My favorite local Robotics Meetup is back in Krakow, Poland, on the 29th of June. We are also thrilled to continue being a media sponsor of that event. The lineup of the event is also very good! I’m looking forward to all the presentations!
Manufacturing ≠ Transactions [Sponsored]
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Amazon’s Astro Robot Sound Turns Motion Into Story
Here is an interesting story from Mike Forst, who worked with the UX team to build Amazon’s Astro robot. It’s a great story on designing human-robot interaction that I recommend to everyone!
Qwen Robot Suite
Qwen is entering the robotics game with an announcement of Robot Suite, which consists of three models:
Qwen-RobotNav, Qwen-RobotManip, and Qwen-RobotWorld. Nav unifies five navigation task families through a controllable observation protocol. Manip turns heterogeneous robot data into a coherent canonical space, enabling cross-embodiment training at scale. World co-trains 20+ embodiments via a natural-language action interface under one world model.
You will find descriptions of these models on the linked page, although at the time of writing, the embedded videos don’t work :(.
Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk
Matthias Plappert is building a desktop setup to test VLA’s and robot models with one assumption: it needs to be affordable (up to $10,000 EUR) and small enough to live next to his desk. The result is a rig with one arm (UFACTORY xArm Lite 6), two cameras, and a 6 DoF SpaceMouse for teleoperation. In the blog post, Matthias discusses his assumptions and choices for the project and describes how the setup will be used. I’m looking forward to the follow-up posts and learning something!
Scale Models of ROS robots
Open Robotics Discourse user MoffKalast wrote an inspiring write-up detailing how they built a 1/5 working-scale model of Husarion’s Lynx mobile robot. The robot comes with a nice sensor suite for its size and can run Nav2.
Lucky Robots — Infinite Data Generation for Robotic AI
Lucky Robots created a game engine purpose-built for robotics. According to the download page, the simulator is free for research and personal use, however I couldn’t find any information about pricing for commercial use. I’m looking forward to seeing how the team grows this project further.
Leg-swing aerial braking with a peak forward flight velocity of 2.5 m/s
Remember the researchers who worked on a bipedal jet-propelled robot? They took another step in their journey, teaching the robot to break by moving its legs. I’m looking forward to seeing more progress on this project!
Field-Testing Rover Capabilities for the Moon and Mars
This is a bit of a teaser about the JPL teams’ field testing of advanced capabilities for potential future Moon and Mars rovers. This work is called ERNEST (Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain), and you can find more context about this project in this article.
Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics as SoftBank exits for $325 million
Hyundai Motor Group is acquiring SoftBank’s remaining 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 million, completing its full ownership of the robotics company. The deal closes as Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot enters commercial deployment and the broader humanoid race intensifies against Tesla Optimus and Figure AI. SoftBank exits to redeploy capital toward its $41 billion OpenAI bet and AI infrastructure.
Our Sponsors
- Foxglove is a purpose-built, modular platform for robotics teams to collect, organize, and learn from vast quantities of multimodal data, creating the data flywheel to safely scale from development to distributed fleets
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- Point One Navigation delivers centimeter-accurate positioning to robots and autonomous systems — powered by the world’s densest fully-owned RTK corrections network.
Events
- 2026 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: Jun 22 - Jun 24, 2026. Houston, Texas, United States of America
- Cracow Robotics & AI Meetup: Jun 29, 2026. Krakow, Poland
- Robotics: Science and Systems: Jul 13 - Jul 16, 2026. Sydney, Australia
- Actuate 26: Aug 18 - Aug 19, 2026. San Francisco, California, United States of America
- Commercial UAV Expo: Sep 01 - Sep 03, 2026. Las Vegas, Nevada, United States of America
- Autonomy: Sep 14, 2026. Malmö, Sweden
- Open Source Summit: Oct 07 - Oct 09, 2026. Prague, Czechia
- ROSCon Spain 2026: Oct 27 - Oct 28, 2026. Valencia, Spain
- ROSCon BE 2026: Nov 25 - Nov 26, 2026. Nivelles, Belgium
- Humanoids 2026: Dec 06 - Dec 09, 2026. Santa Clara, California, United States of America
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
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