Weekly Robotics #316

Issue 316

The LeRobot Worldwide Hackathon is on this weekend. I'm really excited to see what the community will produce. If you are joining in on the fun, good luck!

Newton Physics Documentation

Newton Physics Documentation cover

Newton Physics, an open-source physics engine developed by NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Disney Research, is out, and I’m very excited about it! The GitHub repo says it’s still prerelease, so I would be cautious about jumping too fast and running this in production. Big thanks to Kimberly McGuire, our expert on robotic simulation, for sharing the news on our Matrix channel!

Source

SmolVLA: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model trained on Lerobot Community Data

SmolVLA: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model trained on Lerobot Community Data cover

Hugging Face had released a tiny Vision-Language-Action model that was trained on LeRobot community datasets. At 450M parameters, the model is quite compact and should run on consumer hardware. If you’d like to learn more about this work, check out this paper.

Source

What Happens When Robots Die? The Case for End-of-Life Standards in Robotics

With Aldebaran being put in receivership, Aaron Prather makes a strong point on creating end-of-life standards in robotics. I like the idea of placing software in escrow from day one, but wonder if any company has taken this approach.

Source

Precision Clock Mk IV

Precision Clock Mk IV cover

Tim Alex Jacobs created and documented another project. To me, this is a tale of passion and overengineering things just because you can (and that’s a good thing!). If you enjoy quirky electronic designs, you will love this write-up (or the video summarizing it).

Source

Cloudini: pointcloud compression for the rest of us

Davide Faconti just released Cloudini, a point cloud compression library that significantly reduces the size of your rosbags. I’m looking forward to doing a deep dive on this in the near future!

Source

FPV Drone Takes Off From A Rocketing Start

FPV Drone Takes Off From A Rocketing Start cover

I Build Stuff built a self-landing CanSat (yes, that’s a satellite a size of a can). The design process in the video is exciting to follow, and the micro linear actuators are a great find!

Source

Ukraine destroys more than 40 military aircraft in a drone attack deep inside Russia

I was on the fence about whether to feature this attack in the newsletter, but I think we should be mindful about the dual-use potential of robotics, and especially drones. The strike itself looks like something straight out of an action movie. The strike supposedly downed as many as 40 Russian aircraft, causing significant losses. When the first news about the attack dropped, some believed the multirotors were using AI or were pre-programmed, but this was debunked, and the drones were apparently teleoperated. If you’d like to learn more about this incident, then AiTelly made an episode describing it in detail. Also, the multirotors were reportedly using Ardupilot.

Source

Events

For more robotic events, check out our event page.

Want to promote your product or service in Weekly Robotics? Check out our advertising options.