I had a blast in SF. Actuate was packed with engineers and many interesting talks. I also spent 1.5 hours in Waymos, including 10 minutes in a parking lot where it was trying to pull out of it. Baring the parking lot hiccup, I really enjoyed the rides, and they were way smoother than expected.
Live demo: Agentic workflows for robot builders [Sponsored]
Foxglove has announced a new set of features for robotics development. Agentic workflows, Semantic Search, Comparison Mode, and more. Their engineers will demo these features live on September 2, 2026. Open to all.
Training Dyna-2 at million-hour scale, repeatably
Dyna released this great write-up that can serve as a blueprint for anyone seeking to process large amounts of training data. From this article, you will learn how the company scaled the data ingestion throughput from 14,000 episode-hours to 440,000. I love how much effort went into this piece; our field could definitely use more content like this.
Two Years of Weaponized Plastic
Michael Ferguson created a Weaponized Plastic Fighting League for a 3D-printed battle-bot-like tournament. This post describes some of Michael’s recent builds. I like the idea of a cost-efficient league like that, since proper battle bots can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
NASA Aborts LINK Mission to Rescue Sinking Swift Space Telescope
Back in July, I covered the Swift-rescue mission, where a satellite called Link was meant to capture the Swift telescope and move it to a higher orbit. Unfortunately, the plan was scrapped because of multiple technical issues with LINK (failure of reaction wheels and a thruster malfunction).
ROS Keeps Evolving via Physical AI SIG
Open Source Robotics Alliance created a Special Interest Group to explore how to enable Physical AI workflows in ROS, focusing on two areas: collecting data for training models and running those models on real robots. The group is working on everything from zero-copy tensor transport and ROS-to-LeRobot data pipelines to standardized robot descriptions and low-latency policy inference. I’m in! Looking forward to the journey!
Chinese robot beats Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint world record in humanoid bot games
For a long time, my benchmark for robot speed was Boston Dynamics Cheetah at a top speed of 28.3 mph. The average speed of the robot from this article would come to 23.7 mph. We are getting close, and I find this impressive for two reasons: Cheetah had hydraulic actuators, and it was fixed on a treadmill. Here we have a robot with electric motors and running freely. It feels like it’s only a matter of time before Cheetah’s record is smashed by a mass-produced platform.
MIT engineers design a better controller for operating construction diggers
Here is an interesting manipulator idea from MIT researchers: a digger interface where you hold a bucket-like end-effector for teleoperation. The team believes this new interface could shorten operator training time, and I bet the company from the next feature might also be interested.
Gravis Robotics raises $200M for autonomous construction
Citing the article:
The construction industry has been slow to automate, but demand for infrastructure repairs, AI data center buildouts, and U.S. reshoring and defense needs could change that. Gravis Robotics today announced that SoftBank is investing $200 million in its Series A round, which it claimed is the largest in construction robotics history.
Shares in humanoid robot firm Unitree surge 600% on Chinese stock market debut
Unitree IPO’d last week, and the stock price quickly climbed to a high of 1,100 Yuan, while today the shares sit at roughly half that. It’s definitely one of the more interesting IPOs, and I’m looking forward to how this story develops.
Being ambitious and being a dad
To wrap up this issue, I’d like to share a piece of writing by Nicholas Charriere that really resonated with me. It’s not related to robotics in any way, but it perfectly captures the struggle of doing your best to be a good parent and a builder. If anyone feels like sharing some experiences, feel free to ping me!
Our Sponsors
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- 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
- 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
- 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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