Lukas Ziegler
@lukas_m_ziegler • 62,486 subscribers
robotics evangelist | riding the wave of robotics | angel investing 🕵🏼♂️
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Modular robots that repair themselves by... stealing parts! 👀 A team at Columbia University built robots made of Truss Links, stick-shaped modules with magnetic connectors at each end. Connect a few and you get a structure that can expand, contract, roll, and reshape itself. If a link breaks or comes loose, the robot grabs a spare module nearby and rebuilds itself. No human intervention needed. A tetrahedron-shaped robot grabbed a spare link like a walking stick. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler1,056,155 次观看 • 3 个月前
A 40-year-old patent has finally been brought to life. That's the Y-zipper. A 3D-printed three-sided fastener that transitions any object from flexible to rigid and back again. The robotics application is the one that caught my attention. A quadruped robot that adjusts its leg stiffness depending on terrain, switching between rigid and flexible in real time without additional motors or complex mechanical systems. But this goes way beyond robotics. A wrist cast that loosens during the day and stiffens at night. A tent that pops into shape in 90 seconds instead of six minutes. The idea sat in a patent filing for four decades. It took 3D printing to finally make it real. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler1,806,952 次观看 • 5 个月前
About a robot that became a 3D printer! 🖨️ A team of designers in Shanghai developed a 6-axis robotic 3D printer inspired by spiderwebs at Tongji University. The project is about merging design and fabrication processes, drawing from spider threads' biomimetic strength and structure. 🕸️ The printer utilizes a unique spindle-knot extrusion technique, enabling self-supporting structures and greater spatial flexibility than traditional layer-based 3D printing. The device features a robot from KUKA and a robotic end-effector with movable printheads, controlled by an Arduino-based system with precise temperature and extrusion controls. Despite being a work in progress, the project shows the potential of combining robotics and 3D printing. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler75,256 次观看 • 8 天前
That's how parts get inspected! 🪡 The pace is ridiculous. Imagine people still doing this instead of machines. Renishaw’s system is one of the biggest shifts in coordinate-measuring machines (CMMs). Instead of moving the entire machine to capture each point, REVO uses a 5-axis scanning head that collects data through rapid angular motion. Combined with automated probe and stylus changes, the system can handle complex geometries and full surface scans that traditionally required slow, point-by-point probing. I love specialized automation in action! 😮💨 ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler43,178 次观看 • 5 天前
A drone or a submarine? 🫧 A student just built a drone that flies through the air and swims underwater — and it actually works. As part of his Bachelor’s project, Andrei Copaci created a 3D-printed, hybrid drone with variable pitch propellers, meaning the blades shift mid-flight to adapt between air and water. Just a laptop, a printer, and a smart idea. The drone is fully custom-coded and transitions seamlessly between flying and swimming. We're entering a new era, where curious students can prototype what once took massive funding and R&D efforts.
Lukas Ziegler1,958,227 次观看 • 1 年前
A robot that drives straight up a wall! 🧱 VertiGo is a robot built by Disney Research with ETH Zürich. Most wall-climbing robots hold on. Suction cups, magnets, dry adhesives. All of them need a surface that cooperates, and none of them solve the genuinely hard part, which is getting from the floor onto the wall in the first place. Two tiltable propellers generate thrust into the wall, pressing four wheels against it hard enough to drive. Each propeller has two degrees of freedom for aiming that thrust, and one pair of wheels steers. The rear propeller pushes the robot toward the wall while the front propeller pushes upward, and the combination flips it onto the vertical surface. One propeller can hold you on a wall. It takes two to get you there. This is from the end of 2015, which is worth saying out loud. A decade later it's still an awesome project in robotics! :) ~~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler121,319 次观看 • 28 天前
Spiderman's stuntman is a robot! 🕸️ The Walt Disney Company Imagineers designed an advanced robotics figure that flies 25 meters in the air making its own real-time decisions as it tucks, somersaults, slows down, and climbs. 🤹🏼♀️ The result is Spider-Man in Avengers Campus, flying above with gravity-defying feats never before seen in a Disney park. That's incredible to see how robotics is changing different verticals! That's pure magic to me! 🔮 ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler799,988 次观看 • 10 个月前
