Today, let's start with sharing some personal news: last week, I joined Foxglove as a Developer Relations Engineer. I'm super excited about this role, as it fits very well with my Weekly Robotics experience. If you participated in the LeRobot Hackathon and made something cool, feel free to drop me a line! I'd like to feature some of the coolest projects next week!

On September 23-24th, we are gathering the brightest minds in robotics for a two-day developer conference in San Francisco. Use code OGMtZA for a 10% ticket discount!

Isaac Sim is open-source

Just last week, we've mentioned that Newton was released, but it seems NVIDIA has one-upped itself and open-sourced Isaac Sim too. This is some truly great news for the open-source robotics community. Thanks, NVIDIA!

High-speed control and navigation for quadrupedal robots on complex and discrete terrain

Researchers at RaiLab at KAIST developed an interesting solution to quadruped robot parkour. There is something satisfying to how this system was designed and, more importantly, how the quadruped robot performs in the real-life experiments.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Robotics

No spoilers, but this is the funniest feature in Weekly Robotics since I started this project 7 years ago. Thanks Benjie!

Aliasing... Or How Sampling Distorts Signals

This video by Marshall Bruner is a great intro to aliasing. This video might be helpful the next time you argue with your colleague that you are not logging your data fast enough.

I made a 3D printed VTOL drone that can fly 130 miles

This is an inspiring story of Tsung Xu who developed a VTOL drone without prior experience in many of the areas necessary to complete a build like this. Never before, had I come across foaming PLA for 3D-printing., and it indeed sounds like the material for the job! I suddenly have an urge to try to 3D-print an aircraft.

Gecko Robotics raises $125 million in deal valuing critical infrastructure startup over $1 billion

Gecko Robotics is officially a unicorn now! Congratulations to the team!

Events

• Energy Drone & Robotics Summit 2025 : Jun 16 - Jun 18, 2025. Houston, Texas, United States of America
• Robotics: Science and Systems 2025 : Jun 21 - Jun 25, 2025. Los Angeles, California, United States of America
• Automatica 2025 : Jun 24 - Jun 27, 2025. Munich, Germany
• RoboCup 2025 : Jul 15 - Jul 21, 2025. Salvador, Brazil
• Open Source Summit 2025 North America : Jul 23 - Jul 25, 2025. Denver, United States of America
• Open Source Summit 2025 Europe : Aug 25 - Aug 27, 2025. Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Commercial UAV Expo : Sep 02 - Sep 04, 2025. Las Vegas, United States of America
• 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

For more robotic events, check out our event page.