It is my pleasure to welcome Jiga as a sponsor of Weekly Robotics! Jiga is built for hardware teams who want the speed of digital manufacturing with the trust of a long-term supplier relationship. Direct communication with vetted manufacturers, reliable capacity from prototype to production, no black box. Exactly what you need when you're iterating fast and scaling real robots. Check out their recent ad on what happens when you trust a black box with your custom parts.
In other news, the Robotics and Simulation devroom that we organized at FOSDEM was a huge success. It was great to see so many amazing talks and talk to the community. The video recordings are trickling in; you can already find some of them in the schedule.
mjlab: A Lightweight Framework for GPU-Accelerated Robot Learning
We present mjlab, a lightweight, open-source framework for robot learning that combines GPU-accelerated simulation with composable environments and minimal setup friction. mjlab adopts the manager-based API introduced by Isaac Lab, where users compose modular building blocks for observations, rewards, and events, and pairs it with MuJoCo Warp for GPU-accelerated physics. The result is a framework installable with a single command, requiring minimal dependencies, and providing direct access to native MuJoCo data structures. mjlab ships with reference implementations of velocity tracking, motion imitation, and manipulation tasks.
To learn more about this work, check ou mjlab’s repo.
Meet Sprout
Fauna Robotics announced their humanoid robot the other day and it feels… different. It feels as if the robot isn’t trying to be human, which I think is a great direction for general-purpose builds. The team also prepared a great technical publication on their architecture, which I highly recommend.
BotBrain: Modular open-source brain for ROS2 robots
BotBrain is an open-source attempt at building a reusable “brain” for robots. The core of this work consists of three modules: an NVIDIA-based hardware setup with Realsense Depth cameras, a web dashboard for fleet management and visualization, and a set of ROS packages.
Benjie’s Humanoid Olympics: Part II
Benjie continues to set challenges for general robots, this time coming up with a series of tasks that can be difficult even for humans. Since all previous medals were snatched in 3 months, I wonder how long these ones will take.
Self-driving cars, drones hijacked by custom road signs
If you happen to be using DriveLM or CloudTrack in your pipelines, you might want to rethink your architecture. The researchers behind CHAI (paper) convincingly injected commands into some pipelines using these tools and tricked robots into performing actions based on text in images. The one interesting case was a rubble-filled roof with the text “safe to land” being interpreted as a safe landing spot.
Artificial intelligence in manufacturing rocket parts
This is more of a teaser article that describes three manufacturing methods I have never encountered: shot peen forming, friction stir welding, and automated fibre placement, and describes how the European Space Agency is looking to extend these methods with Artificial Intelligence.
Waabi raises $1B to advance autonomous trucks and robotaxis
More AI-enabled vehicles are coming to the roads, as Waabi today said it has closed an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round to accelerate its commercialization of autonomous trucks. The company has also secured additional investment from Uber Technologies Inc. and said the strategic partnership will support its expansion into robotaxis.
Our Sponsors
- Foxglove develops an integrated platform for robotics visualization.
- HelloRobo distils robotics tech into simple, usable interfaces
- Jiga connects hardware teams directly with vetted manufacturers for reliable capacity from prototype to production, combining the speed of digital manufacturing with the trust of a long-term supplier relationship.
Events
- 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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