It’s my pleasure to welcome Viam as a new quarterly sponsor of the newsletter. As you will see below, Viam is running a robotic fundamentals course that you might want to check out!
Join Now: Viam 101 [Sponsored]
Learn the fundamentals of robotics by building a real application with Viam. This free, self-paced online course is entirely hands-on and runs in simulation, so no hardware is required. More than 300 engineers have already signed up! Join today to get instant access at launch and be entered to win a UFactory Lite 6 robotic arm.
OctoSense: Self-Supervised Learning for Multimodal Robot Perception
OctoSense is a dataset and a method for fusing multi-modal sensor data into a single, robust representation. The system fuses data from: LiDAR, two RGB cameras, two event cameras, GNSS, a thermal camera, and an IMU. The dataset of this work (59 hours, 2,474 km of driving) is available on HuggingFace. To learn more about this work, check out this paper.
Nasa launches robot to save Swift telescope falling to Earth
Back in my University days, I started following ESA’s e.Deorbit mission updates. At the time, the agency was looking into ways to capture and deorbit a satellite; imagine my surprise when, out of the blue, I saw NASA was attempting just this kind of mission to save the Swift observatory. A three-armed satellite called ‘Link’ was launched on Friday and will raise Swift’s orbit. I’ll be following this mission closely and will let you know on interesting developments!
Learning Dynamic Rope Manipulation Using Task-Level Iterative Learning Control
Krishna Suresh and Chris Atkeson from CMU taught a robot to tie a flying overhand knot in fewer than 10 trials given a single human demonstration. Once the learning succeeds, the robot is 100% successful on 40 repeated trials. Nice work!
Engineer Vs Bee: Round 1
If you have an hour (!!), Jeremy Fielding has been working on a bumblebee tracking robot. As usual, Jeremy does a great job explaining the issue and the technical hurdles that need to be overcome. As an extra, you will learn something about bees.
The Crazy History of the First Humanoid Robot
Meet the first humanoid robot from 1939, Elektro the Moto-Man, a robot with a rich history who even appeared in a movie. The robot was able to move its arms and fingers, detect colors, smoke cigarettes(!), and blow up balloons. It’s wild how much robotics has changed in 100 years!
copper-rs first stable release (v1.0.0)
Copper-rs, a Rust-first robotics middleware, has hit a major milestone with a v1 release. It’s been great following this journey for the past couple of years. Looking forward to the next couple!
Luxonis Raises $14 Million Series A to Power the Perception Layer Behind Physical AI
Luxonis, the robotics and industrial automation company behind the OAK camera and DepthAI software, today announced the close of a $14 million Series A round led by Denali Growth Partners, with participation from Taiwania Capital. The funding will accelerate Luxonis’s commercial expansion, advance the product roadmap, and scale production of its OAK camera platform to meet the growing demand from the physical AI market.
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.
- Viam is the software platform for building, deploying, and managing robotics applications. Write control logic in your language of choice with well-defined APIs for hardware and services, deploy with built-in OTA updates, and easily scale from prototype to production.
Events
- 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 UK 2026: Oct 21 - Oct 23, 2026. Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- 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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