Today’s issue arrives a bit later. By accident, I enjoyed my holidays so much that I stopped researching cool robots. I really enjoyed the first feature I prepared for you Today. MABEL is an interesting design, especially for the price. It runs on Damiao motors, which I’m seeing in more and more designs these days. This got me thinking about how much the upcoming robot revolution will be driven by cost-effective, high-power actuators. Access to these for us, mere mortals working on hobby projects, is a huge enabler.
FUSE: The Location Technology Conference for Physical AI [Sponsored]
Nov 19, The Foundry, San Francisco
FUSE is the location technology conference for robotics and autonomy engineers. Learn from leaders deploying Physical AI in production at scale. Only a few seats left!
MABEL — Open-Source Mobile Bimanual Robot for Teleoperation and Learning
Mabel is an open-source bimanual robot developed by Researchers from the Center for Robotics and Embodied Intelligence (CREO), New York University. The robot sits on a wheeled platform, is open-source, and costs about $8k in parts. The robot uses a standing desk lift for the up-and-down movement. The arms are adapted OpenArm hardware and use Damiao actuators. Each arm carries a 17-DOF tendon-driven ORCA hand.
Dream, build, destroy, repeat
TIL MIT has a Combat Robotics Club (CRC) that lets students build battlebot-style fighting robots. It makes me want to come back to school.
Drone Delivery Noise Shows Limits of Tech Acceptance
This article covers what I believe is the biggest blocker to large-scale drone delivery adoption: noise and how it can negatively affect people. This issue is good food for thought for anyone looking to send the robots where the humans are.
ROSCon Global 2026 on Vimeo
In case you missed it, ROSCon 2026 videos are out! Enjoy! If you are thinking of consulting in ROS, here is my talk from this conference. Looking forward to the next one in Krakow!
Task-Driven Closed-Loop Design Optimization of Passively Morphing Quadrotors for Contact-Mediated Narrow Gap Traversal
A team of researchers built a drone that can passively adapt its shape to the openings it’s flying through:
The resulting prototype passively reduces its width from 31.3 to 14.1 cm and traverses a 15 cm wide opening at a 2 m/s reference speed.
If you are wondering how to control the drone under such deflection, the answer in this paper is NMPC (nonlinear model predictive control). Nice work!
batchplan
Citing the repo:
batchplan is a Rust library for batched, collision-aware robot motion planning. Solve IK, find paths, and generate trajectories within robot limits across many scenes in one call. Planning runs on the CPU, with optional wgpu acceleration for IK and trajectory optimization.
Chinese regulators block SoftBank’s $5.4B acquisition of ABB Robotics
Citiing the article:
It has been more than a year since ABB announced it singed an agreement to sell its robotics division to the Japanese tech giant SoftBank Group. The $5.375 billion deal is now being blocked by Chinese regulators, ABB confirmed to The Robot Report.
A former Apple and Uber engineer raised $51 million to rethink the self-driving truck
Humble Robotics has raised $51M. The company is developing an autonomous hauler that looks like a neat redesign of conventional hauling trucks.
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Events
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