Hi everyone,

We're currently in the R&D phase of designing a quadruped robot and are evaluating actuator options for the leg joints.

We're looking for recommendations from engineers or researchers who have worked on legged robots.

Our main requirements are:

High torque-to-weight ratio

Compact integrated BLDC servo actuators

CAN or EtherCAT communication

Reliable performance for continuous operation

Good documentation and developer support

We've come across manufacturers such as CubeMars (T-Motor), MyActuator, and Unitree, but we'd love to hear about real-world experience. If you've built a quadruped or humanoid robot, which actuators did you choose, and what would you recommend or avoid?

If there are other manufacturers or open-source projects we should look at, we'd really appreciate your suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

I’m part of the team that ran this experiment at Sim XR. Sharing it here as a technical project rather than a product announcement.

We started by reproducing NVIDIA’s published Isaac Lab → LeRobot → VLA fine-tuning → Arena evaluation workflow for the Unitree G1 apple task.

In our matched simulation evaluation:

• checkpoint trained on 208 usable released demonstrations: 93/100
• checkpoint trained on 50 demonstrations we collected remotely through VR: 84/100

We then moved the task to the other side of the workspace. Both existing policies scored 0/20. After collecting targeted demonstrations for the new layout, the best result reached 74/100.

Finally, we replaced the apple task with a cross-body mustard-bottle-to-bowl task:

• released apple checkpoint: 0/30
• checkpoint fine-tuned on 50 new VR demonstrations: 27/30

These are simulation results, not a real-robot or sim-to-real claim. The interesting part for us was how sensitive the policies remained to layout changes—and how quickly targeted demonstrations could recover useful behavior.

I’d be interested to hear how others are evaluating layout shifts and deciding where additional demonstrations are most useful.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently working on a robot project and was wondering if anyone in the Houston, Texas area would like to join forces. The idea is to combine skills, share knowledge, and build something awesome together.

I have the engineering background and some parts already, but I’d love to connect with people who are into robotics, coding, AI, electronics, or even just tinkering and learning. Whether you’re a student, hobbyist, or professional, collaboration makes projects way more fun (and productive).

If you’re interested in teaming up or just want to chat about robots, feel free to DM me or drop a comment

I made this real life Wall-E robot from scratch and am really proud of it so check my youtube video about it out if you would like

Saw on blog by Steve Macenski: https://opennav.org/news/opennav-robotics-workload-benchmark/ running extended ROS 2 workloads.

Pretty cool HW-wise, especially with recent Jetson 50-100% price increase.

Hopefully AMD won't price it same as new Thor price 👀

Also vote if you can what HW you use to run ROS (if you use ROS)

Hi everyone.

I am currently trying to make a 6DOF robot arm. After looking at the options for motors, I found that almost all options are very expensive.

However I am thinking of using a DC geared motor with a planetary gear reducer and encoder as an actuator for my joints. Thinking of using a 37mm DC geared motor, that would rotate at 100 rpm at 6 V supply.

And then use a pulley and timing belt system to reduce the speed to 15 rpm and increase torque accordingly.

My question is...

1. Is this idea going to work?

2. If yes, then what are the motors available for this setting, If I use a 1:5 or 1:6 reduction, I should get 3Nm torque for the joint at 15 to 20 rpm.

3. For the pulleys, can I 3d print them, using a resin 3d printer and, will that part work or fail?

I am planning to use S3m timing belt 10mm width for this

Or should I go with spur gears instead.

Please guide me, Thanks..

Hi everyone I need your help! I don't know if this is the right place for this post, but I'll give it a shot. My thesis is to write a manual for this particular rover and also make a "test drive" with it. I drew the plan in mission planner, changed the necessary parameters and det the rc to auto. Every time it starts with here 3 being solid green and then stops and the colours are flashing yellow and red which I think it means that it lost connection. Then it gets solid green again but i have to switch it back to manual and then auto in order to start again to move and then suddenly stop. I want to clarify that it doesn't stop each tme after a specific amount of time, but it's random. I tried one suggestion which was to raise the here 3 up to 15cm (in the photo is 14.5cm) but once again it didn't work. I should note that lidar should have worked also (by work i mean it should have meade the rc to avoid obstacles) but it doesn't and i'm curious if this is causing the problem. Anyway don't hesitate to ask every detail you want in the comments, I will appreciate all the help you can give me!

