Today's issue is on the longer side - had some difficulties coming with the final selection, but that's good, means there is a lot going on in Robotics. Probably a good sign if you are involved in our industry.
Cartwheel Robotics Wants to Build Humanoids that People Love
This piece introduces Yogi, a humanoid robot by Cartwheel Robotics that looks very much like a cartoon character. What comes across to me from this article is Scott LaValley’s strategy of treating general purpose robots as a north start, but meanwhile, targeting museums and science centers.
Students shatter Guinness World Record for fastest puzzle cube-solving robot
Last year, we featured news about Mitsubishi Electric beating the Guiness World Record for the fastest robot to solve a Rubik’s cube at 0.305 seconds. The students from Purdue University just smashed the previous record with a solve in 0.103 seconds. If you blink, you will miss it!
Welcome Your New AI (LEGO) Overlord
This is a fun project, where an LLM creates a LEGO structure based on a prompt, and some YASKAWA manipulators can then build it.
Design for 3D-Printing
You know this feeling when you see a time read estimate on a website, and you know you are in for a treat? That’s the case with this 80-minute article describing some lessons learned over the years.
$1 Robot vs $200,000 Robot
Hacksmith Industries made this video going through various robots for any budget. Good entertainment, and a serious workshop envy!
Wrist Mounted CD Launcher - Built to DESTROY!
If we are doing a YouTube party, then we are doing a YouTube party. In this video, Aaed Musa builds a CD Launcher, that reminds me of a disk launcher from the Unreal Game.
Orient - Ball Balancing Robot
Sahil Sharma and Nishit Mittal created this neat ball-balancing robot. This GitHub repository contains a project video, source code and CAD parts. Well done!
Robot-Manipulation.org
The COMPARE ecosystem aims to create a greater cohesion between open-source products that improves the modularity of open-source components in the robot manipulation pipeline for more effective performance benchmarking. COMPARE seeks to unite the existing community of users and developers to build upon and integrate existing open-source products as well as improve and evolve the future of robot manipulation research. This is achieved through the generation of community-driven standards for components of software pipelines, benchmarking practices, objects, datasets, and hardware designs.
OpenLoong
If you like rabbit holes for exploration, then you might love this one! It’s an open-source hardware for a humanoid robot. Most of the material is still available in Chinese, but once you go through it, you should be able to build a very capable platform!
Events
- 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
- 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
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
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