentally safe materials.Īfter being 3D-printed into the desired shape, the artificial muscle was electrically actuated using a thin resistive wire and low-power (8V). To achieve an actuator with high strain and high stress coupled with low density, lead author of the study Aslan Miriyev, a postdoctoral researcher in the Creative Machines lab, used a silicone rubber matrix with ethanol distributed throughout in micro-bubbles. The new material has a strain density (expansion per gram) that is 15 times larger than natural muscle, and can lift 1000 times its own weight. A group in the Creative Machines lab led by Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical engineering, has developed a 3D-printable synthetic soft muscle, a one-of-a-kind artificial active tissue with intrinsic expansion ability that does not require an external compressor or high voltage equipment as previous muscles required. Researchers at Columbia Engineering have solved a long-standing issue in the creation of untethered soft robots whose actions and movements can help mimic natural biological systems.