NEWSLETTER
I mentioned taking a sabbatical from the newsletter a couple of weeks ago. It's finally happening! This was quite a run, not missing a single issue for so many years. We've seen quite a bit of growth, too! At the beginning of April, we had 15,000 subscribers combined across LinkedIn and E-mail. Two months later, we are at ~16,500. A 10% organic growth in two months sounds exciting, so why take a break? To say the last couple of months were busy is an understatement. I've been going through some personal changes (all for the better, fortunately!), and finding four to six hours a week to prepare a newsletter issue has been quite hard.
In the past couple of months, I've been quite bugged by a need for more automation in my workflow, a suboptimal signup journey, huge friction for advertisers, and a lack of automation for reporting. On top of that, the design of the e-mail newsletter and the website could use a do-over.
So, what comes next is I will make sure to finish Baldur's Gate 3. Once I do, I'll think about this project's future and start implementing some changes. And when I'm done, the Weekly Robotics 2.0 will be glorious! I actually can't wait to get to this place. If you have any feedback or ideas on what I could improve, please feel free to let me know. If you would like to connect or see some of the highlighted robotics projects I'll undoubtedly come across soon, feel free to connect on LinkedIn.
Finally, some thank-yous are in order. Rodrigo has been handling the Publication of the Week section for years now, combing over through interesting papers week over week and adding huge value to this newsletter. We've also built a small WR Slack community with Patreon members. Even though I wasn't as active as I wanted there, I enjoyed some of our conversations and hope we will continue using this medium. Last but not least, thank you for reading this newsletter! Knowing that people like you followed my work greatly motivated me to keep going. So, thanks for all the fish (so far), and I'm already looking forward to being back!
Low Latency Automotive Vision with Event Cameras (Nature, 2024)
Researchers at the University of Zurich are looking into bringing together event and the RGB cameras to get the best of the both worlds from these two modalities. The results seem very good, and I hope we will see more developments in the event camera space.
Hype Robot Rocks Out With The Twitch Chat
Do you remember the famous Twitch Plays Pokemon? Well, some streamers have a robot that can respond to the Twitch chat, and you can learn about it from the featured page.
building the world’s WORST camera viewfinder (probably)
I love this kind of DIY small projects that solve interesting problems. The video is very detailed at 31 minutes long and the project repository contains some valuable snippets and links to explore.
A Robot on A Mission
This is an exciting project called MAMA BEAR (Mechanics of Additively Manufactured Architectures Bayesian Experimental Autonomous Researcher) from Boston University. It’s an assembly line, where a 3D printer prints a shape which is then automatically fed to a press for a compression test. Then, the system optimizes the structure, and the process starts again automatically, using a Bayesian process to improve the design.
Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy
“We introduce Octo octo, our ongoing effort for building open-source, widely applicable generalist policies for robotic manipulation. The Octo model is a transformer-based diffusion policy, pretrained on 800k robot episodes from the Open X-Embodiment dataset. It supports flexible task and observation definitions and can be quickly finetuned to new observation and action spaces. We are introducing two initial versions of Octo, Octo-Small (27M parameters) and Octo-Base (93M parameters)”.
DeepMind’s New Robots: An AI Revolution!
Remember the DeppMind’s soccer (or football, depending on where you are located) paper that I featured back in the issue 295. Two Minute Papers did a video on them, which is an easy-to-digest way to go through this work.
A robot will soon try to remove melted nuclear fuel from Japan’s destroyed Fukushima reactor
Developments for Fukushima decommissioning are well underway. This piece describes a manipulator that will be lowered into the Unit 2 reactor at Fukushima and remove less than 3 grams of debris in the tests.
Mitsubishi Electric Recognized by GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS for fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube
Mitsubishi Electric beat the world record for the fastest robot to solve Rubik’s cube by 0.38 seconds. That’s fast!
Publication of the Week - A Glimpse into History and Statistics
For the final publication, I wanted to do something different. This publication of the week presents some stats around itself. The first paper of the week dedicated section dated back to issue #2 (Aug. 2018), and only on issue #13 (Nov. 2018) it got the Publication of the Week name. Since then, more than 250 publications have been featured, and probably thousands of authors presented, bringing all different robotics-related fields. I started writing the publications in issue #116 (Nov. 2020), and since then, with a few breaks, this become routine for my Sundays. I couldn’t be more grateful for Mat letting me be part of this as it opened a box of pandora of opportunities and connected me with amazing people. If you, like me, will miss this newsletter during the sabbatical, please make sure to add me on LinkedIn so we can chat about robotics. - Rodrigo
Events
- ISMR (Medical Robotics) 2024: Jun 03 - Jun 05, 2024. Atlanta, Georgia, United States
- ICUAS (UAVs) 2024: Jun 04 - Jun 07, 2024. Chania, Crete, Greece
- AIRA Challenge 2024: Jun 10 - Jun 14, 2024 (ddl: Jan 07, 2024). Frankfurt am Main, Germany
- Energy Drone & Robotics Coalition 2024: Jun 10 - Jun 12, 2024. Houston, United States
- ROSCON France 2024: Jun 19 - Jun 20, 2024. Nantes, France
- Robotics: Science and Systems 2024: Jul 15 - Jul 19, 2024. Delft, The Netherlands
- RoboCup 2024: Jul 17 - Jul 22, 2024. Eindhoven, Netherlands
- IRoC-U2024: Aug 05 - Aug 06, 2024 (ddl: Jan 15, 2024). Bengaluru, India
- BioRob 2024: Sep 01 - Sep 04, 2024. Heidelberg, Germany
- Commercial UAV Expo: Sep 03 - Sep 05, 2024. Las Vegas, United States of America
For more robotic events, check out our event page.