ROBOTS
Astrobee: The Open-Source Robot Lesson for Every Site Crew
NASA's Astrobee free-flyer runs an open ROS stack students can program in orbit. Why a readable, resettable robot beats the sealed demo on any site.
The robot arm that put its motors in the basement
Disney Research's fluid transmission delivers 4.5 Nm at 120 grams by moving the motors to the torso — and moves robot-cell safety from software into hardware.
Arduino is a Qualcomm company now — what that changes on a studio bench
Arduino is now a Qualcomm company. What that changes on a studio bench — and how arduino-cli, sketch.yaml pinning and sha256 manifests keep builds reproducible.
Matador Lost Its Head — and the Only Thing Left to Watch Was the Software
A T800 humanoid lost its head at Shenzhen's URKL tournament — 32 teams, one chassis, $1.44M belt. The real story is the safety envelope the policy ignored.
GAF: the 4D robotics plugin your atelier should commission, not license
Gaussian Action Field extends 3D splatting into a 4D robotic-manipulation engine. Why Swiss ateliers should commission it, not license its wrapper.
The blurry-mean trap: why your AV (and BIM) model can score well and still be wrong
An arXiv diffusion world model shows SSIM and cosine metrics reward useless blur — the evaluation lesson every AEC ML pipeline needs. Plus a 3-line Python check.
When the camera blinks: a robot that retrieves its way through sensor dropout
A new arXiv method, RL4IL, handles missing camera or language inputs by retrieving donor demonstrations — RAG for robot hands, and an AEC reliability lesson.
Japan's teleoperated construction giant, read from the floor: amplify, don't replace
Jinki Ittai's giant construction humanoid is teleoperated, not autonomous — what that means for European sites, EU machinery law, and the torque math vendors skip.
The planner that braked for a building: CADET audits the shortcuts your robot already learned
CADET audits and repairs causal confusion in deployed end-to-end driving planners with no retraining — and why post-hoc AI auditing matters for AEC.
A Robot With No Hard Parts: Topology Optimization Designs a Soft Fish Tail
TO-SoFiT uses topology optimization to co-design a hydraulic soft fish tail with programmable, pressure-tunable undulating locomotion — and public code to try.
