Today’s issue is coming later than usual because Hacksmith Industries released a new Battlebots video. I have no idea why Battlebots pulls me so hard (ok, I actually have some ideas), but I’m glad the show isn’t available in my region; otherwise, I might miss some newsletter issues.
SF Robot Hackathon: Harnessing Physical AI & Data [Sponsored]
Join Viam and MongoDB for two days of building a physical AI application. Every team gets a real robot arm, a MongoDB Atlas cluster, and Viam mentors. Past projects: VLA training, chess, cocktails.
Top three teams win SO-101 kits, plus up to $5,000 each in Viam and MongoDB credits. Space is limited, so apply now.
When: Thu & Fri, Oct 29-30 in SF.
USDCraft — Articulated 3D Assets for Simulation
This work explores generating and reconstructing articulated objects for use in simulation. USDCraft-10k, which will be released as part of this work, is a 10,000-asset library. Of everyday objects. Real2Sim2Real is real!
Jumper - a crab robot
Jumper is an open-source crab robot. Right now, it’s hard to tell which parts of this project will be open source, but it still looks interesting. For now, you can find an online simulator for this robot here.
Isaac ROS 5.0 with Pixi
Our friends behind Pixi, the package manager wrote a great guide on using their isaac-forge, which makes handling NVIDIA dependencies easy. I’m looking forward to playing with this!
The Hexa-Bouncer
This is s a very nice build. The notes the author shows at the 1:30 mark made me feel like an amateur, given the mess I usually make when solving problems with pen and paper. And the rest of the video is just clean engineering: nice IK solving in Unity out of all software and some nice machining of custom components. Love it!
We Went PRO in BATTLEBOTS…Were We Ready?
Hacksmith Industries is back to work on their Battlebot. In the video, you’ll learn about the robot redesign and the updated AI fighting algorithm. I would love to learn a bit more about the software side of this project. This episode has a lot of interesting thoughts on Software vs. hardware in this competition, and the use of AI seems especially controversial for some teams.
MarsLab - A Martian Rover Simulator
Citing the website:
We present MarsLab, an open-source, ROS2-native Mars rover simulator for autonomy and navigation algorithm development. MarsLab combines HiRISE-derived and procedural terrain with customizable rock, crater, solar-illumination, and atmospheric-dust settings, and runs a Perseverance-class rover model in NVIDIA Isaac Sim. The runtime publishes RGB, depth, RGB-D point clouds, LiDAR, IMU, wheel odometry, and ground-truth pose data through standard ROS2 topics.
Learning to Drive on Mars: Visual Multimodal Traversability Estimation for Off-World Navigation
Since we are in space, I found this traversability framework quite exciting, and I can’t wait for the dataset to become available!
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
- ROSCon UK 2026: Oct 21 - Oct 23, 2026. Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- Bots & Brews Houston: Oct 22, 2026. Houston, Texas, United States of America
- ROSCon Spain 2026: Oct 27 - Oct 28, 2026. Valencia, Spain
- Robot Hackathon: Harnessing Physical AI & Data: Oct 29 - Oct 30, 2026. San Francisco, California, United States of America
- Humanoid Europe 2026: Nov 05 - Nov 06, 2026. Munich, Germany
- 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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