Weekly Robotics #314

Issue 314

ROS 2 Kilted Kaiju was released the other day. When the G-version naming brainstorm was ongoing, I was bummed to learn that Gamera wasn’t an option, but Kaiju was totally fine, so now we have official distro graphics featuring a giant turtle sowing destruction.

I wish I hadn’t missed ICRA this year. From what I’ve seen, the event looked exciting. I especially liked the floating bipeds shown in some coverage I can’t find anymore, but I’ll try to link it in the next issue!

My Robotics Highlights at IEEE ICRA 2025

My Robotics Highlights at IEEE ICRA 2025 cover

Nathan Hung put together a short overview showcasing some of the robots on the ICRA floor. I really liked the video’s format!

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I Bought a Robot Cat for My Rabbit

I Bought a Robot Cat for My Rabbit cover

I really enjoyed this article by Ericka Johnson, who introduces us to the interesting world of ARI (Animal-Robot Interaction), all because of an experiment that looked into testing an interaction between a rabbit and a robot cat.

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Amazon delivery drones crashed after mistaking rain for ground: Report

On December 16th, 2024, two Amazon MK30 multirotors crashed during landing. According to the linked article, the cause was LiDAR misinterpreting rain as the ground, leading the motors to shut off. I did some digging and found the NTSB report from the accident. While it lacks detail, it certainly doesn’t paint as bleak a picture as the article suggests.

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Roller-Coaster-SLAM-Dataset

Roller-Coaster-SLAM-Dataset cover

What better way to benchmark your SLAM solution than by running it through a roller coaster? The highly dynamic motion and changing lighting conditions will likely challenge your library of choice. The two datasets were recorded using an OAK-D Pro W camera with ROS 1, so you’ll need to work with .bag files to run them. Enjoy!

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RTEST - Unit Testing Framework

RTEST is a new kid around the block in ROS 2. It’s a C++ unit test framework developed by BEAM and Spyrosoft that is meant to take inter-process communication out of the equation, making the tests more streamlined.

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D1Auto-Combination

D1Auto-Combination cover

This is an exciting demonstrator from Direct Drive Innovation; it shows two wheeled-bipedal robots that can dock with each other and form a functional wheeled quadruped robot.

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PyRoki: A Modular Toolkit for Robot Kinematic Optimization

PyRoki: A Modular Toolkit for Robot Kinematic Optimization cover

PyRoki is a modular, extensible, and cross-platform toolkit for kinematic optimization, all in Python.

I highly recommend checking out the video contained on the linked page. The results look very interesting.

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LeRobot Community Datasets: The “ImageNet” of Robotics — When and How?

LeRobot community is on fire with adding new datasets so much that some good practices need to be introduced to create quality input for VLAs. If this approach is how we get to general robots, then I’m in!

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Creating a FULL-SIZED Groot!

Creating a FULL-SIZED Groot! cover

It feels like for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been featuring a quality robotic-entertainment video in every issue. Today’s one belongs to Dave’s Armoury who shows a very interesting process in making a huge robot manipulator carve wood to build a gigantic Groot statue.

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Build Toolkits

This week, I created this article, where I share why building power-user interfaces can supercharge your team’s productivity. This lesson took me a good couple of years to realize, but if you want to scale up, freeing your developers from robot provisioning as much as possible is the way to go!

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Events

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