Weekly Robotics #320

Issue 320

Over the last couple of months, most of the robotic news I've come across has focused on new humanoid robots and vision-language-action models. I still manage to find projects that are outside these two categories, but it has been increasingly difficult. I will still feature general robot-related things to keep you posted, but if you think I missed anything interesting in robotics happening, please do let me know!

SPICE-HL3 Single-Photon, Inertial & Stereo dataset for Exploration of High-Latitude Lunar Landscapes

SPICE-HL3 Single-Photon, Inertial & Stereo dataset for Exploration of High-Latitude Lunar Landscapes cover

One of the perks of my job at Foxglove is that I get to play with robotic data. This dataset jumped the queue! It simulated a lunar rover in various lighting conditions. In the dataset, you will find inertial sensors, wheel odometry, and multiple types of cameras. The most unusual modality is the SPAD512 single-photon camera that captures binary images that can be integrated to create higher bit-depth images (sounds like magic to me). To learn more about this dataset, check out this paper.

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Awesome Robotics Conferences and Schools List

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you probably saw our event list at the bottom of every issue. Davide Torielli has a more comprehensive list that seems to encompass every robotic conference known to exist.

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UAIbot

UAIbot cover

Beginner-friendly web-based simulator for interactive robotics learning and research. Click and drag on the simulation below to interact with it in 3D!

To top it all off, this project comes with a course on robotic manipulation that looks to be very high quality.

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How can we get enough data to train a robot GPT?

Chris Paxton invites you to a thought experiment for creating a massive robot dataset with 2 trillion tokens. Enjoy!

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There Are Better Lego-Compatible Universal Joints Out There

There Are Better Lego-Compatible Universal Joints Out There cover

If anyone is still building robots from LEGO, this might be an interesting video to check out. Apparently, there is a world of hardened replacements for LEGO parts, in this case, universal joints that can withstand 10x the torque of the original parts.

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DexWrist: A Robotic Wrist for Dynamic Manipulation

DexWrist: A Robotic Wrist for Dynamic Manipulation cover

MIT Researchers created an interesting robotic wrist for agile, dynamic manipulation. The website indicates that a BOM and a tutorial will be released at a later stage. It’ll be interesting to follow this work as it evolves.

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Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

K-Scale Labs builds open-source humanoid robots. They created a launch-HN thread that contains an interesting Q&A. I highly recommend it!

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Events

For more robotic events, check out our event page.

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