🤖 Robotics

Recently had a technical interview with Peer Robotics for a robotics engineering role. Sharing the structure in case it helps others preparing for AMR / mobile robotics interviews. My background project was around LiDAR + IMU-based navigation for a scaled autonomous vehicle, so the discussion naturally went deep into mobile robot navigation. The main areas asked were: End-to-end navigation stack: sensors → localization/odometry → TF → costmaps → planner/controller → /cmd_vel Difference between odometry, localization, and SLAM Why LiDAR and IMU are fused, and how odometry drift is handled TF/frame understanding and what breaks if transforms are wrong Global planner vs local planner Global costmap vs local costmap How a robot behaves when a sudden obstacle appears Why a robot may oscillate, get stuck, or fail to plan How to debug navigation issues using topics, TF, RViz, logs, and replayed data Since my profile also includes AI work, there was some discussion on how LLMs/AI can fit into robotics. The important takeaway was that real robotics companies are cautious about black-box systems. AI can help with high-level reasoning, diagnostics, operator interaction, perception support, or log analysis, but safety-critical planning and control still need to be deterministic, testable, and reliable. There was also a short discussion about AI coding tools. The focus was not whether someone uses them, but whether they can validate the code, test edge cases, debug runtime behavior, and avoid blindly trusting generated output. Overall takeaway: for robotics interviews, especially AMR roles, don’t just prepare definitions. Be ready to explain how the full robot stack behaves in real-world conditions and how you would debug failures. Enjoy

Colin Angle, Roomba co-founder and former iRobot CEO, has launched a new company called Familiar Machines & Magic focused on home robotics. His view is that humanoids are not the obvious starting point for robots in the home. A home robot should be designed around the job it is meant to do, not around copying the human body. A $20,000 humanoid pushing an upright vacuum is not a practical use case when robot vacuums already exist. For home robotics, Angle points toward robots built around routine, interaction, wellness, and companionship rather than general-purpose humanoids trying to handle household chores.

Full blog post here https://dc-engineer.com/native-srdf-editing-on-ios-and-robot-xml-export-armor-v0-10-release-notes/ AR Mobile Robotics is my personal project to bring a professional-grade robotics simulation to iPhone and iPad. https://armor.dc-engineer.com The latest update includes a semantics structure and editor to create joint groups and states, setting initial values for the MuJoCo simulation. Existing features include a loader and editor for the unified robot description format, URDF, which is standard in ROS, and can be used in simulators like Gazebo and Drake. ARMOR will also export in URDF and MJCF, with assets organized into a robot archive. I’m also open-sourcing a few of the components of the app as I go along. I hope these will be useful to others who are building engineering tools into mobile apps, particularly with the capability to handle standard file formats used in multiple industries. https://armor.dc-engineer.com/open-source/ What would you like to see me add?

Well, what good is designing a hand if it can't actually do anything, so here's a couple actions (all in real time) I was able to achieve with my hand & wrist combo! Surprising just how many more poses and gestures having a wrist allows for vs just a hand. Design wise, not much has changed since my last post, aside from a few tolerance and material improvements. Instead, I've been putting it through its paces, making sure it can work decently accurately, reliably, and safely. Maybe v21 a little bit later...

I just graduated from college. So my final year project is on mobile robot path planning, till now I've learnt something about Gazebo and ROS2 humble, learnt about some algorithm implementation too. But I wanna learn further in more structured way.....first of all I wanna explore the areas in robotics and automation, need to know what works are going on worldwide, what job opportunities are out there. Then only I can understand which path is more suitable for me, or whether robotics is my thing or not. Can anyone suggest me where I can start? Or can anyone share their experiences how you guys started your journey and continuing it? (I've come across a lots of resources but I really donno where to start from scratch without wasting time)

I’m planning to work on an end-to-end manipulation / VLA project and wanted some opinions on the simulator + training stack. Previously, I used a Unity-based simulator and trained an ACT policy with LeRobot. It worked reasonably well, but at the time I avoided Isaac Sim because it had too many unresolved bugs and stability issues. Now I’m reconsidering Isaac Sim again, especially for large-scale synthetic data generation. My rough plan is: - Use Isaac Sim locally or on cloud GPUs - Spawn multiple robot arms/manipulators (maybe scaling from 1 up to dozens of environments) - Run simple manipulation tasks like swipe/pick/place - Use RL for exploration and task completion - Collect camera observations + trajectories - Train a VLA or vision-based policy from the collected data I’d love feedback on: - Recommended RL frameworks/models for manipulation - Recommended VLA / visuomotor models - Whether this pipeline makes sense overall I’m also curious what people are currently using in practice for scalable manipulation training.