I forgot to mention it two weeks back, but it’s been 8 (!!) years since I started Weekly Robotics. What. a. journey. It has been super fun catching up with robotics for so long, and sometimes I can’t help but feel our industry is just getting started in some ways. Onwards and upwards, and looking forward to the next 8 years!
FUSE: The Location Technology Conference for Physical AI [Sponsored]
FUSE is the conference for engineers solving real-world localization and autonomy, with talks from the teams shipping Physical AI in production. No product keynotes or marketing. Two stops in 2026: San Francisco (Nov 19, Foundry SF) and Toulouse (Oct 6, Orange 5G Lab).
Stretch 4 Autodocking
With so many things being AI-driven lately, I found it refreshing to read about a good ol’ algorithmic solution to a problem. In this blog post, Binit shares how he implemented Autodocking on the Hello Robot Stretch robot. This is an interesting implementation of Nav2, MPPI, and MPC. Getting this algorithm to run a 40ms loop is impressive! Big thanks to Binit for sharing this news with me!
Hilarity, unease and relief: games show China is not over the finish line in humanoid robot race
Last week, I mentioned the speed record from the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games in China. This article zooms in a bit more on this competition and highlights the massive differences you could find in the competition year-over-year. If you like seeing robots break, you can find some robots from those games falling apart here.
I Gave Claude a Body
Strap a camera to an $1,100 R/C car and have Claude Code control it. I didn’t expect it could get so entertaining, yet so philosophical. This was fun!
Microduck - A tiny biped robot you can teach new tricks
I am mind-blown by this robot. Sure, it’s probably the best off-the-shelf robot for Reinforcement Learning for the price, but $399? And this thing comes with 15 servos? At this price point, it’s a steal, and I’m tempted to order one for that reason alone. It turns out the company has already sold over 10,000+ units. Congrats to the team!
I’m also not surprised that Pollen Robotics developed this robot, since Open Duck has been around for a while and was developed by Antoine Pirrone, who happens to work at Pollen.
Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, report says
Since we are discussing Hugging Face (and why they can sell robots at cost), news dropped that NVIDIA agreed to buy Hugging Face. I’ve seen many sources reporting it like it was a done deal - not yet! The companies are merely discussing the acquisition (and I haven’t seen either officially confirm this yet).
Gatik Raises $200 Million
Citing the release:
Gatik, the leader in autonomous trucking, today announced $200 million in financing as demand accelerates for driverless commercial freight across Fortune 50 retail, grocery and CPG supply chains. The Series D round was led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), with participation from Millennium Management, ARK Invest, Intact Private Capital and others.
Our Sponsors
- Card79 helps robotics companies accelerate deployment and adoption by designing every human touchpoint between people and autonomous systems—from industrial design and interfaces to human-robot interaction.
- 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
- Jiga connects hardware teams directly with vetted manufacturers for reliable capacity from prototype to production, combining the speed of digital manufacturing with the trust of a long-term supplier relationship
- Point One Navigation delivers centimeter-accurate positioning to robots and autonomous systems — powered by the world’s densest fully-owned RTK corrections network.
- Viam is the software platform for building, deploying, and managing robotics applications. Write control logic in your language of choice with well-defined APIs for hardware and services, deploy with built-in OTA updates, and easily scale from prototype to production.
Events
- Commercial UAV Expo: Sep 01 - Sep 03, 2026. Las Vegas, Nevada, United States of America
- Autonomy: Sep 14, 2026. Malmö, Sweden
- ROSCon Global: Sep 22 - Sep 24, 2026. Toronto, Canada
- Gravis Robotics x Foxglove: Zurich Robotics Night: Sep 29, 2026. Zürich, Switzerland
- FUSE Toulouse 2026: Oct 06, 2026. Toulouse, France
- Open Source Summit: Oct 07 - Oct 09, 2026. Prague, Czechia
- ROSCon UK 2026: Oct 21 - Oct 23, 2026. Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- ROSCon Spain 2026: Oct 27 - Oct 28, 2026. Valencia, Spain
- FUSE San Francisco 2026: Nov 19, 2026. San Francisco, California, United States of America
- ROSCon BE 2026: Nov 25 - Nov 26, 2026. Nivelles, Belgium
For more robotic events, check out our event page.
Want to promote your product or service in Weekly Robotics? Check out our advertising options.