If you happen to be in Europe and going through the heatwave… Good luck! The last two days over here has been quite an experience. Can’t wait for winter already!
Actuate26: The 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. Last year, we were sold out, so don’t wait until the last minute to get yours!
ELROB 2026: Notes from the Largest Field Robotics Trial Europe Has Ever Seen
We’ve featured notes from ELROB back in issue 233 by Alexander Entinger, and it was very fun (mirror for the interested). Back to today’s issue. Samet Kütük does an excellent job of sharing how this event played out, the teams involved, and the challenges. Feeling a bit of FOMO reading this piece is absolutely warranted. Sounds like a very fun event.
The Unified Autonomy Stack: Toward a Blueprint for Generalizable Robot Autonomy
We introduce and open-source the Unified Autonomy Stack, a system-level solution that enables resilient autonomy across diverse aerial and ground robot morphologies. The architecture centers on three synergistic modules – multi-modal perception, multi-behavior planning, and multi-layered safe navigation – that together deliver comprehensive mission autonomy. The stack fuses data from LiDAR, radar, vision, and inertial sensing, enabling (a) robust localization and mapping through factor graph-based fusion, (b) semantic scene understanding, (c) motion and informative path planning through sampling-based techniques adaptive across spatial scales, as well as (d) multi-layered safe navigation both through planning on the online reconstructed map and deep learning-driven exteroceptive policies alongside last-resort safety filters using control barrier functions.
I found this video to be a very nice overview of this architecture, or you can find the paper on arXiv.
Robot Dog Extinguishes Fires
DEEP Robotics presented a robot with a pulse extinguisher that seems quite effective in this little teaser.
Building And Testing A DIY Robot Actuator
In this video, Brandon Lai describes his process of creating a planetary gear-based actuator for a humanoid robot.
EtherCAT: Fastest Communication for Your Robot
Continuing the topic of actuators, Skyentfic used CAN bus for a long time but has recently started exploring EtherCAT, which is said to be much faster. If you don’t have experience with this protocol, you might want to watch this.
Floating Companion: Exploring Design Space for Soft Floating Robots in Indoor Environments
That’s one interesting take for a robot companion. I would love one!
General Intuition raises $320M to use video game data to train robots
General Intuition US Inc. this week raised $320 million in Series A funding. The company said it plans to use the financing to build AI models that can perceive, predict, and act in virtual and physical environments.
Agility Robotics to Go Public Through Merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI
Agility Robotics is going public via a SPAC. The linked page mentions that Agility has secured $300M in orders to date and has a $2.5B pre-money equity value. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out, especially that to date I only lost money on SPACs.
Our Sponsors
- 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
- 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
- Point One Navigation delivers centimeter-accurate positioning to robots and autonomous systems — powered by the world’s densest fully-owned RTK corrections network.
Events
- Cracow Robotics & AI Meetup: Jun 29, 2026. Krakow, Poland
- Robotics: Science and Systems: Jul 13 - Jul 16, 2026. Sydney, Australia
- Physical AI Happy Hour: Zürich: Jul 16, 2026. Zurich, Switzerland
- 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
- Humanoids 2026: Dec 06 - Dec 09, 2026. Santa Clara, California, United States of America
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
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