Build a fully local, open-source robot vacuum with OOMWOO, a DIY project combining 3D-printed hardware, Raspberry Pi, and 2D LiDAR. It performs autonomous navigation and mapping directly on-device using ROS2, maintaining privacy by avoiding cloud reliance while integrating natively with Home Assistant.

NEW UNITREE COMPETITOR JUST DROPPED! Booster Robotics @boosterobotics is a Beijing humanoid-robot startup founded in June 2023 by CEO Cheng Hao, with a core team from Tsinghua's Robot Control Lab and its Hephaestus RoboCup soccer team. It sells small, walk-and-run-optimized bipedal humanoids as a research, education and competition platform rather than for industrial labor. Its product line consists of: - the K1 (about 95 cm, 19.5 kg, 22 DoF, NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX, ROS2 and Isaac Sim support), starts at $4,999. - The flagship T1 (about 118 cm, 30 kg, 23 DoF, Jetson AGX Orin, up to 18 km/h), runs roughly $22,000 to $34,000. - The Professional T2 (July 2026), that uses NVIDIA's Thor compute. It ships a developer IDE, Booster Studio, and its robots won both humanoid leagues at RoboCup 2025. Booster Robotics targets research, education and competition, has shipped more than 700 units to over 200 customers (more than half internationally), and reached positive monthly operating cash flow in December 2025, while the marquee humanoid companies (Figure, Tesla Optimus, even Unitree pre-IPO) burn cash chasing a factory-labor future. Booster already monetizes the developer ecosystem (cheap robots plus the Booster Studio IDE plus ROS2 and Isaac Sim) instead of promising labor replacement later. -> It is the anti-Figure play. Both 2025 RoboCup humanoid league champions ran on Booster hardware! Tsinghua's Hephaestus won AdultSize on the T1 and Germany's Boosted HTWK won KidSize on the K1 Winning robot soccer is an unfakeable test of dynamic bipedal control (unstructured, adversarial, contact-rich, you cannot cherry-pick a match), and sweeping both size classes, including a German team choosing a Chinese robot, means the serious humanoid-research community standardizes on Booster. Pricing is not random. The K1 at $4,999 puts a walking humanoid in a classroom and undercuts even Unitree's G1 (about $16,000); the T1 at roughly $22,000 to $34,000 is the RoboCup-grade research machine; the T2 (July 2026, NVIDIA Thor, a claimed ~2,070 TFLOPS) is the pro edition. Sub-$5,000 for a real biped is a bet on the next generation: whoever learns robotics on your platform builds for it. Dexterity is deliberately not their game. The T1 is optimized for walking and running (18 km/h, omnidirectional) and won a soccer league, and Booster describes its IP as a motion-algorithm platform that decouples control across configurations. The compute is NVIDIA (Jetson Orin, Thor), the stack is ROS2 and Isaac Sim, and Booster Studio (June 2026) adds agent development, "vibe coding," simulation and one-click deployment to the physical robot. More than half of units ship internationally, so this is China exporting a developer platform, not just hardware, and riding the global open-robotics toolchain rather than a closed domestic one, the inverse of the usual worry about vertically closed Chinese stacks. Backers include the Beijing Robotics Industry Development Investment Fund, the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund and Shenzhen Capital Group, that is, municipal state money seeding a humanoid-developer champion.

Toronto is calling the ROS community. 🍁 Join us at #ROSCon#, September 22–24, for technical talks, tutorials, demos, and conversations about what’s next in robotics. Connect with leading robotics developers and explore the latest from the NVIDIA robotics platform and ROS 2 for real-time applications. See you there 👉 @OpenRoboticsOrg

Your robot failed. You have the logs. Now what? At #ROSCon# 2026, Foxglove CEO @adrianmacneil will share a practical ROS 2 debugging workflow with MCAP: replay failures, find root causes, and validate fixes. Thursday, Sept. 24 | 5:10–5:30 PM Grand Ballroom West/Centre

Supporting 50+ robotic hand models globally. MANUS Metagloves integrate with leading robotic-hand platforms via the MANUS Core SDK, with support for C++, Python and ROS 2. Learn more about MANUS for #Robotics# →

RMB 9,800 (about $1,460) to get started. BLUE WORM just unveiled Mantis Standard. Detach an arm for your desk, build a dual-arm workstation, or add the mobile base and lift for a wheeled humanoid. The arms, base, lift and head use mechanical and electrical quick-connects. Change the configuration, keep the same robot brain: BW-Brain. The full 1.4 m build has 22 degrees of freedom, a rated 7 kg payload per arm and 550 mm of vertical lift. It supports ROS 2, Isaac Sim and LeRobot, with compatibility for π0.5, ACT and SmolVLA. You can simulate a task, collect VR demonstrations, fine-tune a policy and deploy it on the hardware. For a small lab, reusing those components and development tools could mean fewer separate rigs to buy and less integration work.

Ready to bring AI into the physical world? 🤖 Join our livestream on Tuesday, August 11th at 9:00am PT to learn how to: 🧠 Run and fine-tune NVIDIA GR00T 1.7 🔗 Connect models, sensors, and actuators with ROS 2 🦾 Deploy a model on the SO-101 robot arm to execute a real-world task 🎙️Guest speaker @nikodembartnik will also share the latest advances and highlights from the open-source robotics community. Add to calendar:

Your robot arm is probably already supported by LeRobot. You just don't know it yet. The community has shipped 30+ hardware integrations: xArm, UR5e, Franka, Trossen, AgileX Piper, I2RT YAM, ARX5, ugo Pro, Quest and PICO 4 teleop, GELLO, Haply Inverse3 haptics, ROS 2 bridges. Most of them are drop-in plugins. pip install pass --robot.type=... and you're recording datasets. No fork, no patching our repo.

29 builders. 13 countries. One mission. We're excited to announce the 29 developers selected for the first cohort of Project EDGE. Over the past few weeks, we've received applications from researchers, robotics engineers, open-source contributors, startups, creators, and universities around the world. After reviewing each application, we've selected our first group of builders to join the Project EDGE Founding Cohort. This cohort includes: • Leading university robotics labs • AI researchers and robotics engineers • Open-source robotics contributors • Robotics startups and infrastructure builders • Developer communities and robotics creators Together, they'll explore humanoid locomotion, robot learning, teleoperation, ROS 2, embodied AI, data pipelines, and real-world deployment on LUMOS NIX. This is just the beginning.Project EDGE is still accepting applications, and we'll continue selecting outstanding builders from around the world. If you're building the future of embodied AI, we'd love to hear from you. Apply here: