Weekly Robotics #309

By Mat Sadowski
Issue 309

When I emerged from my sabbatical a couple of weeks back, I thought I would focus on the technical content rather than the business news, but the two business news I’m sharing today felt too big to keep them to myself. So, moving on, some business news might be back on the menu!

Making an omnidirectional ROS2 robot. No talking, no music. Just building.

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I actually love this video, and the title is spot on. If I didn’t have a six-month-old requiring constant attention, I would put on some good tea, relax on the sofa and binge it.

Binner Makes Workshop Parts Organization Easy

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This article introduces Binner, an open-source inventory management software that you can self-host. The software will help you organize your parts and track inventory.

Vision Language Action Models (VLA) & Policies for Robots

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Jaykumaran from LearnOpenCV wrote this piece that covers Vision Language Action Models. I found this article to be an excellent introduction to these models, and it contains a healthy-mix of proprietary stuff like Helix, and open-source (e.g. π0).

Hugging Face buys a humanoid robotics startup

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I didn’t have Hugging Face becoming a hardware company in my 2025 bingo card, yet here we are. Congratulations to everyone involved! It sounds like a great match.

AI dev platform Hugging Face has acquired Pollen Robotics, a robotics startup based in France, for an undisclosed amount. Wired reports that Hugging Face plans to sell Pollen’s humanoid robot, Reachy 2, and let developers download and suggest improvements to its code.

ICRA2025 Paper List

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Frankie Dong Li created this repository listing all papers that will be presented at ICRA2025. Be cautious, your scroll wheel might get hot when you go through the list!

BiDexHand

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This is the open source release of the MSR Dexterous Hand V3, a robotic hand featuring 16 degrees of freedom. It utilizes a cable-and-pulley system, with 15 servos arranged in N configuration to drive its 15 joints with tendon.

To see this project in action, check out this YouTube video.

ABB plans to spin off its robotics division as a separately listed company

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ABB announced today that it will launch a process to propose to its Annual General Meeting 2026 to decide on a 100 percent spin-off of its Robotics division. The intention is for the business to start trading as a separately listed company during the second quarter of 2026.

awesome-robot-descriptions

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This repository contains a curated list of robot descriptions in URDF, Xacro or MJCF formats. In the repo, you will find all kinds of robotic platforms. From manipulators, through bipeds, humanoid and wheeled robots.

Isaac Sim in under half an hour

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Josh from the channel Articulated Robotics created this neat tutorial on NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab. I thoroughly enjoyed this video, and I think this is a great entry point if you’d like to start using these tools and if your computer is beefy enough that it can handle it.

Events

For more robotic events, check out our event page.