I was floored seeing the demo video of NEO’s hands. I didn’t expect to see a human-like robot hand move so fast and be developed so soon. If you asked me a week ago, I would have said we would see something along those lines in 2028, yet here we are. General robots got even more exciting now!
NEO’s Hands | An API to the Physical World
1X showcased new NEO hands, and I’m impressed. The hand has 25 degrees of freedom, is tendon-driven, and contains tactile sensors. The core development seems to be around the quasi-direct drive tendons (pictured in the cover image) that seemingly use ropes for transmission. The movement speed and accuracy are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Cool stuff!
I Built my Son an Over-Engineered Robot
Carl Bugeja built a tiny robot that weighs only 93 grams. In the video, you will find the evolution of this build, the components selected, and some possible applications.
zero2robot
xero2robot is an interactive embodied AI course where you will learn to build VLA policies (among many other things). The course is free, and you can run it locally on your machine. If I were learning VLAs today, I would definitely start with this work! Nice work, Kaushik!
I Built a Clay 3D Printer that Prints Impossible Objects
Joshua Bird created a clay printer. I once spoke with a researcher working on clay printing for their project, and apparently it’s a nightmare (as you can see in this video). Changing viscosity as the material dries up and tiny rocks, as Joshua mentioned, make for quite a challenge. But at the end of the day, the results might make all the trouble worth it.
Robostral Navigate: single-camera AI navigation
Mistral AI created a navigation model for robotics. A summary from the linked page below:
Robostral Navigate is an 8B model that enables robots to autonomously navigate complex environments using only a single RGB camera, achieving 76.6% success on unseen R2R-CE benchmarks—outperforming multi-sensor approaches while being more efficient. Built entirely in-house with simulated data and token-efficient techniques, it generalizes across robot types and adapts to real-world obstacles unseen during training.
sw2robot
sw2robot is a SolidWorks-to-URDF converter that builds on top of solidworks_urdf_exporter. The exporter converts a kinematic graph in SolidWorks into a URDF tree structure, while sw2roboteditor is a browser-based editor that lets you clean up the design. You can find a tutorial showing the export process in this video. Nice work!
Engineer Vs Bee - Round 2: Building The Bee Chaser Base.
The other day, I featured Jeremy Fielding’s robot for bee photography. He just released another video in this series, focusing on a moving base platform.
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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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