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

Bring CUDA-accelerated transport to existing ROS 2 nodes with an AI coding agent. ⚡ New agent skills in NVIDIA Isaac ROS 5.0 help audit data movement, preserve standard ROS 2 interfaces, remove unnecessary host copies, and verify the CUDA buffer backend. Explore the technical workflow 📄 #ROSCon#

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# →

It's good to see robotics finally getting the recognition it deserves these days. The venture capital market says so, the steady flow of talent says so, and of course so does the progress in AI, which promises that the physical world can be automated, despite being so unpredictable and messy for machines. That's exactly why I wanted to shine a light on the people building in the robotics space. They're a bit like Renaissance men. Their skills go way beyond writing code. They have to bridge software with the real world, and despite how it might sound, that's an incredibly hard challenge. Atoms are harder to control than bits. Here are just some of the fields a roboticist must be aware of: → Software engineering & robotics frameworks: Fluency in Python/C++ and tools like ROS 2 and simulators. Modern robots are software-defined, so code quality is critical. → AI & ML for perception and control + data: Computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep/reinforcement learning. Knowing when to use classical vs. learned methods is key. → Systems integration & mechatronics: Understanding how sensors, actuators, electronics, and embedded systems fit together. Debugging across the hardware/software boundary sets strong engineers apart. → Control theory & motion planning: From PID and MPC to trajectory optimization and path planning. This is what makes robots move reliably in the real world. → Collaboration & safety-aware design: Communicating across disciplines and designing for reliability and safety standards. Deployment realities and failure modes matter as much as features. Hats off to all these great people working in robotics space, and focusing on really hard problems :) Image credits: @jbhuang0604 ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →