Reading up on robotics

A builder details her plan to train an RL policy (PPO via PufferLib) that directly commands octocopter motors at 50 Hz, using MuJoCo simulation to handle motor lag and loop latency for fault-tolerant flight.

Three startups are launching general-purpose robots under $10,000 this year, including Nori Robotics' $1,288 robot, BracketBot's $3,000 robot, and Weave Robotics' Isaac 1 at $8,000.

Chinese companies now dominate robot component manufacturing due to scale and cost advantages from their electric vehicle industry, making it hard for others to compete.

Nvidia's ENPIRE harness lets AI coding agents autonomously train robots to perform physical tasks like cutting zip ties and installing GPUs.

Ajeya Cotra forecasts AI self-sufficiency within 10 years; Timothy B. Lee gives a 50-year median, debating robotics, tacit knowledge, and profit incentives.

Viral robot videos often rely on teleoperation, sped-up playback, and familiar training environments, misleading viewers about true autonomous capabilities.

Fei-Fei Li proposes a taxonomy of world models into renderers, simulators, and planners, arguing simulation is the most consequential and underappreciated category.

Config, a robotics data startup backed by Samsung and Hyundai, supplies proprietary training data for manufacturers building their own robot AI, likening itself to TSMC.

Aaed Musa details building CARA 2.0, a $1,000 quadruped robot that uses rewound BLDC motors and custom capstan drives to achieve dynamic, low-cost locomotion for hobbyists and researchers.

Medra operates a bio lab run by a hundred robots that autonomously perform pharmaceutical experiments, aiming to accelerate drug discovery.

Physical Intelligence's new π0.7 model can direct robots to perform unfamiliar tasks by combining learned skills, surprising its own researchers.

Melania Trump appeared with a robot and stated that more children should be educated by humanoid educators.

Qualcomm's Ventuno Q single-board computer combines a Dragonwing IQ8 processor with a microcontroller and 16GB RAM for offline edge AI and robotics applications.

An 85-year-old woman living alone on the Washington coast uses the ElliQ robot as a companion to combat isolation and loneliness.

Anthropic's Claude was used by NASA's JPL to autonomously plan Perseverance's 400-meter traverse on Mars, cutting route-planning time in half.

A video documentary details how engineer Don Bickler invented the Mars rover's rocker-bogie suspension in his garage, enabling robust off-road mobility on other planets.

Tesla is abandoning its automotive business by killing Model S/X, skipping new models, and pivoting entirely to robotaxis and humanoid robots.

Boston Dynamics' new Atlas humanoid robot prioritizes functional design over human mimicry, arguing that non-human forms can be more efficient and cost-effective for industrial tasks.

Rodney Brooks argues that Silicon Valley's current humanoid robot craze is fundamentally misguided and unlikely to succeed.