It’s my pleasure to welcome LTX as a new quarterly sponsor of Weekly Robotics! Founded in 2024, LTX is a lab for building frontier open-weight multimodal models that understand physical space, causality, and structure.
In other news, as you will see in the last feature, I’m again involved in the open-source robotics devroom at FOSDEM 2027. That event became a highlight of my year, and I invite you to consider coming, even if it’s quite a trip. It’s worth it!
Your robots are getting smarter. Why do your customers have to? [Sponsored]
Every confusing workflow, every support call, every minute of downtime costs your customers patience and confidence.
We make robots easier to work with. From mission planning and everyday interactions to troubleshooting and keeping systems running, we design intuitive UX that reduces friction, builds confidence, and minimizes downtime.
The Dexterity Deadlock
The tl;dr at the top of the post is a great summary of what you will find inside:
TL;DR: Robot dexterity is stuck behind many unsolved problems. This post focuses on one that we think is underappreciated: the gearbox. High-ratio gearboxes break sim-to-real transfer, destroy force transparency, and are the first thing to wear out. We explain why, and what we did about it.
I highly recommend this article, especially if you work with manipulation.
Robotheca: the open-source robot library
Robotheca is a library of open-source robots, many of which this newsletter has featured over the years. I find this interesting for a few reasons: the library includes over 450 robots, all categorized with BOM prices, complexity, and a custom scoring system. If you are looking to build a new robot, start here!
Better Than a Robot Arm? Why I Built a Crane Robot to clean my house
This is an interesting build of a room-scale, wire-driven robot gripper you can use to clean your space. I was recently pondering buying a claw machine, but this sounds way cooler!
LoongForge-VLDA — Vision-Language-Delta-Action
I don’t think I would be able to describe this feature better than its repository:
We introduce LoongForge-VLDA (Vision-Language-Delta-Action), a new model architecture that learns compact Deltas as actionable transition interfaces for robotic manipulation. It extends π₀.₅ with latent world modeling and world-conditioned action prediction, using V-JEPA 2 visual representations to learn latent changes and future features, and jointly trains the action policy with an auxiliary alignment objective. This project provides the two-stage training and evaluation recipe, built on LoongForge.
How to Train Your Robot
Brian Potter of Construction Physics wrote a primer on robot training, covering current approaches, limitations, and the future outlook. It might be a good read for anyone just starting to explore these methods.
Bedrock Robotics nears $1B in total funding as demand for autonomous heavy equipment surges
Citing the article:
San Francisco-based Bedrock Robotics has raised $600 million in Series C funding, co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, at a $4.1 billion valuation. The round brings its total funding to nearly $1 billion as it scales fully autonomous heavy equipment to address nationwide construction labor shortages.
Marelleo, a story box I built for my kids
Forgive me for featuring a non-robotic toy in the newsletter, but I found the idea of this story box, where you can associate any sound file with a figurine through an NFC, and have the kid play it by putting the figurine on the box, quite exciting. I hope to build this one day!
FOSDEM 2027: Robotics & Simulation Devroom, 3rd edition!
For the third year, I’m one of the organizers of the FOSDEM Robotics & Simulation devroom. Every year, we get an interesting lineup of people sharing their stories about working on or with open-source robotics and tooling. One of my colleagues described FOSDEM as the Woodstock of conferences, and it’s strangely fitting - it’s an event unlike any other. And it’s free to attend! The Call for Proposals is now open, and I invite you to submit your talk. If you would rather attend, see you in Brussels!
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.
- LTX is a lab for building frontier open world models, developing open-weight multimodal models that understand physical space, causality, and structure.
Events
- ROSCon IT 2026: Nov 03, 2026. Bologna, Italy
- 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.
Want to promote your product or service in Weekly Robotics? Check out our advertising options.