Lately, I've been playing HARD with LLMs for robotics-related coding. The pace of development of these tools is crazy. I feel like if I'm not paying attention for two weeks, it becomes hard to catch up on the latest state of the art, and these things feel like such a productivity multiplier that it's hard to go back from using them.
Ray: the framework behind scalable VLA training & fine-tuning [Sponsored]
VLAs power embodied AI, but fine-tuning them is a distributed systems challenge. Ray is used for NVIDIA GROOT 1.6, Physical Intelligence’s π models, and by robotics teams like Bonsai Labs to scale VLA pipelines with distributed multimodal data processing, parallel data loading, and fault-tolerant multi-node GPU training – on any cloud. Learn why.
Electric motor scaling laws and inertia in robot actuators
This is a very detailed blog post from Ben Katz, of the famous Mini Cheetah, about actuators and inertia. The post mentions this is one of many upcoming write-ups by Ben. I’m really looking forward to diving into these!
Reconfigurable legged machines in the wild
There is something captivating about these modular robot legs. The project uses multiple configurations, ranging from 1 to 5 modules, across different terrains. I highly recommend checking out the paper for this project here. Among many things, you will find an assembly video of this module.
RML Flood Memorial
On March 6th, 2025, the Robomechanics Lab at CMU was flooded with 4 feet of black water (i.e. mixed with sewage). We lost most of the robots in the lab, and as a tribute my students put together this “In Memoriam” video.
Poor robots! 🫡
Every Single Board Computer I Tested in 2025
Bret Weber made a nice overview of SBCs he tested in 2025. The prices range from $42 all the way up to $590. It’s a good overview of some of the choices on the market that you might find useful if you are like me and you are not up to date with the market.
From Simulation to Reality: Swiss Bipedal Robot
In this video, Skyentific walks you through his setup of a 3D-printed bipedal robot and how he used reinforcement-learning to train it to walk. Nice progress from the previous videos!
Mercury-Transforming-Drone
Mercury is an open-source mobile base that can also fly. The project is based on ArduPilot, and the repository contains all STL files and BOM in case you want to recreate this build yourself.
Oxa raises $103M to automate industrial driving tasks
Oxa, a developer of autonomous vehicle technology, this month closed a $103 million Series D round. The company said the investment will enable it to intensify its focus on commercializing the automation of repetitive industrial driving tasks.
Our Sponsors
- Anyscale gives you a platform to run and scale all your ML and AI workloads, from data processing to training and inference.
- Foxglove is a purpose-built, modular platform for robotics teams to collect, organize, and learn from vast quantities of multimodal data, creating the data flywheel to safely scale from development to distributed fleets
- 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
- Bots, Bevs and Devs: Mar 11, 2026. San Francisco, United States of America
- European Robotics Forum: Mar 23 - Mar 27, 2026. Stavanger, Norway
- Cracow Robotics & AI Meetup: Mar 30, 2026. Krakow, Poland
- Robotics & Physical AI day (Mashup): Apr 15 - Apr 15, 2026. Malmö, Sweden
- 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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