Diffusion Policies Enable Precise, Safe Robot Assembly Without Extra Data
Faster, cheaper robot deployment in factories? A post-training framework for diffusion policies that uses self-rollouts and physical constraints to achieve safety alignment in robotics without extra demos, rewards, or human interventions... The ICML 2026 Spotlight paper from Tsinghua PhD student Lingxuan Wu demonstrates emergent fine-grained correction behaviors in a GPU heat sink assembly task requiring millimeter-level precision. The accompanying video shows 10 successful autonomous trials at 4x speed, highlighting collision avoidance and trajectory corrections within tight 3mm feasible regions for industrial applications. Thank you for sharing, Lingxuan Wu (@EthanNg51931527) 📌 Paper: https://lnkd.in/eJ284XRU Code: https://lnkd.in/eH_WgN32 Project: https://lnkd.in/exW228RE —— Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free: http://22astronauts.com
Unified Multimodal Rig Enables Precise Physical AI Training
A multimodal data capture rig built for Physical AI training: Synchronizing RGB video, stereo IR depth, real-time 3D hand reconstruction, and 23x20 tactile pressure grids from sensor gloves during a cucumber-slicing task. The video from Grace Zhang visualizes aligned streams: Top-left RGB...
Free ROS2 Course From ETH Zurich’s Legged‑Robot Lab
The lab that built ANYmal teaches a free ROS2 course... ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab runs a full introductory course on ROS2 every year: Slides and lecture recordings from previous years are publicly available on YouTube and GitHub. The curriculum is practical...
ETH Zurich Releases Full Free 2026 Robot Learning Course
ETH Zurich just open-sourced their entire 2026 robot learning course. Not a MOOC. The actual course. Slides, lecture recordings, coding assignments, GitHub repo. The curriculum goes from imitation learning and RL all the way to Vision-Language-Action models and foundation models for robotics. Guest...
Modular Open-Source Robot Arm Enables Easy Tool Swapping
An open-source modular robot arm system with a detachable gripper that enables autonomous tool swapping, building on the low-cost SO101 arm for $14 adapter or $140 full build: Video shows dual robot arms performing precise pick-and-place tasks on a workbench,...
Open‑Source 3D‑Printed Robot Wrist Accelerates Innovation
3D printed differential robot arm wrist. [👇 GitHub Link - Open Source ] High demand, so they open sourced it early. A differential mechanism released as a test fixture for future robots. Built around their Spectral micro BLDC driver. Parts,...
Zero-Shot Video Reward Model Boosts Robot Success
A zero-shot video-language reward model. Trained on over 1M trajectories from 21 robot embodiments. It predicts: Frame-level task progress and generalizes zero-shot to unseen tasks, scenes, and robots, yielding 2.4–4.5x better success rates in: Online/offline RL, data filtering, failure detection,...
Teach Robots in an Hour, Transform Lab Flexibility
If you can teach a robot a new skill in under an hour, you've just made your whole lab more flexible overnight. Pharma and biotech need automation that's flexible enough for unstructured work... yet auditable enough to trust in regulated...
Open-Source MPC Path Tracker Demystifies Real-Time Control
A simple MPC controller for path tracking implemented in python. Few resources actually teach it without assuming a PhD first. This open-source project does exactly that: An iterative MPC tracking controller (built with CVXPY and MuJoCo) that shows how to...
Rapidly Deployable Vision System Verifies Cable Insertion
Insertion Verification of Ethernet Cable. It was trained and set up in minutes: This object detector and classifier can be used for robotic tasks or in assembly verification. This classifier checks whether a connector was fully inserted or not. Small...
Open‑Source 5B World Model Enables Scalable Robot Manipulation
The first open-source unified world model for scalable robot manipulation: 5B-parameter open-source unified video-action world model that combines policy and world modeling to generate robot actions, predict future visuals, and evaluate task progress from observations, language, and state. The model...
Virtual Testing Eliminates Downtime in Modern Manufacturing
A month later, I'm still thinking about that day in Augsburg. We co-hosted the KUKA × Visual Components Simulation Event... and honestly, it was one of those events where you leave with your head full. The room was packed with...
One Demo Generates Thousands of Humanoid Tasks, Boosting Performance
A system that automatically creates thousands of varied humanoid loco-manipulation demonstrations from one single teleoperated example: How? Via interleaved locomotion planning, manipulation planning, and skill adaptation. It features a new nine-task humanoid loco-manipulation benchmark in simulation, where synthetic data from...
Amazon‑Acquired Fauna Robotics CTO Joins Robotics Event
243 approved. 200+ more trying to get in. So we made the evening worth it: We added one more voice to the stage: → Josh Merel | CTO, Fauna Robotics (now Amazon ) Fauna launched Sprout in January. By March,...
Event‑Grounded World Model Boosts Real‑World Robot Dexterity
A practical step forward for real-world manipulation: an open-source world model that replaces rigid action chunking with event-grounded prediction. It anchors planning and control to actual physical moments (reach → grasp → contact → place), giving robots more natural timing,...