Weekly Robotics #383

Every confusing workflow, every support call, every minute of downtime costs your customers patience and confidence.

We make robots easier to work with. From mission planning and everyday interactions to troubleshooting and keeping systems running, we design intuitive UX that reduces friction, builds confidence, and minimizes downtime.

The tl;dr at the top of the post is a great summary of what you will find inside:

TL;DR: Robot dexterity is stuck behind many unsolved problems. This post focuses on one that we think is underappreciated: the gearbox. High-ratio gearboxes break sim-to-real transfer, destroy force transparency, and are the first thing to wear out. We explain why, and what we did about it.

I highly recommend this article, especially if you work with manipulation.

Robotheca is a library of open-source robots, many of which this newsletter has featured over the years. I find this interesting for a few reasons: the library includes over 450 robots, all categorized with BOM prices, complexity, and a custom scoring system. If you are looking to build a new robot, start here!

This is an interesting build of a room-scale, wire-driven robot gripper you can use to clean your space. I was recently pondering buying a claw machine, but this sounds way cooler!

I don't think I would be able to describe this feature better than its repository:

We introduce LoongForge-VLDA (Vision-Language-Delta-Action), a new model architecture that learns compact Deltas as actionable transition interfaces for robotic manipulation. It extends π₀.₅ with latent world modeling and world-conditioned action prediction, using V-JEPA 2 visual representations to learn latent changes and future features, and jointly trains the action policy with an auxiliary alignment objective. This project provides the two-stage training and evaluation recipe, built on LoongForge.

Brian Potter of Construction Physics wrote a primer on robot training, covering current approaches, limitations, and the future outlook. It might be a good read for anyone just starting to explore these methods.

Citing the article:

San Francisco-based Bedrock Robotics has raised $600 million in Series C funding, co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, at a $4.1 billion valuation. The round brings its total funding to nearly $1 billion as it scales fully autonomous heavy equipment to address nationwide construction labor shortages.

Forgive me for featuring a non-robotic toy in the newsletter, but I found the idea of this story box, where you can associate any sound file with a figurine through an NFC, and have the kid play it by putting the figurine on the box, quite exciting. I hope to build this one day!

For the third year, I'm one of the organizers of the FOSDEM Robotics & Simulation devroom. Every year, we get an interesting lineup of people sharing their stories about working on or with open-source robotics and tooling. One of my colleagues described FOSDEM as the Woodstock of conferences, and it's strangely fitting - it's an event unlike any other. And it's free to attend! The Call for Proposals is now open, and I invite you to submit your talk. If you would rather attend, see you in Brussels!