In the previous issue, I've mentioned that the Embedded Linux Conference will have a robotics track. Griswald, a chair of the robotics track at CppCon told me they are also open for business, and they just announced a call for submissions!
Lately, I feel like the robotics market is booming. In every issue of the newsletter, I end up with 15+ exciting features that I aggressively need to trim down to the final selection. Being in robotics, I think this is a great problem to have!
Sponsored
Feetech STS3215 Servos for Robotics Projects
Kawasaki Corleo
Last week, Kawasaki showcased this very interesting ride-on hydrogen-powered quadruped concept. I have to say I like this concept more than the Ibex robot they have showcased some time back that we covered in the issue #186. I guess it will take some time until we can see a performance of these robots on par with what is shown in the video, but I’m still hyped!
50 most innovative robotics companies
RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards are back!
This year we brought back three major awards: Robot of the Year, Application of the Year, and Startup of the Year. We added a fourth major honor: Robots for Good, which recognizes a robot making a meaningful impact on society.
Autonomous Human-Robot Interaction via Operator Imitation
Disney Researchers keep delivering inspiring content with the BD. This work shows some spectacular interaction of the robot with a user and the robot showing a set of emotions (shy, happy, angry, sad). Cool stuff!
Hey, You’re Killing it, Keep Going
This newsletter issue by Elecia from Embedded.FM really resonated with me. As an independent contractor, Elecia has been suffering from burnout for a while, a trap that is surprisingly easy to fall into if you juggle clients, don’t take holidays and strive to perform at 100% at all times. I’ll allow myself to join the author a little bit here, in case you need to hear this: you’ve got this!
MASt3R-SLAM: Real-Time Dense SLAM with 3D Reconstruction Priors
We present a real-time monocular dense SLAM system designed bottom-up from MASt3R, a two-view 3D reconstruction and matching prior. Equipped with this strong prior, our system is robust on in-the-wild video sequences despite making no assumption on a fixed or parametric camera model beyond a unique camera centre. We introduce efficient methods for pointmap matching, camera tracking and local fusion, graph construction and loop closure, and second-order global optimisation. With known calibration, a simple modification to the system achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks. Altogether, we propose a plug-and-play monocular SLAM system capable of producing globally-consistent poses and dense geometry while operating at 15 FPS.
Unitree Go 2 Teardown: The Secrets of This $2000 Robot Dog
If you like to spend 30 minutes of your coffee time looking at some high-quality teardown, then I highly recommend this one! The folks from iFixit did an excellent job, and I have to say the robot is very high quality for the price.
How Dairy Robots Are Changing Work for Cows (and Farmers)
If you like robot examples for 3Ds (Dirty, Dull, Dangerous), then the range of Lely’s robots described in this article is definitely it. I’m sold on calling this diverse range of products “Dairy Industry 4.0”.
Online Fourier Transform Tutorial
Alex Becker, who is the author of an excellent Kalman Filter Tutorial that we featured a couple of weeks back, is back with a tutorial on Fourier Transform. As with the Kalman Filter publication, the tutorial is very extensive, and contains some example Python code.
A Roboticist’s First Time at the European Robotics Forum
Last week, Kimberly was representing Weekly Robotics at the European Robotics Forum 2025. The linked article describes her experience attending this event for the firs time.
Events
- RoboSoft 2025: Apr 23 - Apr 26, 2025. Lausanne, Switzerland
- Farm Robotics Challenge: Apr 24, 2025 (ddl: Dec 12, 2024). Davis, California, United States of America
- 7th International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering: Apr 28, 2025. Ottawa, Canada
- Robotics Summit & Expo 2025: Apr 30 - May 01, 2025. Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Automate 2025: May 12 - May 15, 2025. Detroit, Michigan, United States of America
- ICUAS (UAVs) 2025: May 14 - May 17, 2025. Charlotte, North Carolina, United States of America
- Xponential 2025: May 19 - May 22, 2025. Houston, Texas, United States of America
- ICRA 2025: May 19 - May 23, 2025. Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America
- Eurobot Open 2025: May 28 - May 31, 2025. La Roche-sur-Yon, France
- Open Hardware Summit 2025: May 30 - May 31, 2025. Edinburgh, Scotland
For more robotic events, check out our event page.