Last week, I had the pleasure of traveling to Zurich and visiting the ETH Robotic Systems Lab and the RAI Institute. Seeing state-of-the-art hardware and demonstrators and peeking behind the curtain is one thing, but talking to passionate robotic developers is always the highlight of visits like these.
In other news, I'm very happy to present an article on GPS-denied navigation for drones (first feature today), contributed by Alessandro Saviolo. Thanks, Alessandro!
Late parts don’t have to be a surprise [Sponsored]
The worst part about a missed deadline isn't the delay, it's finding out too late to adjust your build schedule. Most sourcing platforms give you a lead time estimate upfront and then go silent. On Jiga, you talk directly to the manufacturer making your parts. You get proactive updates on production status, so when timelines shift, you know before your integration timeline is at risk, not after your team is already waiting on hardware.
Rethinking Drone Autonomy in GPS-Denied Environments
As promised in the intro, HUNT is a drone autonomy framework for GPS-denied, unstructured environments that replaces persistent global localization with instantaneous relative frames rebuilt from directly observable onboard signals such as inertial attitude, barometric altitude, visual motion cues, and target geometry. Make sure to check out the featured videos!
MIGHTY: Hermite Spline-based Efficient Trajectory Planning
MIGHTY is a “Hermite spline-based planner that performs spatiotemporal optimization while fully leveraging the continuous search space of a spline”. The result: multirotors capable of highly agile flight with reduced travel time and computation requirements compared to the state-of-the-art solutions. To learn more about this project, check out the project repository or the ArXiv preprint.
How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer
If you enjoyed following the Artemis II story, you will likely enjoy this write-up on the design of a fault-tolerant computer for this spacecraft. It’s the first time I’ve come across a “fail silent” architecture, where if any of the redundant systems have an issue, they remain silent, and we always take the available output. Very interesting design decisions all around!
FusionCore
FusionCore is an open-source ROS 2 UKF-based sensor-fusion SDK that natively supports 3D, GNSS, IMUs, wheel encoders, and more! I really like the feature list and am looking forward to testing it out!
What I learned from making my own drone (Part I)
Nickolai Belakovski wrote a fantastic piece on lessons learned from building his first drone. If you are no stranger to drones, you will probably nod at some of the problems with IMUs, DShot, and rolling your own PID implementation. All in all, it’s a solid series of lessons learned!
LS3 Boston Dynamics Mini Resin Printing
Remember the AlphaDog from Boston Dynamics? A Reddit user is building a tiny replica that will host moving parts. I have to say I really like how it’s coming together.
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
- Robotics & Physical AI day (Mashup): Apr 15 - Apr 15, 2026. Malmö, Sweden
- Actuate Global — San Francisco: Industry Night: Apr 23, 2026. San Francisco, United States of America
- Actuate Global — London: Community Meetup: Apr 30, 2026. London, United Kingdom
- Hands on Workshop: Scaling Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models with Ray: Apr 30, 2026. Pittsburgh, United States of America
- Actuate Global — Paris: Community Meetup: May 04, 2026. Paris, France
- Actuate Global — Zurich: Field Session: May 06, 2026. Zurich, Switzerland
- NextGen Robotics LIVE: May 06, 2026. Odense, Denmark
- Actuate Global — Munich: Community Meetup: May 07, 2026. Munich, Germany
- Open Hardware Summit: May 22 - May 23, 2026. Berlin, Germany
- Robotics Summit & Expo 2026: May 27 - May 28, 2026. Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
Want to promote your product or service in Weekly Robotics? Check out our advertising options.