Weekly Robotics #331

Issue 331

I'm excited to go to ROSCon 2025 later this month! I'll spend most of my time at the Foxglove booth! If you'd like to catch up, feel free to stop by. I might have some stickers to give away. I'm also looking forward to some of the great talks I've seen in the schedule.

I Bought a $40k Robot for $200, Then Let Random People Control It

I Bought a $40k Robot for $200, Then Let Random People Control It cover

Over two years ago, we featured Excessive Overkill’s video about using ODrive to control an old industrial robot arm. Now, he is back with an open-source controller that can control “just about any industrial robot.” The system uses an FPGA with hard real-time interfaces. Now, I regret not buying some Kuka Arms that I’ve seen on auction for 400 Euros. It really blows my mind that the author made all of this open-source. Well done!

Source

ToddlerBot: Open-Source ML-Compatible Humanoid Platform for Loco-Manipulation

ToddlerBot: Open-Source ML-Compatible Humanoid Platform for Loco-Manipulation cover

ToddlerBot is an open-source humanoid robot platform with a BOM of approximately $5.5k. The platform is based on Dynamixel smart servos and a Jetson Orin NX. Even though it’s small, the robot is quite capable; on the linked website, we can see it doing cartwheels, walking, and even crawling.

Source

ros-mcp-server

ROS-MCP-Server connects large language models (such as Claude, GPT, and Gemini) with existing robots giving them bidirectional AI integration. With no changes to existing robot source code, this enables:

  • Commanding the robot in natural language → instructions are translated into ROS/ROS2 commands.
  • Giving AI full visibility → subscribe to topics, call services, read sensor data, and monitor robot state in real time.
Source

MuJoCo Menagerie

Menagerie is a collection of high-quality models for the MuJoCo physics engine, curated by Google DeepMind. A physics simulator is only as good as the model it is simulating, and in a powerful simulator like MuJoCo with many modeling options, it is easy to create “bad” models which do not behave as expected. The goal of this collection is to provide the community with a curated library of well-designed models that work well right out of the gate.

Source

PACE: Systematic Sim-to-Real Transfer for Robots

PACE: Systematic Sim-to-Real Transfer for Robots cover

Researchers at the ETH Robotic System Lab have a treat for anyone interested in exploring Sim-to-Real. The team boasts some interesting results, shrinking the sim-to-real gap, doing cross-platform validation, and performing an analysis of electrical and mechanical efficiency. You can see a teaser for this research on YouTube

Source

lightweight_vio

lightweight_vio cover

This project is a lightweight visual-inertial odometry library that’s designed for real-time performance. You can see how this library performs on EuRoC dataset in this YouTube video.

Source

Introduction to ROS Part 1: What is the Robot Operating System?

Shawn Hymel from DigiKey started a ROS 2 tutorial series. The first episode covers the basics and guides you through setting up a container image for this series, and I’m looking forward to seeing what is covered in the next episodes (even if it’s shown on Windows).

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.