Weekly archive
Robotics and AI news
Robotics and artificial intelligence every week, sources in plain sight. No data, I don't report it.
13 entries
Robot safety, memory and touch | Robotics Three new preprints test safer coding agents, lightweight robotic memory and tactile control with physical experiments. Isaac Lab 3 is ready to test | Robotics Isaac Lab 3.0 enters early access with multiple backends, kit-less execution, and migration changes that need careful work on 2.x projects. Genesis 1.4.1 and wbc-mjlab 0.0.6 | Robotics Genesis updates large-scene simulation and fixes imports and actuators. wbc-mjlab adds an experimental Unitree G1 control path. MuJoCo 3.13.0 and Show-Harness | What makers can use MuJoCo improves servo and contact stability. Show-Harness explores robot control through semantic actions and browser-recorded demonstrations. Safer stops, 360 drone vision and prediction tests | AI Three preprints study when a Unitree G1 can halt, panoramic vision at 20 Hz and why a prediction score can select the wrong state estimator. Three preprints put guardrails around AI robot failures | Robotics and AI What really changed in the last 24 hours: three preprints test how to anticipate failed contact, choose better visual evidence, and evaluate humanoid motion with more useful data. Three preprints try to teach robots with less data | Robotics and AI What really changed in the last 24 hours: three preprints test locomotion and manipulation with synthetic data, one demonstration, or a structured demonstration. They are research results, not ready-to-build products. ROS 2 Lyrical gets its second patch | What changes for your robots ROS 2 Lyrical shipped its second patch with updated packages and new binaries. It adds no flashy capability, but it gives projects already using this LTS release a newer base. A printed sign hijacks a VLM-controlled robot | What changed in AI robotics A study running 5,670 trials steers VLM-controlled robots off task just by putting text in the camera's view, succeeding 27.0% and 29.4% of the time. Plus a whole-body humanoid model with 40 hours of household data, 11 bugs found in Isaac Sim, and Unitree pricing its IPO. A $2 ESP32-C61 and an 8 GB Jetson | What changed in AI robotics A Wi-Fi 6 module now sells for about $2, Espressif open sources the whole RainMaker Neo stack under Apache 2.0, and two papers show a bimanual policy running on an 8 GB Jetson and an action model trained on a single 24 GB GPU. Gemini Robotics 2 | What is available for AI robotics now DeepMind has made Gemini Robotics ER 2 available through its API. It can coordinate tools and video, while robot control, physical limits and safety remain the builder's job. TurboVLA, NeoRacer and HumanCLAW | AI robotics What actually changed in AI robotics: a lightweight VLA with code, an open autonomous car on pre-order, and a benchmark showing what current models still cannot do. Grabette, LingBot-VLA 2.0 and LeRobot 0.6 | AI robotics The useful part of these two weeks doesn't come from humanoids: it comes from open hardware that records data with your hand, open weights that run on a gaming GPU, and a LeRobot release that breaks your project if you skip the changelog.
