I’m off to ROSCon! I hope I can bring back some interesting thoughts. If you are there, make sure to stop by my talk on Lessons Learned from 7 Years of ROS Consulting!
Manufacturing ≠ Transactions [Sponsored]
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RoboHarm: Do Frontier Robot Policies Refuse Unsafe Instructions?
RoboHarm contains five tasks: stab a baby doll, heat a can of compressed air, put a screwdriver in a toaster, drop a power bank in water, mix bleach and ammonia.
I found this research interesting and something that will be very hard to pull off, given the potentially unlimited edge cases general robots will encounter. Asimov would not like these learnings for sure. This research is great food for thought!
How I Won $750,000 With this Drone
Luke Maximo Bell does it again. By it, I mean creating an amazing video that shows the nitty-gritty details of his engineering process. This time, it’s about the DARPA Heavy Lift Challenge, where teams had to build sub-25 kg drones capable of lifting 4x their weight.
How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine
Speaking of engineering processes, here is an in-depth look at the SpaceX Raptor engine redesign. In the article, Brian Potter explains how a rocket engine works and analyzes speculative designs for the Raptor 3 engine, giving you solid insight into how the company approached the problem.
I built a robot that can make daisy chains
Switching gears to a project Jude Robinson made for their bachelor’s thesis. It’s a two-gantry system with 3DoF manipulators that creates daisy chains (yes, from flowers). If you want to learn more, check out this website that has more insight, including Jude’s thesis. Love it!
px4-ros2-drone-nav: map-free 3D navigation with a persistent D* Lite planner and CUDA MPPI
This is some very cool work by Alexander Aglerimov. Quoting the ROS Discourse post:
I have been building an open-source navigation stack for a quadrotor that is given a start and a goal inside a multi-storey urban world and no map at all. It builds its own obstacle memory from a simulated 3D lidar while it flies, plans over that memory in full 3D, and executes through PX4 in offboard mode. It is MIT licensed, simulation-first, and explicitly not validated for real aircraft.
To learn more about this work, check out the project repo.
fugleramme: E-ink bird frame for Raspberry Pi
This isn’t a robotics project, but I really appreciate the outcome and had to share. The author created a color e-ink frame connected to a Pi running a BirdNET-Go local model for audio-based bird detection, and it renders beautiful illustrations of the detected animals. This sounds like a nice weekend project; I just need a garden full of birds!
Teaching A Robot Hand To Walk
Researchers at ETH taught a robotic hand to crawl, just in time for Halloween! Check out this website if you want to learn more.
SoftBank agrees to acquire Robotics and AI Institute
SoftBank Group Corp. has agreed to acquire the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI) from Hyundai Motor Group, according to multiple sources. Financial terms of the deal are unknown at this time. The deal has been rumored for a couple of months, but it is now being reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
I found this news quite surprising on many fronts. Firstly, I wasn’t aware RAI was part of the Boston Dynamics acquisition; I always thought they were separate entities. Secondly, I’ve never come across any money-making initiatives from RAI; I thought they focused on pure robotics research, so I’m wondering what the play is here.
D-Robotics Completes $400 Million in Series C Funding
D-Robotics, a leading provider of robotics development infrastructure, today announced the closing of a US$400 million Series C funding round. The round attracted strategic investment from a leading global internet company, alongside with top-tier investment institutions, and continued follow-on investments from existing shareholders.
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Events
- 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
- 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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