If your Monday coffee didn’t taste the same as usual due to me not sending out an issue - apologies. I hope today’s issue makes up for it! I’m in SF all week starting today; if you would like to meet up, please feel free to get in touch. Coffee is on me! Similarly, if you are at Actuate, let’s catch up!
DARPA Lift Challenge Results
DARPA Lift Challenge is over. The goal was to design a drone with a payload-to-drone-weight ratio of 4:1, and the teams came close, with the winning team scoring a 3.84:1 ratio. DARPA published many videos from the challenge; I highly recommend the crashes!
Finger Mod
Finger Mod is an interactive website by Steph that lets you customize a flexible gripper design for the SO-100 robot arms and export an STL file for printing.
feetech-motorlab
Speaking of SO-100 arms, one thing I love about them are the Feetech servos that they use. If you are one of us, you might like this web bench for characterizing some of the 12V servos.
Deployment Is Not Destiny: Robot Recomposition in the Field
I don’t user a term super cool lightly, but this research is certainly it. It introduces a framework for robot hardware/software reconfiguration, where adding a new robot capability is a matter of plugging a USB drive with the right module and connecting the hardware. This project is a very neat usage of Behavior Trees.
Holistic Fusion: Task- and Setup-Agnostic Robot Localization and State Estimation with Factor Graphs
Citing the abstract:
Holistic Fusion formulates sensor fusion as a combined estimation problem of i) the local and global robot state and ii) a (theoretically unlimited) number of dynamic variables, including automatic alignment of reference frames; this formulation fits countless real-world applications without conceptual modifications, offering a comprehensive solution beyond hard-coded/task-specific approaches. The proposed factor-graph formulation enables direct fusion of an arbitrary number of absolute, local, and landmark measurements expressed with respect to different frames by explicitly including them as states in the optimization and modeling their evolution as random walks.
Submersible Drone Analyzes Ice
This video covers an interesting project by the Polaris Team on a submarine robot for measuring ice thickness. My biggest takeaway was that RTK GPS works well enough underwater and beneath a thick layer of ice.
The Chernobyl NPP And Forty Years Of Robots For High Radiation Environments
This article features an interesting mini documentary on how the Chernobyl reactor has been surveyed over time and how the robots for the sarcophagus evolved over time.
Hadrian raises $1.37B to accelerate U.S. defense, aerospace manufacturing
Hadrian Automation last week said it has brought in $1.37 billion in new equity financing. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate the buildout of the domestic manufacturing capacity needed to deliver U.S. military, aerospace, and industrial systems.
Our Sponsors
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- 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
- 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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