These days, I’m slowly refreshing my CAD skills after not using them for about 14 years. Back in my University days, I loved using Autodesk Inventor (a totally different product now). At one point, I had a very ambitious idea to learn OpenSCAD - which allows creating designs programmatically, but I fell short due to a steep learning curve.
Fusion 360 was promising, but it does not support Linux, and you should buy a subscription if you earn over $1k. Since I’m in the hobby category now, I settled on OnShape, especially since I don’t mind my designs being available online to everyone until I decide to go pro. If anyone has any advice on re-learning CAD, please hit me up!
FUSE: The Location Technology Conference for Physical AI [Sponsored]
FUSE is the conference for engineers solving real-world localization and autonomy, with talks from the teams shipping Physical AI in production. No product keynotes or marketing. Two stops in 2026: San Francisco (Nov 19, Foundry SF) and Toulouse (Oct 6, Orange 5G Lab).
Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
Google DeepMind has released Gemini Robotics 2, the team’s most advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. The release is accompanied by an embodied reasoning (ER) model and an on-device model optimized to run locally. The biggest news for me, though, is the accuracy scores listed on the linked website - 45.7% to 76.3% rates for a Humanoid picking- which makes you think about how much work will be needed to bridge the gap for true general robotics approaches that can work in industry and at home.
datasets.bot
Speaking of VLAs and training, here is a website with a searchable list of 39,703 hours of robot data across 63 public datasets. You might want to bookmark this, and if you are developing datasets, make sure to submit it!
Built at Monumental
Here is an interesting look behind the scenes at Monumental, where Tom, a hardware engineer, shows how he works on autonomous construction robots. I love the build room where the robots constantly build brick walls!
Four Time Scales for Technology Development and Deployment
Here is an interesting take from Rodney Brooks on four time scales for technology. From research timescales to hype to reshaping the economy. I find it a very good food for thought.
Physical AI: The DARPA Legacy & the Road Ahead — From Face-Plants to Foundation Models
I really liked this piece by Samuel Bouchard about the legacy of the DARPA Robotics Challenge and how it influenced the robotics ecosystem. I highly recommend this read!
Mechanochromic Skin Gives Robot Finger Fine Senses
This article describes research into a robot skin that can sense objects based on changes in the color of the sensing material that reacts to deformation. This design has a 0.1 mm resolution (approximately the thickness of printer paper) with no computational latency. This could be an interesting alternative to sensors using markers and cameras to calculate forces and displacement. I’m looking forward to seeing if the industry will use this approach.
Trump administration bans new Chinese humanoid robots, to protect US AI buildout
Bad news to anyone who was looking into importing Chinese-made robots to the US:
The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday afternoon released the measures, which bar Chinese imports of new humanoid and quadruped robots, in addition to connected power inverters, which enable renewable energy sources and batteries to connect to grids and data center equipment.
This mobile robot steering mechanism
This looks like an ingenious steering mechanism. You pull a special kind of rope (that reminds me of a ski pass retractor), and the robot follows it based on the direction and seems to use a speed proportional to the pull force. This seems much more reliable than vision- or LiDAR-based approaches, and a great fit for an agricultural use case as shown in this video. Nice!
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Events
- 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
- ROSCon Global: Sep 22 - Sep 24, 2026. Toronto, Canada
- FUSE Toulouse 2026: Oct 06, 2026. Toulouse, France
- 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
- FUSE San Francisco 2026: Nov 19, 2026. San Francisco, California, United States of America
- ROSCon BE 2026: Nov 25 - Nov 26, 2026. Nivelles, Belgium
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
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