Over the last couple of months, most of the robotic news I've come across has focused on new humanoid robots and vision-language-action models. I still manage to find projects that are outside these two categories, but it has been increasingly difficult. I will still feature general robot-related things to keep you posted, but if you think I missed anything interesting in robotics happening, please do let me know!
SPICE-HL3 Single-Photon, Inertial & Stereo dataset for Exploration of High-Latitude Lunar Landscapes
One of the perks of my job at Foxglove is that I get to play with robotic data. This dataset jumped the queue! It simulated a lunar rover in various lighting conditions. In the dataset, you will find inertial sensors, wheel odometry, and multiple types of cameras. The most unusual modality is the SPAD512 single-photon camera that captures binary images that can be integrated to create higher bit-depth images (sounds like magic to me). To learn more about this dataset, check out this paper.
Awesome Robotics Conferences and Schools List
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you probably saw our event list at the bottom of every issue. Davide Torielli has a more comprehensive list that seems to encompass every robotic conference known to exist.
UAIbot
Beginner-friendly web-based simulator for interactive robotics learning and research. Click and drag on the simulation below to interact with it in 3D!
To top it all off, this project comes with a course on robotic manipulation that looks to be very high quality.
How can we get enough data to train a robot GPT?
Chris Paxton invites you to a thought experiment for creating a massive robot dataset with 2 trillion tokens. Enjoy!
There Are Better Lego-Compatible Universal Joints Out There
If anyone is still building robots from LEGO, this might be an interesting video to check out. Apparently, there is a world of hardened replacements for LEGO parts, in this case, universal joints that can withstand 10x the torque of the original parts.
DexWrist: A Robotic Wrist for Dynamic Manipulation
MIT Researchers created an interesting robotic wrist for agile, dynamic manipulation. The website indicates that a BOM and a tutorial will be released at a later stage. It’ll be interesting to follow this work as it evolves.
Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots
K-Scale Labs builds open-source humanoid robots. They created a launch-HN thread that contains an interesting Q&A. I highly recommend it!
Events
- 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
- Commercial UAV Expo: Sep 02 - Sep 04, 2025. Las Vegas, United States of America
- CppCon 2025 (robotics track): Sep 13 - Sep 19, 2025. Aurora, Colorado, United States of America
- ROSCon UK 2025: Sep 15 - Sep 17, 2025. Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- Actuate 2025: Sep 23 - Sep 24, 2025. San Francisco, California, United States of America
- Conference on Robot Learning 2025: Sep 27 - Sep 30, 2025. Seoul, Korea
- RoboBusiness 2025: Oct 15 - Oct 16, 2025. Santa Clara, United States of America
- IROS 2025: Oct 18 - Oct 25, 2025. Hangzhou, China
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
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