Today, I’m on my way to ICRA! I’m super excited to see what some of the top robotics researchers have been up to and catching up with some friends. If you are joining this event, let’s try to grab a coffee!
How Torc Robotics Scales Multimodal AI for Autonomous Driving with Ray [Sponsored]
Join us on June 10 to hear from a Staff ML Engineer and ML Ops Tech Lead at Torc Robotics, a company driving the future of autonomous commercial vehicles. Torc runs a wide range of multimodal data processing and curation workloads that are mission-critical to their AI development. Join his live presentation to learn how they tackled their toughest data challenges.
How to build a shitty robot
I thoroughly enjoyed this blog post by Mario Zechner. Mario bought a toy robot for 10 euros (with an interesting mechanism for walking and turning using a single motor) and then proceeded to rip it apart, connect an ESP32 to the robot’s H-bridge, and build a client-server LLM to use his laptop as the robot’s brain through text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and an LLM. Nice work!
PCL Tutorial
I love this interactive tutorial by Hyungtae Lim. The tutorial consists of 14 interactive tutorials with sample data and an option to set custom parameters. This will definitely come in handy for anyone looking to learn about PointCloud operations. I added this project to our Awesome Weekly Robotics list.
MODKOM: Toolbox of Modular Components to Demonstrate Reconfigurable Space Robots
The MODKOM (Modular Components as Building Blocks for Application-Specific Configurable Space Robots) project aims to create a toolbox that allows robots to be configured and recombined for specific tasks using specialized, standardized building blocks throughout different mission phases.
Post-Qualification Contribution: Coding a Classical Robot Controller in the Age of Coding Agents, an Honest Assessment
In this Open Robotics Discourse post, Thanhtientc shares his team’s effort to compete in the AI for Industry Challenge, where the team decided to approach the problem of robotic cable and wire handling using classical methods coded with the help of LLMs. Even though the team didn’t win, they shared some quite interesting lessons about their journey.
A SF startup is secretly testing robots in Airbnbs, and trashing them, lawsuit claims
Home robots are getting closer to real homes, but this is not exactly the test deployment anyone wants to see. A San Francisco Airbnb host is suing The Bot Company, alleging its employees rented his house under false pretenses to test chore-doing robot prototypes, leaving scratched appliances, damaged furniture, chipped tiles. Initially, I thought the approach of testing the robots in Airbnbs was ingenious but I never thought of the damage that could cause.
frax
frax is a fast kinematics and dynamics library in pure Python, using JAX for JIT-compilation and automatic differentiation. With frax, you can design high-performance inverse-kinematics and inverse-dynamics controllers at the speed of Pinocchio, ease of use of Python, and differentiation and parallelization-compatibility of MJX.
To learn more about this work, check out this arXiv paper.
School of Football | The Rabona | Boston Dynamics x Hyundai
I must be living under a rock as I have no clue what this video is about, but I appreciate the moves and ball kicking! Wish we had a soccer league with Atlas humanoids. Hopefully, one day!
Self-driving bus crashes into tram on debut day in Sweden
This is definitely not the way you want to start your autonomous vehicle rollout. Fortunately, no one was injured in the accident.
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Events
- ICRA 2026: Jun 01 - Jun 05, 2026. Vienna, Austria
- ROS Meetup @ ICRA 2026: Jun 02, 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
- Commercial UAV Expo: Sep 01 - Sep 03, 2026. Las Vegas, Nevada, United States of America
- Autonomy: Sep 14, 2026. Malmö, Sweden
- Open Source Summit: Oct 07 - Oct 09, 2026. Prague, Czechia
- ROSCon Spain 2026: Oct 27 - Oct 28, 2026. Valencia, Spain
- ROSCon BE 2026: Nov 25 - Nov 26, 2026. Nivelles, Belgium
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
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