No intro today, let's jump straight into some interesting robotics projects and write-ups!
Six Things I Learned Watching a Robotics Startup Die from the Inside
This is a great post from Rui Xu about his experience as the COO of K-Scale Labs, a US humanoid robot company that went out of business last year. I really appreciate these lessons, and I think you might too!
Xiaomi-Robotics-0
We introduce Xiaomi-Robotics-0, an advanced vision-language-action (VLA) model optimized for high performance and fast and smooth real-time execution. The key to our method lies in a carefully designed training recipe and deployment strategy. Xiaomi-Robotics-0 is first pre-trained on a large amount of cross-embodiment robot trajectories and vision-language data, enabling it to acquire broad and generalizable action-generation knowledge while preserving strong VLM capabilities. During post-training and deployment, we employ asynchronous execution techniques to address inference latency, ensuring continuous and seamless real-time rollouts.
How Perseverance Learned to ‘Self-Locate’ on Mars
This is more of a teaser, but apparently, the JPL team initially used a powerful computer module originally created to communicate with the Ingenuity helicopter and turned it into a localization module that can match features in camera images with satellite imagery to localize itself. You can learn more about the localization framework in this paper.
Adding internal audio sensing to internal vision enables human-like in-hand fabric recognition with soft robotic fingertips
This work is ingenious. The team incorporated a microphone into the fingers of a robotic hand to help detect fabrics, achieving 97% classification accuracy on 20 common fabrics. The video embedded on this website is a very nice example of robotic ASMR. To learn more about this work, check out this paper.
Platonic Ideals: Making Money on Construction Robots
This piece from Era Ventures is a nice overview of how the construction industry is structured in the US and what can be the points of entry for robotics companies (spoiler alert: this is no easy feat).
OpenCastor
OpenCastor brands itself as “the universal runtime for embodied AI” - it’s an open-source robot brain project that allows you to connect to eight different AI providers, some of which you can start for free. The project boasts a tiered architecture, where the reactive layer provides “hardware-level reflexes” that don’t contain AI and provide the safety layer. I’d love to see how this system performs in action!
2025 ROS Metrics Report
The annual ROS metrics report is out! It’s showing healthy community growth and a crazy jump in.deb downloads. I’m really happy to see these numbers!
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Events
- Embedded World 2026: Mar 10 - Mar 12, 2026. Nuremberg, Germany
- European Robotics Forum: Mar 23 - Mar 27, 2026. Stavanger, Norway
- Robotics & Physical AI day (Mashup): Apr 15 - Apr 15, 2026. Malmö, Sweden
- Open Hardware Summit: May 22 - May 23, 2026. Berlin, Germany
- ICRA 2026: Jun 01 - Jun 05, 2026. Vienna, Austria
- 2026 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: Jun 22 - Jun 24, 2026. Houston, Texas, United States of America
- Robotics: Science and Systems: Jul 13 - Jul 16, 2026. Sydney, Australia
- Open Source Summit: Oct 07 - Oct 09, 2026. Prague, Czechia
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
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