Weekly Robotics #286
It is my pleasure to welcome Foxglove as a quarterly sponsor of Weekly Robotics! Foxglove is a robotics observability platform that enables faster development and accelerated time-to-market through powerful visualizations, multimodal data management, and debugging workflows. They also develop and maintain the popular MCAP logging format. The support allows me to keep putting hours into the work on the newsletter and is highly appreciated. Thanks! As usual, the publication of the week section is manned by Rodrigo.
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Balancing cube
Willem Pennings created a balancing cube inspired by Cubli, a reaction cube developed by the team from ETH Zurich. The best thing about Willem’s work? It’s all open-source. If you decide to reproduce this work, be wary of the cost; according to the author, it costs 2,500 Euro to build this project.
Getting into robotics as a software engineer
Here is an exciting story from Bouke van der Bijl about his journey from working purely on software to developing software for robotics, interacting with other engineers, and building physical products.
Benchmarking Latency Across Common Wireless Links For MCUs
If you are into embedded applications and love profiling and benchmarking, you will love this write-up from Electric UI. They compared multiple embedded wireless transmission hardware to establish how much latency is introduced when sending 12B, 128B, and 1024B of data (where possible). I was surprised that SiK didn’t do so well compared to other solutions.
Disney’s Newest Robot Demonstrates Collaborative Cuteness
Disney has done it again, and by ‘it’, I mean they created a captivating animatronic robot (or, more precisely, two robots). Super interesting!
Bringing GLaDOS to life with Robotics and AI
领英推荐
Dave from Dave’s Armoury recently had some free time and started building an AI-based robot from Portal. I liked following Dave’s journey building a text-to-speech solution with an LLM (all working on a local computer!) and then developing a robot arm to host the entire solution. Inspiring stuff!
Publication of the Week - Real-World Robot Applications of Foundation Models: A Review
The recent surge in the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) provides exciting possibilities for exploring new ideas. The authors have divided these models into various robotics-related categories, such as language, audio, 3D representations, planning, and perception. As much as LLMs are seen as a peak in the Gartner hype cycle graph, and yet there is a lot more to come, this paper reviews some available models that can be experimented with in your application or even inspire you to explore new project ideas.
Business
NASA lays off 530 workers at Jet Propulsion Lab
“NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a memo Tuesday that it is laying off approximately 570 workers because it still does not have a federally approved budget for the 2024 fiscal year for its Mars Sample Return mission. JPL Director Laurie Leshin said the lack of Congressional appropriations has also endangered the agency’s (MSR) missions. 530 staff employees will be cut, accounting for about 8% of the lab’s workforce, along with 40 contractors. The announcement follows a wave of previous contractor cuts earlier in the month. The JPL said it dealt with a lack of funding approval ahead of the Tuesday layoffs by anticipating a 63% decrease from its FY2023 MSR budget (roughly consistent with Congressional markups), per NASA direction, and cutting costs elsewhere: a hiring freeze, reduced MSR contracts, and cuts to internal “burden budgets””.
Project 3 Mobility brings in $107M for its autonomous mobility ecosystem - The Robot Report
“Project 3 Mobility, which is developing what it called an “ecosystem of urban autonomous mobility,” has brought in €100 million, or more than $107 million, in Series A funding. The Zagreb, Croatia-based company said this latest investment will lay a foundation for its future development and growth”.
Starship Technologies raises $90M as its sidewalk robots pass 6M deliveries | TechCrunch
“Starship Technologies, a startup out of Estonia that was an early mover in the delivery robotics space, has picked up $90 million in funding as it works to cement its position at the top of its category”.
Events
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