Olympic skateboarder Danny León marked Europe’s first total solar eclipse in 27 years by performing a trick just as the celestial phenomenon reached its peak on Wednesday in Spain.

A flying skateboard, and it's actually shipping! 🛹 Personal eVTOLs so far have meant a seat, a cockpit and a pilot's licence. It is a platform you stand on. Four ducted propulsion units arranged in petal-like sections, eight rotors, and a self-developed flight controller called the NA80 running dual-redundant architecture with three inertial measurement units per unit. The control scheme is the part worth understanding. High-precision sensors track the combined centre of gravity of rider and machine, and adjust rotor thrust as you lean. Steering is a nudge on a control stick, takeoff is a button press. CoolFly says most people get it in about 10 minutes, roughly like learning a self-balancing scooter. What makes this more than a stunt is the paperwork around it: China's revised Civil Aviation Law took effect on 1 July giving the low-altitude economy legal standing, and in June an insurer underwrote the first policy written specifically for standing manned flying vehicles. The law and the insurance arrived before the vehicle did. 11 minutes of airtime and nowhere to sit. Would you step on? :) ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

This robot is skateboarding completely blind. And yes... It’s autonomous. No vision or markers. Just proprioception, joint torques and some very clever state estimation. Aditya Bhatt (PhD at IAS / DFKI under Jan Peters) just dropped one of the wildest robot demos of the year. People in the comments are already losing it over the same questions: How the hell does it know where the deck is? Pure IMU? Contact models? What observations is the policy actually getting at inference time? They only trigger the tricks like a real-life video game. This is coming straight out of @Jan_R_Peters’ lab, @ias_tudarmstadt. The same Jan Peters who just sat down for a long, unusually honest interview about how German red tape cost the field a full five-year head start on humanoids. If you’re into real robot learning (not just pretty videos), both are worth your time. Skateboarder demo and work by @aditya_bhatt. Podcast: Ep 105 | Red Tape Cost Us a 5-Year Lead in Humanoid Robotics (w/ Jan Peters) Huge thanks to Jan Peters for the rare honesty, his humour and insights into the world of robotics and his own! Full Conversation: On Spotify: On YouTube: