The Open Source Summit in Amsterdam was a lot of fun. My next stop is ROSCon in Singapore (27-29th Oct) and Infoshare in Katowice (24-25th Nov). If you attend any of these and would like to catch up, please let me know! Next week, I'll be taking a short break from the newsletter, so see you in two weeks!

UR5 Inverse Kinematics

Alexander Elias created this fantastic write-up, which teaches you how to write an inverse kinematic solver based on IK-Geo. As you'd expect, the tutorial is making good use of maths, so make sure to load up on sugar and caffeine before doing a deep dive!

The Myth of the Planned Career

Joe Jones created another article for his Dancing with Roomba blog. This time, Joe is discussing his career path and how it has been changing over time. Sometimes travelling the world or landing a dream job does not help living a fulfilled life and you find your calling by chance.

Diffuse-CLoC: Guided Diffusion for Physics-based Character Look-ahead Control

There used to be a time, where every year I would go through all SIGGRAPH submissions and describe the robotic-related ones. This submission shows an interesting approach to character control that is not out of realm of possibility to be applied on robotics systems.

Building A Real Life Pixar Lamp Pt.2

A cool open-source robot arm that's also an arm with an attached LLM. The team used the Feetech STS3215 servos, which can also be found in the SO100 project. For more information, check out the project repo.

Optimizing ROS 2 Communication for Wireless Robotic Systems

If you've used ROS 2 on a lossy wi-fi network, chances are you know how painful a process it can be. This paper by the Researchers from the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology presents their work on tuning DDS for this exact scenario. The output of this work is this GitHub project with a script that should help you tune your settings. If you happen to try it out, please let me know how it goes! I'm really curious how it works out.

The Ultimate Guide To Linear Actuators

Jeremy Fielding, who has been featured in this newsletter numerous times, created this video explaining in great detail how linear actuators work and how to select one for your next project.

Air Spot | RL Behavior Research

In this video, you can learn a little bit about how the team at Boston Dynamics prepared their robots for a "Got Talent" audition, and taught the robot to perform a triple back-flip.

Events

• Commercial UAV Expo : Sep 02 - Sep 04, 2025. Las Vegas, United States of America
• ROSCon Japan 2025 : Sep 09 - Sep 09, 2025. Nagoya, Japan
• CppCon 2025 (robotics track) : Sep 13 - Sep 19, 2025. Aurora, Colorado, United States of America
• ROSCon UK 2025 : Sep 15 - Sep 17, 2025. Edinburgh, United Kingdom
• Actuate 2025 : Sep 23 - Sep 24, 2025. San Francisco, California, United States of America
• Conference on Robot Learning 2025 : Sep 27 - Sep 30, 2025. Seoul, Korea
• RoboBusiness 2025 : Oct 15 - Oct 16, 2025. Santa Clara, United States of America
• IROS 2025 : Oct 18 - Oct 25, 2025. Hangzhou, China
• ROSCon 2025 : Oct 27 - Oct 29, 2025. Singapore, Republic of Singapore
• ROSCon China 2025 : Oct 30 - Oct 31, 2025. Shanghai, China

For more robotic events, check out our event page.