If you were eagerly awaiting your weekly dose of robotics news and it didn't come - apologies; I've been traveling quite a bit and getting older, I find it harder and harder to borrow 4+ hours of sleep time to wrap up a newsletter issue. To make up for it, please find Labububot towards the end of this issue. Enjoy today's news!
Actuate 26 early bird ticket pricing ends in two weeks! [Sponsored]
This year at Actuate, we'll bring together 1,000+ attendees to experience a full lineup of technical presentations, industry-leader keynotes, and a 15,000-square-foot exhibition hall. The full schedule and speaker lineup will be released next month; however, discounted early-bird tickets ($199 Expo Pass/$649 Full Access Pass) will end in 2 weeks. See you there!
Honeybees teach drones how to navigate
This paper introduces an interesting strategy for the ‘home finding’ problem on drones. At the start, the drone will explore the area around the home point, building a view memory. As the insect flies away, the odometry error accumulates, making it impossible to return home using that method alone. It can easily return to a known area, though, where a neural vector with a home vector will kick in, and the aircraft will return safely. The video explainer for this paper is on another level, featuring a very nice stop-motion LEGO animation. Love it!
Testing the Next Generation of Mars Helicopter Rotor Blades
It’s more of a teaser than a full-fledged newsletter feature, but NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is testing a new design of a Mars helicopter. With Mars’ atmosphere at 1% of Earth’s density, the team needs proper testing facilities and quite a bit of science to ensure the 30% payload increase is achievable.
Unitree Unveils: GD01, A Manned Transformable Mecha, from $650,000
Unitree unveiled a ride-in humanoid robot. At 500 kg (including human payload), and at $650k, it’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure about use cases and commercial viability, but I’ll be cheerfully observing where this design goes!
Japan’s robot wolf sells out as record bear attacks drive demand
I have to admit, this is not a headline I was expecting to put in this newsletter, ever. According to the article, the robot wolf is outfitted with artificial fur draped over a pipe frame, a motion sensor, flashing LEDs, and a speaker that broadcasts 50 recorded sounds. According to the article, the company is planning to build a wheeled product soon, including a portable version for hikers.
High Precision Excavator Control
The team from ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab showcased high-precision work with their excavator, achieving up to 1.8cm precision. If you like that video, make sure to check out this video that goes into the material-handling framework for construction robotics.
F.03 Livestream - Day 5
What started as an 8-hour experiment changed into “we will get these robots to sort packages until they break”. Aside from performance compared to a professional human, it’s interesting to see how consistent these robots are in this task. Now, the big question about general robots is: how well can this architecture adapt to other tasks in messy real-world scenarios? I guess we will see in the coming years!
Exclusive: Ouster’s new color lidar is coming to replace cameras
I don’t necessarily agree with TechCrunch here on LiDAR replacing cameras, but a dedicated chip outputting both PointCloud and color data is very interesting and should enable workflows without needing to perform LiDAR-camera calibration.
Labububot — one of the rarest monsters on Earth
I think that’s enough of robots for today for me…
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Events
- Cracow Robotics & AI Meetup: May 18, 2026. Krakow, Poland
- 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
- Actuate Global — Boston: Community Meetup: May 27, 2026. Boston, United States of America
- 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
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- Commercial UAV Expo: Sep 01 - Sep 03, 2026. Las Vegas, Nevada, United States of America
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