Weekly Robotics #310

By Mat Sadowski
Issue 310

Last week, I wrapped up my longest running consulting gig after a whooping 4 years. I wrote an update on my consulting journey that I'm featuring in this issue - I hope there are some lessons learned there for anyone looking into pivoting their career to follow a similar path.

Remote Robotics Consulting - Seven Years In [Sponsored]

Reachy 2 humanoid – full ROS 2 dev stack now open-source (one-line Docker, sim + Python SDK)

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Just last week, we featured the news that Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics, and it’s already Christmas for anyone who would like to dive deep into a mature ROS 2 software stack of a complex robot. The firmware of the robot uses Rust, and based on the datasheet it should be running 500Hz control loops. The core software of the robot is based on ROS 2 Humble.

Berkeley Humanoid Lite: An Open-source, Accessible, and Customizable 3D-printed Humanoid Robot

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Berkeley Humanoid Lite: An Open-source, Accessible, and Customizable 3D-printed Humanoid Robot cover

Speaking of open-source humanoids, researchers from University of California, Berkeley, released Berkeley Humanoid Lite. A BIM for this platform should come under $5,000. This robot weights only 16 kg and stands at 0.8m tall. To learn more about this work, have a look at this paper.

best-of-robot-simulators

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Kimberly McGuire prepared a list of the top robot simulators. I was surprised about the list when ordered by the GitHub stars.

5 Brutal Truths About Mechanical Engineering (10 Years at Apple, Meta, Startups)

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5 Brutal Truths About Mechanical Engineering (10 Years at Apple, Meta, Startups) cover

The advice for mechanical engineers coming from Leon Zhang in this video seems solid to me (definitely not a proper mechanical engineer). Many points Leon discusses apply to other fields too (for example, what to consider before quitting a stable job to work at a startup).

A VLA with Open-World Generalization

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A VLA with Open-World Generalization cover

Folks from Physical Intelligence released a new VLA model π0.5. To evaluate the robots in homes that were not seen before, the company rented a bunch of Airbnb’s. Based on the results included in the linked page, I think the model (and the robots!) do really well. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next! You can find a paper describing this work here.

PiLiDAR

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PiLiDAR cover

Here is a cool work-in-progress open-source LiDAR. Based on the pictures featured on the project page, it appears that you can make it output 2D scans in real-time and thus could use it in your next robotic project. Cool stuff!

Is the CEO of the humanoid startup Figure AI exaggerating his startup’s work with BMW?

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Jason Del Rey authored this piece, where he asked around about Figure’s cooperation with BMW and whether Figure indeed deployed a robot fleet at their factory. After this article was published, Adcock made this post on LinkedIn, announcing that the company will take legal action against the Fortune and the author.

Events

For more robotic events, check out our event page.