A system with moving transfer plates! 🍽️ Modular transfer plates that move items in any direction. These systems from Festo give factories something really cool; reconfigurable motion that adapts as layouts or processes change. Because they can route items in multiple directions, you can run inspections, branch flows based on sensor data, or perform operations directly on the moving parts. It could even power fully automated storage: shelves that reposition items based on real-time demand. I'd love to see more of them in 3PL centers. Where would you use them? 👀 ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler215,528 次观看 • 2 个月前
Welcome to the pico world! 🔬 Micro-dispensing at the picoliter scale is incredible when you compare it to everyday numbers: a single raindrop is about 50 microliters, roughly 50 million times larger than a picoliter. Being able to place droplets this small without touching the surface is key for biotech, diagnostics, and micro-electronics, where tiny volumes matter. And at this scale, two basics become critical: → Accuracy = how close you are to the real value. → Precision = how repeatable each droplet is. I could watch it all day long! 🤯 ~~ ♻ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler773,756 次观看 • 10 个月前
Seeing touch without pressing down! Most tactile sensors rely on deformation. Press down, deform the sensor, measure the deformation. But light contact, touching water, cream, soft films, doesn't deform anything. The sensor sees nothing. LightTact flips the approach. It uses optical detection instead. An ambient-blocking configuration suppresses external light and internal illumination everywhere except at actual contact points. Only scattered light from true contact gets through. The results? High-contrast raw images. Non-contact pixels stay near-black. Contact pixels show the natural appearance of whatever's touching. This works across material properties, contact forces, surface colors, and lighting conditions. Water, facial cream, thin films, liquids, all become visible the moment they touch. The sensor outputs spatially aligned visual-tactile images. Vision-language models can read them directly. Here's the paper: Changyi Lin and team - hats off ;) ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler207,776 次观看 • 3 个月前
This is not a 2050 warehouse. This is a modern air hub of Amazon. Amazon uses robots to help sort and ship billions of packages each year. At Amazon Air, the company's main air hub in Kentucky, hundreds of self-charging robots zoom across the warehouse floor to organize orders. These robots, called “drives,” follow small stickers on the floor to know where to go and when to speed up or slow down. Amazon has more than ONE MILLION robots in its facilities, and it’s even deploying more new types of robots that can sort items of different shapes and sizes. P.S. Can you guess how many robots they had back in 2013? ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler181,431 次观看 • 2 个月前
This drone becomes a flying manipulator! 🥏 Researchers at the The University of Tokyo developed this aerial robot. Built with four pairs of ducted fans linked by actuated joints, Dragon can reshape itself mid-flight. This allows it to grasp objects and perform tasks typically reserved for ground-based manipulators. Each segment has dual rotors, and its navigation stack calculates the most efficient shape for each object. Total payload? More than 3 kilograms. P.S. To increase Dragon's battery life, they consider allowing it to walk on the ground.
Lukas Ziegler741,694 次观看 • 1 年前
![🧵 Farming robots are no longer experimental. They're deployed, profitable, and reshaping agriculture. In orchards, vineyards, vegetable fields, and beyond, they're tackling labor shortages, precision spraying, and chemical reduction at scale. This is how robotics is quietly becoming the backbone of next-gen agriculture [Save this thread for later 📌]](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1962834755323310109/amplify_video_thumb/1962834643779997697/img/TOM-dxBD503c9chv.jpg)
🧵 Farming robots are no longer experimental. They're deployed, profitable, and reshaping agriculture. In orchards, vineyards, vegetable fields, and beyond, they're tackling labor shortages, precision spraying, and chemical reduction at scale. This is how robotics is quietly becoming the backbone of next-gen agriculture [Save this thread for later 📌]
Lukas Ziegler780,491 次观看 • 1 年前
🚨 BREAKING: SoftBank has agreed to acquire the RAI Institute from Hyundai Motor Group, and the story behind this deal is one of the most fascinating in all of robotics. There's not too many details yet. Neither party is saying much for now. RAI was founded by Marc Raibert, the same man who founded Boston Dynamics in 1992. SoftBank previously owned Boston Dynamics from 2017 to 2021. Now it's acquiring Raibert's next institution. The RAI's research is serious and foundational: robot control, perception, manipulation, navigation and AI for complex physical tasks. Its team developed the whole-body learning framework behind Atlas's extraordinary acrobatic movements. And for those who follow European robotics closely, Marco Hutter, the ETH Zürich one of the most respected figures in legged robotics globally, has been closely tied to RAI's research direction. The institute represents exactly the kind of fundamental research culture Hutter embodies, long-term, rigorous, hardware-in-the-loop science. But zoom out and the bird eye view is even more interesting to look at! 