Weekly Robotics #321

Issue 321

On August 26th, I'm giving a talk on open-source robotics at the Open Source Summit in Amsterdam. If you happen to be there at that time and you'd like to meet up for a coffee, feel free to reach out!

Reachy Mini - The Open-Source Robot for Today’s and Tomorrow’s AI Builders

Reachy Mini - The Open-Source Robot for Today's and Tomorrow's AI Builders cover

Hugging Face is releasing the Reachy Mini, a cute companion computer that is currently available for preorder (yours truly already ordered his). If this robot does not give you enough FOMO, then the team also released the Amazing Hand, an 8 DoF four-fingered robot hand with a sub $200 BOM.

There is one interesting aspect about the latest robots released by Pollen Robotics/Hugging Face - they don’t mention ROS. Granted, these robots are far simpler than Reachy 2, but it’s still an interesting change in direction (not too unexpected given the AI push).

Source

RealSense Completes Spinout from Intel, Raises $50 Million to Accelerate AI-Powered Vision for Robotics and Biometrics

RealSense successfully spun off from Intel and raised $50 million.

“We’re excited to build on our leadership position in 3D perception in robotics and see scalable growth potential in the rise of physical AI,” said Nadav Orbach, CEO of RealSense. “Our independence allows us to move faster and innovate more boldly to adapt to rapidly changing market dynamics as we lead the charge in AI innovation and the coming robotics renaissance.”

Source

I Built a Robot Dog Using… Rope?

I Built a Robot Dog Using... Rope? cover

Aaed Musa built a quadruped robot driven by Capstan Drives. As always, the video is very informative and contains highly satisfying shots of the build process.

Source

Ironless Rotor Cycloidal Planetary Actuator

Ironless Rotor Cycloidal Planetary Actuator cover

If you are still hungry for actuators, then here is an excellent write-up from Caden Kraft on how he designed an actuator from scratch, including wiring the coils himself. And the best thing? It’s open-source.

Source

Harvest Automation, Part 1 – Dancing with Roomba

Harvest Automation, Part 1 – Dancing with Roomba cover

Joe Jones wrote this captivating story of his journey founding Harvest Automation after leaving iRobot with his colleagues. It’s an insightful story about discovering product-market fit and building an agricultural company. I’m looking forward to the next part of this series!

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RoboBrain 2.0

Just when you thought this was an AI-free newsletter issue!

We are excited to introduce RoboBrain2.0, the most powerful open-source embodied brain model to date. Compared to its predecessor, RoboBrain 1.0, our latest version are designed to unify perception, reasoning, and planning for complex embodied tasks in physical environments. It comes in two variants: a lightweight 7B model and a full-scale 32B model, featuring a heterogeneous architecture with a vision encoder and a language model. Despite its compact size, RoboBrain 2.0 achieves strong performance across a wide spectrum of embodied reasoning tasks.

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Events

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