Weekly Robotics #342
Today's issue is on the shorter side, as I'm emerging from the holiday blues and wrapping up a secret project I recently teased on LinkedIn. I expect to be fully in the zone next week. Happy New Year, everyone!
Vision-Language-Action, explained with a minimum of math and jargon
Hafeez Jimoh made an excellent blog post explaining the VLAs in simple terms. If you still didn’t have a chance to look into this concept, this blog post might be a great starting point.
Serial Bus Servo Motors (2025)
Aditya Kamath made an excellent blog post about his refactoring efforts of the SCServo_Linux library to control Feetech servo motors.
Why Chopped Carbon Fiber In FDM Prints Is A Contaminant
The carbon fiber reinforced(??) filaments might actually be worse for your prints than regular PLA. Why? Find out in the video featured in this article (super enjoyable, I highly recommend it).
URDF Designer
OpenLegged created this open-source URDF designer that hopefully can bring some speed into your development efforts. You can find the source code for this work on GitHub.
What you NEED to know before touching a video file
Working at Foxglove, I often need to work with video streams, and even though this blog post is about video files, you might still find some valuable insights into working with video streams.
Robot kicks human
It turns out that if you work on humanoid robots using MOCAP, you ought to be very careful. I feel bad for laughing at this the other day.
Events
- FOSDEM 2026: Jan 31 - Feb 01, 2026. Brussels, Belgium
- Embedded World 2026: Mar 10 - Mar 12, 2026. Nuremberg, Germany
- European Robotics Forum: Mar 23 - Mar 27, 2026. Stavanger, Norway
- Commercial UAV Forum: Apr 22 - Apr 23, 2026. Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Open Hardware Summit: May 22 - May 23, 2026. Berlin, Germany
- ICRA 2026: Jun 01 - Jun 05, 2026. Vienna, Austria
- 2026 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: Jun 22 - Jun 24, 2026. Houston, Texas, United States of America
- Robotics: Science and Systems: Jul 13 - Jul 16, 2026. Sydney, Australia
- Open Source Summit: Oct 07 - Oct 09, 2026. Prague, Czechia
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
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