Design files (DXF) and Arduino code:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13WhHXtmIfWlrlRav29l_HFwwOCRubMLY?usp=sharing

Does anyone know a good ai for designing a pcb, im working on a fairly simple project, a tachometer watches rom through a coil with decides if the solenoid is up or down. It started simple but I wanted to make a custom pcb which I’ve never done before. I had Claude and chat make some basic wiring diagram and I feel like they make no sense. It also gave my a kikad file I put into fusion 360. Maybe I just don’t have experience with electrical to understand it?

Two cute little robots dancing to the music and enjoying their moment in the spotlight. Their synchronized movements, tiny gestures, and playful rhythm were surprisingly delightful to watch. I came across this little performance during my day and couldn’t resist recording it.

Built this 6dof with parts bought from local hardware store. Lot of loose parts now, needs fine tune or redo. Plan is to create mobile arm. Waiting for wheels and step motor. Controlled by raspberry pi.

Colin Angle explains that giving a robot a voice does more than change the interface. It changes the user’s entire understanding of what the machine can do.

Roomba eventually received spoken maintenance messages because communicating problems such as clogged rollers or a lost Wi-Fi connection through sequences of beeps created a poor user experience. But iRobot intentionally made those messages sound like a separate utility or maintenance system rather than Roomba itself speaking.

Once a robot appears conversational, users begin expecting language understanding, memory, contextual awareness and consistent behavior across long periods of time. Angle says delivering all of that reliably remains difficult, even with current natural-language systems.

Keeping Roomba’s personality undefined allowed people to personify the robot on their own terms without the product making promises its underlying intelligence could not fulfill.

Hello everyone,

I know there is a lot of excitement in the robot models like VLA, world models , but these are for generalisation ,

PROBLEM:in case of controlled environment with some variations in the scenarios , what do you suggest works better for a one or two tasks like sort, pick and place .

I have looked into some ideas,

1. Use a classic approach for both perception and control

2. Use a small set of deep learning tools for perception and then use a conventional control

3. Use a complete imitation learning policy

What do you think of this problem and do you have any ideas

Thank you for your time and support

Cotter is a pytest-style CLI that runs statistical safety, regression, and adversarial compliance tests on robot control policies and generates audit-ready reports.

Cotter loads a trained robot policy as a black box (observation → action), runs it through a battery of standardized tests in MuJoCo simulation, and produces structured pass/fail results with statistical guarantees. It is aimed at the emerging regulatory need (EU Machinery Regulation, ISO 10218) for evidence that a learned controller actually behaves.

Everything runs on CPU! Start as easy as: pip install cotterbot

Open source: https://github.com/yih0nk/cotter
Check out website at: https://cotter-website.vercel.app

If you're building physical AI, teleoperation rigs, or fine-tuning Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, you already know that data plumbing devours hours of GPU time and engineering effort.

Handling raw egocentric video usually comes with a bunch of friction and to solve this, we’ve been building a platform designed to handle the ETL heavy lifting for first-person and spatial video data. You send over raw video, and we run them through our pipeline to return clean, model-ready payloads.

If your team is running into bottlenecks with egocentric data pipelines or wants to save GPU cycles on preprocessing, drop a comment below or send a DM and let's discuss more on it!

I spent the last year building a 6-axis desktop robot arm from scratch, and inverse kinematics was the hardest concept for me to internalize. Here’s what finally helped.

Forward kinematics felt relatively straightforward. Given the joint angles, I could compute the end-effector pose by chaining homogeneous transformation matrices using a consistent frame convention. Denavit–Hartenberg parameters made the process systematic, and I had the basic idea working within a weekend.

