ROSCon 2026 was great! What I like most about this conference is that it always feels like I’m just catching up with friends. Even more exciting, ROSCon 2027 will take place in Krakow, my hometown, and I just can’t wait for it. If you are coming, feel free to hit me up for recommendations; I’ve got plenty!
Some of the features in today’s newsletter made me so happy! I love seeing such creative approaches to robotics and engineering.
Less Skynet. More Baymax. By design. [Sponsored]
Card79 helps companies shape how their robots make people feel, supporting safer, clearer interactions through intentional design. For Neuralink’s R1, we helped turn an intimidating lab machine into an approachable surgical robot for operating rooms and clinical trial deployment.
A transformable tethered aerial platform for robot-environment interactions
I found this drone very interesting; it’s two bicopters tethered to one another and equipped with a winch. This design creates interesting flight dynamics between the two aircraft. Using the tether for perching is ingenious - I would never have thought of that.
EVPeriscope
This feature motivates me. The team created a closed-loop control system for a quadrotor from the ground robot and simultaneously had the quadrotor deliver sensor data useful in cases like occlusion. To me, the most interesting part is that the team used an event camera to track the aircraft robustly.
The Cartesian Hand: In-Hand Manipulation with All-Linear Fingers
This research presents an interesting end-effector with all-linear fingers and 7 DoF. The approach is very creative, and I’m actually surprised by how a simple design like this can handle such diverse manipulation tasks. If you’d like to learn more about this work, make sure to check out the project page.
Omnidirectional Amphibious Locomotion via Internal Mass Actuation
This is an interesting mobile-robot design: a spherical body actuated by three masses on linear joints enclosed within it. Like it!
Trying A New Radial Impeller Design For Quadcopters
If you are thinking of changing up the propeller action on your drone, you might consider impellers. As the article mentions, the design has mostly disadvantages, but the noise profile is indeed much more pleasant than traditional propeller designs.
Intrinsic open sources key parts of its platform for easier development
Big news for ROS users - Intrinsic has open-sourced Intrinsic Core, a “local runtime, SDK, and hardware-agnostic, real-time control framework for industrial robotics”. Looking forward to exploring it soon!
Qualcomm to acquire PickNik Robotics and keep MoveIt open-source
Citing the article:
Qualcomm Technologies Inc. today said it has agreed to acquire PickNik Inc., which has developed robotics software including the MoveIt open-source manipulation framework. The companies said they expect to streamline MoveIt integration with Qualcomm Dragonwing platforms to give developers an easier path from AI models to planning, manipulation, and real-time control.
Our Sponsors
- Card79 helps robotics companies accelerate deployment and adoption by designing every human touchpoint between people and autonomous systems—from industrial design and interfaces to human-robot interaction.
- 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
- Gravis Robotics x Foxglove: Zurich Robotics Night: Sep 29, 2026. Zürich, Switzerland
- 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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