As you will see in the sponsored feature, at Foxglove, we are organizing another Actuate conference in SF this year. I'm really looking forward to attending it. The lineup is already very good. If you can make it to the conference, let me know, and let's try to catch up!
Actuate26: The physical AI conference for robotics developers [Sponsored]
This August, 1,000+ robotics developers will gather in San Francisco for Actuate 26. Join us to hear how industry leading teams are deploying autonomy and scaling real-world robotic systems. Grab your discounted early bird tickets before they’re gone! Find full details & register on the Actuate website.
Meet “Roadrunner”: a bipedal, wheeled robot for multi-modal locomotion
This is a very cool wheeled-bipedal robot by Researchers from the RAI Institute. Via YouTube description:
“Roadrunner” is a new bipedal wheeled robot prototype designed for multi-modal locomotion. It weighs around 15kg (33 lb.) and can seamlessly switch between its side-by-side and in-line wheel modes and stepping configurations depending on what is required for navigating its environment. The robot’s legs are entirely symmetric, allowing it to point its knees forward or backward, which can be used to avoid obstacles or manage specific movements. A single control policy was trained to handle both side-by-side and in-line driving. Several behaviors, including standing up from various ground configurations and balancing on one wheel, were successfully deployed zero-shot on the hardware.
3D Printed Robot Arm Built For Learning Purposes
As robot arms go, this is one of the cleaner 3D-printed builds I’ve featured in the newsletter. The arm is 3D-printed (including the reducers) and runs on an STM32 microcontroller that communicates with the Raspberry Pi over the CAN bus.
ANYmal Grand Tour
I’ve spent a lot of time working with an episode from this dataset over the last few days, and I really enjoyed it. If you like quadrupeds and robots with huge multimodal stacks, you will definitely enjoy this. The authors were also very kind in contributing a blog post to the Foxglove blog, where they described their work in detail and included a video showing the robot in action.
30 Years Ago, Robots Learned to Walk Without Falling
This article is an interesting history lesson about Honda’s Prototype 2 robot and how it learned to walk. Watching the P2 demonstrator featured in the article, I’m a bit torn. On one hand, it feels like the robot’s behavior is not too far from what we are seeing these days. On the other hand, knowing a bit more about the ins and outs of how these things are made makes the progress feel huge!
I Built The World’s Smallest Robot Dog!
Dorian Todd made another version of his 3D-printed quadruped robot; this time, it’s even smaller. It looks like a fun build!
Amazon acquires ‘approachable’ humanoid maker Fauna Robotics
It feels like we’ve just learned that Fauna Robotics built their robots and started selling them, and they were already acquired by Amazon. Congrats to the team! Looking forward to seeing the future of these platforms.
How to add Battery Monitoring to any robot
Josh from the Articulated Robotics channel is back, this time covering BMS and how to set up battery monitoring on your own robot. Very useful topic, especially if you are building your own robots!
Call the cops! Patent infringement drama at LogiMAT
Some patent drama unfolded at LogiMAt, where Ocado called the cops on Brightpick, alleging patent infringement. I can’t help but notice that Brightpick got quite a publicity from this incident. I wonder what the future holds for this case.
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
- 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
- Actuate 26: Aug 18 - Aug 19, 2026. San Francisco, California, United States of America
- Open Source Summit: Oct 07 - Oct 09, 2026. Prague, Czechia
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
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