Weekly Robotics #329

Issue 329

Something I've been thinking about for half of last week was when we get to a point where we can fight viruses with purely mechanical methods (i.e. nanobots), but then I remembered a cautionary tale of Quarians in Mass Effect who end up all wearing hazmat suits because of an atrophied immune system. Yes, I've been sick most of last week, plz send your best advice on fighting a cold.

Figure reaches $39B valuation in latest funding round

Figure reaches $39B valuation in latest funding round cover

We start with some happy news for Figure - the company raised over $1B at a $39B valuation. For reference, the two largest publicly traded purely robotics companies I could find are: Symbotic has a market cap of $33.7B, and FANUC has $27B cap.

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Rethink Robotics shuts down – again

As we are now covering business news, we have sad news from Rething - the company is shutting down.

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AV1 for robotics AI streaming, training and storage.

In this blog post, Haixuan Tao, makes a case for using AV1 video encoding format for robotics. According to the experiments presented, the format is more performant in almost every way, except for storing data as images.

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rl-tools/raptor: A Foundation Policy for Quadrotor Control

rl-tools/raptor: A Foundation Policy for Quadrotor Control cover

This work presents a method for training a “highly adaptive foundation policy for quadrotor control”. The results are quite something. The solution worked on 10 different quadrotors and on four different autopilots (PX4/Betaflight/Crazyflie/M5StampFly). For more information about this work, check out this video and this paper.

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mosaico-labs/refx: Compile-time safe C++ library for accurate coordinate transformations and navigation in mobile robotics.

refx is a modern header-only C++ library designed for mobile robotics and navigation. Its core philosophy is to leverage the C++ type system to provide compile-time safety for all geometric and geodetic calculations. This prevents a wide class of common and difficult-to-debug errors that arise from incorrect handling of coordinate reference frames.

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Controlling Robots using a Large Language Model

Controlling Robots using a Large Language Model cover

Michael Hart wrote this excellent tutorial on how to control a robot simulated in Gazebo via Claude. The solution heavily leverages ROSA, an AI agent designed to integrate LLMs with ROS.

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Bin4ry/UniPwn

Apparently, the Unitree robots suffer from a vulnerability in the BLE WiFi setup that can potentially grant someone full access to the robot. The issue is quite concerning, hopefully the company goes ahead and patches it soon.

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The Story of Hubot

The Story of Hubot cover

In 1984, a company called Hubotics showcased Hubot, a home mobile robot that was surprisingly capable for its time. On release, the price of the robot was $3,500, about $11,000 in today’s money. One thing I always think about watching these old robots is that they were so featureful, yet in 40 years, no one managed to produce robots with this kind of functionality that would make it into homes on a large scale. Will it be different with today’s humanoid push?

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