I love the first feature in today’s issue. I love long-form content looking into reverse engineering and lessons learned (if you’ve been subscribed for a while, you might have noticed that), and the video from Excessive Overkill is exactly that. It’s very entertaining, and the open-source controller for this robot arm is the cherry on top! It makes me feel like I learned something other than what pedipulation is when crafting today’s newsletter.
Manufacturing ≠ Transactions [Sponsored]
Source custom parts with direct access to the manufacturers making them. No middleman, no black box. Jiga gives you a vetted network and one accountable partner standing behind every order. You know who’s building your parts and communicate with them directly. AI-assisted operations handle supplier matching, quoting, quality verification, and production tracking, so the relationships stay human while the operations run at speed.
Fixing a 3000lb Robot and Letting the Internet Destroy Stuff With It
Excessive Overkill lives up to the channel name with this video. Their work creating an open-source FPGA controller for these arms is outstanding. This video is a crazy-good reverse-engineering story; you should watch it!
Should robots be generalists or specialists?
You need to answer the question in the title, but you have three minutes to answer it. What do you say? In this essay, Matthew T. Mason shows an interesting perspective.
Solving a Giant Rubik’s Cube with a Quadruped Robot
I’ll never get tired of the research coming from the ETH Robotic Systems Lab. This time, the team taught a robot to solve a gigantic Rubik’s Cube. If you are wondering why, here are a few reasons I can think of: building SOTA perception and localization, fine-grained pedipulation (a new word I just learned), and interacting with the environment. To learn more about this work, check out this paper.
DASH: A da Vinci Adapter for Serial-link and Humanoid Robots as an Accessible Platform for Surgical Robotics Research
If you thought having quadruped robots solve Rubik’s Cube was a work of art, I’m wondering what you would say about using a humanoid robot as a teleoperation platform to manipulate a surgical robot?
I Built a Drone With ONE Motor
Joshua Bird has built a drone with just one motor. Using a hinge propeller hub and variable acceleration, the software can control the drone’s pitch and roll. This feature is the first time I’ve heard of the PPA-CF filament, which seems to have some very interesting properties (and a price of 156 euros).
RoboJev
If you’re having trouble keeping up with all the trends and framework du jour in the AI world, let me add one more to your plate: RoboJev is a model for labeling task success in robot learning. According to this thread, it’s 48x cheaper and 28x faster than 6 Astra.
Eka Robotics raises $150M to scale its vision-force-action model for robots - The Robot Report
Citing the article:
Eka Robotics this week said it has raised $150 million in Series A funding. The startup said the new funding will help it scale its technology and customer deployments.
Founded in 2024, Eka is building a vision-force-action (VFA) model to develop an intuition of physics through reinforcement learning at scale. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company said that robots using its AI can pick a wide variety of objects outside the training distribution at a speed of roughly 1,500 operations per hour.
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.
Events
- ROSCon Spain 2026: Oct 27 - Oct 28, 2026. Valencia, Spain
- Robot Hackathon: Harnessing Physical AI & Data: Oct 29 - Oct 30, 2026. San Francisco, California, United States of America
- ROSCon IT 2026: Nov 03, 2026. Bologna, Italy
- Humanoid Europe 2026: Nov 05 - Nov 06, 2026. Munich, Germany
- 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.
Want to promote your product or service in Weekly Robotics? Check out our advertising options.