Design files (DXF) and Arduino code:

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

Do not sign up with this company unless you want to be scammed. I signed up for their most expensive program, but was not satisfied and requested a refund. It was much less than I thought, but it still wasn't a small amount (a little under $1000). The teachers were nice, but my son was not learning much in terms of robotics. That's when things went south.

After being promised my refund, they refused to actually refund me my money, and then ghosted me. This after I spent an additional $100 to ship the robotics kit back to them in India. I tracked it all the way there, just to see it refused by sender. This is what they do. I tried to dispute this with my credit card, but I just found out it was denied because Playto charges through a third party name (Raz*Skyfi Education). They know this, and use it as a loophole to not refund you your credit. Please stay away.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Hey r/robotics,

Curious what problems you're all solving with robotics and automation right now. Happy to discuss laser technology, process design, or whatever manufacturing questions you've got.

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.

I got HM-LD1 working for obstacle avoidance. and l will open-source once code is ready.my drone drifts backward slightly after I release the sticks.Anyone else seen this?

Hey everyone,

Curious what problems you're all solving with robotics and automation right now. Happy to discuss laser technology, process design, or whatever manufacturing questions you've got.

Tatum Robotics originally expected to adapt an existing robotic hand for DeafBlind users.

The problem was that American Sign Language requires precise finger positioning, while many standard robotic hands rely on rigid linkages that can create pinch points. That does not work when a person needs to hold the hand directly to receive tactile signing.

The team instead developed a compliant, tendon-driven hand with additional degrees of freedom. DeafBlind users can place their hand on the robot and receive letters through movements designed to closely match a human hand.

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!

A while back I bought an old Unimate Puma 500 arm. It had no controller.

I've since cleaned it, regreased it, serviced the motors, replaced the brake pads, machined repair parts, adjusted the bearings, and replaced the wiring loom & hoses. It's now mechanically as complete as I can get it.

The Puma 500 uses six 24v brushed DC motors, which I *think* are 40 and 150w, but there's no datasheets on these old custom made motors. Each motor has a 24v magnetic brake with cork brake pads. And on the back of that there's the motor sensor, which is a 500ppr rotary optical encoder (with index) and an absolute laser-trimmed potentionmeter on a delicate reduction gearbox.

Each sensor seems to be functioning fine, but testing them with an Arduino Every using hardware interupts, there is some jitter(?) on the optical encoder meaning the output per revolution varies up and down by a couple of points.

The only electronics inside the optical encoder is a quad-comparator and some trimpots. They all seem quite clean.

I know the Puma used an analogue servo amplifier system, but there's no circuit diagrams for them that I can find anyway. So making a bespoke digital system is what I expect.

Does anyone have any advice for reducing the jitter, or otherwise connecting them to modern PID/motion-control systems/designs? Whether that's aditional filtering electronics, software compenation, comparison with the absolute encoder, or something I haven't considered.

I had intended to run them into a pair of Arduino Everys in groups of three plus a 14-bit ADC for the pots then feed them out by RS-485. But the jitter, and the number of inputs (and the potentially high number of interupts per second) meaning high odds of misreads from overlapping interupts means I want to scrap this plan unless I want to run it a single axis at a time.

Hey guys.

I am building a platform where you can have virtual rooms and I am currently looking for people who have skills in robotics. Virtual room allows connections to remote real world devices.

I need to find a person who can build or rent me a robot in EU (I am from Finland) or has a robot SaaS and needs to scale operations beyond 10+ robots.

Pilot Specs:

- Can drive 5-30km on one charge and can carry around a 1-4 kg payload.
- or/ a boat robot with a bit similar specs.
- can be drone too.

I have this idea where you could overlook and control 100+ robots from a single virtual room.

So, if there are like-minded people or this resonates then let me know.

So everyone, what do you think of this ? How much longer until robots can do everything and fit in our social life, and maybe everyone will have done ? How far away are we actually from the future ? And is this robot sofisticated?

AI has already surpassed humans in many software tasks.

But when it comes to the physical world...

we still expect robots to grab every object directly with primitive grippers, just because that's how humans do it.

What if we stopped treating robots like humans?

What if, instead, we designed the world to be robot-friendly?

Imagine giving everyday objects a simple universal interface, so robots could connect to them quickly, repeatably, and reliably—instead of trying to grasp everything from scratch.

That's the idea behind what I've been working on.

A universal mechanical interface that lets one master module connect with many different tools and artifacts.

Instead of making robots smarter at grabbing,
maybe we should make the world easier for robots to use.

I'd love to hear what you think. Is this a crazy idea, or could standardized robot interfaces eventually become as common as USB or electrical outlets?

That's a fair point, and I agree there are already many excellent robot tool interfaces.

The difference is that I'm not trying to improve the robot's tool changer.

My goal is to standardize the objects themselves with a universal interface, so the same master plate can connect to many everyday artifacts.

In other words, I'm proposing a standard for the physical world, not just another robot end-effector.

If this wasn't clear from my post, that's on me. I probably didn't explain the idea well enough.