A team of engineering students from ETH Zürich has developed POLARIS, an autonomous underwater robot designed to measure and map the thickness of ice from underneath frozen alpine lakes. The idea is to make ice surveys safer and faster, especially in places where people need to know whether the ice is strong enough for activities such as racing or other work on frozen lakes. Traditionally, ice…
Researchers at Duke University's General Robotics Lab have built a system that lets one drone follow another using nothing but the sound of its rotors. The project, called SonicFly, estimates a leader drone's bearing and distance from onboard audio alone, without GPS sharing, cameras, radio links, or any active signal exchange between the two aircraft.
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A Sweden-based creator who posts under the name Food For Robots has hand-wound and machined a custom electric actuator from scratch for a bipedal walking robot project, and in the process documented a counterintuitive result about motor design: adding more turns of copper wire to a motor's stator does not increase torque output for a given amount of electrical power.
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A new desktop machine called PewCB One wants to bring PCB fabrication into the same room as the engineer designing it. Instead of exporting a design and waiting on a fab house, PewCB One promises to turn Gerber files into a populated double-sided circuit board without leaving your desk.
The system is built around a 20 W, 1064 nm pulsed laser that…
THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn., USA — DigiKey, the global distribution leader of electronic components and automation products, is hosting a webinar with Shawn Hymel: “Train a balance bot with reinforcement learning,” scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026, at 10 a.m. CDT. The free 90-minute virtual event will be a hands-on robotics and AI workshop that will teach attendees how to get started in the…
Maker Joe C-J has repurposed four discarded Lenovo ThinkPad L380 laptops into a working, self-hosted AI computing cluster, capable of running large language models entirely offline. Each of the four motherboards was stripped from its laptop chassis and mounted into a custom 3D-printed frame, designed in Fusion and reprinted to accommodate a fourth node after an earlier three-node version…
Engineer Dorian Todd has built a self-driving mini fridge on tank treads that can autonomously chase or flee a person and reward them with a cold drink if caught. The project replaces the fridge's standard base with a tracked drivetrain powered by Repeat Robotics Ultra Mark II brushless gear motors designed for 12 lb combat robots. Todd 3D scanned both the metal tread assembly and the…
Developer slvDev has published an open-source project that runs a 28.9-million-parameter language model directly on an ESP32-S3, a microcontroller that costs roughly $8. The model runs entirely on the chip itself, with no data sent to a server, generating text at roughly 9 tokens per second and outputting it to a small connected display. The achievement stands out because of how little working…
Petoi, the team behind the open-source Bittle and Nybble quadruped kits, has opened early access for its next robot, Quaddle. The company describes it as a four-servo quadruped capable of walking, strafing sideways, and spinning in place, a claim that stands out mainly because of how few actuators it uses to pull it off.
Most legged robots that can…
YouTuber Plentiful Props 3D has developed a functional Spider Man-inspired web shooter that combines custom electronics, 3D-printed parts, and a servo-actuated spray mechanism to fire web-like strands from a wrist-mounted wearable. The project uses an ESP32-S3 Mini development board mounted on a custom PCB to control the firing mechanism. According to the creator, the electronics package…
Bitmerse is preparing to launch Romu, a USB Type-A development board small enough to disappear almost entirely into the port it plugs into. The project is currently listed as "Coming Soon" on Crowd Supply. It's built around Raspberry Pi's RP2354A, a variant of the RP2350 chip that pairs a dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 running at 150 MHz with 2 MB of stacked onboard flash and 520 KB of SRAM. The…
Northwestern University engineers have unveiled Phantom Twist, a groundbreaking low-visibility UAV that exploits human visual perception to hide in plain sight. The drone spins its entire body at up to 25 rotations per second using a single motor and counter-rotating propeller system. Unlike traditional quadcopters with stationary bodies, Phantom Twist has no fixed…