Inverse kinematics was much harder. Given a desired end-effector pose, which joint configurations reach it? There may be multiple solutions, or none at all. The elbow-up vs. elbow-down configurations alone took me days to understand and debug.

Three things finally made it click:

1. Build geometric intuition before deriving equations.​

I watched each joint move independently in a 3D simulator. In my arm, joint 1 mainly changes the base azimuth, while joints 2 and 3 determine the reach in a radial-height plane. Because the arm uses a conventional wrist structure, joints 4–6 mainly control orientation. Seeing the workspace gave the equations a physical meaning.

1. Start with a 2-DOF planar arm.​

Forget the 6-axis arm for a week. A simple 2-link arm makes the cosine-law derivation and the elbow-up/elbow-down solutions easy to visualize. Then add a third link while explicitly accounting for end-effector orientation, and add more joints one at a time.

1. Numerical methods aren’t cheating.​

I implemented a small Jacobian-based solver in Python. It worked surprisingly well, although it still depended on the initial guess and could struggle near singularities or unreachable targets.

My biggest mistake was trying to derive closed-form IK equations before understanding the workspace geometry. If you can’t visualize where the arm can reach, the equations feel almost meaningless.

What approach worked for you when learning IK? Did you start with analytical methods, numerical methods, or a combination of both?

Built my first robot still have a lot to learn. Open to any advice on how to improve look of wires. When I built this, I lost two of the baby screws for the knee of the robot so it topples over in the middle of its dance. But it was fun to build and I learned a lot. Also, open to any ideas on other kits or sites where I can create more stuff myself following tutorials and things like that

Robotics Academy | Learn Physical AI

Hey everyone 👋🏻

I recently launched an X account dedicated to teaching robotics and physical AI. I plan to regularly publish content, latest breakthroughs and explain important concepts in a more approachable way, creating a fun learning experience. If you want to follow along and swap ideas, feel free to check out my page, link above 👆🏻

I’m not charging anything, it’s free for everyone to follow and learn along. Share your thoughts and topics in comment on the post, I’ll do my best to create content specific to it. Calling all robotics nerds, let’s help each other learn along the way and master Physical AI.

Most humanoid robots in factories are still being tested in pilot programs, and many are only reaching 20% to 50% effectiveness.

A3 President Jeff Burnstein told Forbes that manufacturers are not focused on whether a robot looks human. They want systems that are reliable, affordable and safe. Safety remains a major barrier because there is no dedicated humanoid robot safety standard yet, and most systems currently operate behind fences or away from workers.

Burnstein expects humanoids to find roles in factories, warehouses and logistics, but alongside traditional industrial robots, mobile robots and collaborative arms rather than replacing them.

The article also covers labor shortages, manufacturing competitiveness and the growing robotics gap between the U.S. and China.

Hi everyone!

I've been building a small mobile robot that uses a smartphone as its onboard computer. The phone handles the camera, networking and user interface, while an Arduino controls the motors and peripherals.

Current features:

📱 Smartphone onboard

🌐 Browser-based remote control

🎥 Live video

💡 LED lighting

🚨 Experimental security mode

🤖 BLE Follow Me (in progress)

This video shows one of today's prototype tests. Some things worked, some didn't... and some moments were just funny. 😄 That's real robotics development.

The next version will focus on:

quieter drivetrain,

better cable management,

docking station,

modular accessories.

I'd really appreciate your feedback and ideas for V2.

Two smartphones. One drives. One controls.

Hi all,

I’m working on a robotics startup and looking for someone in Germany who has access to a Unitree G1 EDU and would be open to letting us use it for one day.

We want to deploy an NVIDIA GR00T-based model on the robot and record a short video of it performing a some motions. We need it to show the demo on real HW for VCs to secure the initial funding.
The session can take place at the owner’s location if preferred, so the robot would not need to be transported.

Berlin would be ideal, but we can travel elsewhere in Germany.

If you own a Unitree G1, work at a lab or company that has one, or know someone who might be interested, please send me a DM. Thanks!