👀 Couple of facts! SoftBank is simultaneously: → Acquiring RAI — cutting-edge robotics AI research → Acquiring ABB's robotics business for $5.3 billion, decades of industrial automation at global scale → Building Roze AI, autonomous robots to build data centres Masayoshi Son is assembling one of the most ambitious robotics portfolios ever constructed. Fundamental research. Industrial scale. Physical infrastructure. All under one roof. The deal is currently under CFIUS review, the US foreign investment committee screening for national security implications. SoftBank is making a serious, long-term, multi-billion dollar bet that robotics is the defining technology platform of the next decade. 🔗 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler53,685 次观看 • 26 天前
A robotic hand that walks away on its own fingers! 🪬 We finally have the Thing from Addams family in robotics, and it was developed at ETH Zürich. No wheels, no legs bolted underneath, no separate drive mechanism. The same fingers that grasp things also carry the hand across a surface and hold up its weight. A quadruped has four identical legs spaced evenly around its body, and most legged-locomotion reward functions quietly assume exactly that. A hand has fingers of different lengths, arranged unevenly around a palm, with a thumb that matches none of them. The team wrote a reward formulation for that unequal geometry, and in simulation it moves faster than tuned rewards borrowed from quadruped work. They kept the hand's existing finger design and its position controller, so this isn't a bespoke machine built for the demo. And power and computation sit onboard, so it runs untethered. → Crawling, steering, and recovery after being knocked over → While holding itself up, it executes a sequence of keyboard commands with no vision at all → It pushes an object to target positions using overhead visual feedback → The simulator was calibrated against measurements taken from the physical hardware A hand that walks to a task and then performs the task is a mobile manipulator with no locomotion hardware in it. Big shoutout to authors Amir Kzp! 😮💨 🔗 Here's the paper: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler62,562 次观看 • 1 个月前
Robots can make building tall structures safer. 🧱 The fastening robot from Raise Robotics helps put up walls on high buildings without putting workers in danger. It uses robots to do the risky jobs people used to do. This means fewer accidents and injuries on construction sites. Workers can stay on the ground and control the robot from a safe place. My fear of height just got a fear of height! 🫣 ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler34,832 次观看 • 17 天前
Open-source magnetic tactile sensor for $5! 🧲 Researchers introduced a magnetic tactile sensor that's low-cost, and easy to fabricate, democratizing tactile sensing for robotics. Operating in unstructured environments like homes and offices requires robots to sense forces during physical interaction. Yet the lack of a versatile, accessible tactile sensor has led to fragmented solutions and often force-unaware, sensorless approaches. Building an eFlesh sensor requires four components: a hobbyist 3D printer, off-the-shelf magnets (less than $5), a CAD model, and a magnetometer circuit board. The sensor is 3D printed with magnets embedded in the middle layer. Based on chosen mechanical properties, magnets displace in response to contact forces, measured by a magnetometer underneath. An open-source design tool converts simple OBJ/STL files into 3D-printable STLs. This enables application-specific sensors for robot hands, grippers, quadruped feet, and more. Slip detection generalizes to unseen objects with 95% accuracy. Visual-tactile control policies improve manipulation by 40% over vision-only baselines, achieving 90% success on precise tasks like plug insertion and credit card swiping. All design files, code, trained models, and conversion tools are openly available. Project page: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler290,100 次观看 • 5 个月前
Trained a humanoid entirely in a 3D scan of the office. Zero real-world fine-tuning. It just walked in and worked. RL needs hundreds of thousands of attempts, and real robots can't afford to crash. A misjudged gap or a glass door collision breaks hardware and costs hours resetting. So you train in a sim. But sim policies usually train on randomized, untextured geometry; depth is easy to fake. The robot learns structure, not the real world: no materials, no lighting, no idea what anything actually is. RGB cameras carry all of that but training RGB policies in generic fake worlds won’t generalize to the real world. Niantic Spatial 🌎 Scaniverse reconstructs your scan of the real deployment site. One 360° camera walkthrough → photorealistic 3D Gaussian splat at metric scale → collision mesh pulled from the same reconstruction, so vision and physics match exactly. Drops straight into NVIDIA Isaac Sim/Lab, no manual conversion. Flexion simulation-first approach then seamlessly enables the training of RGB-only nav policies inside that reconstruction. With added domain randomization + large image encoders for robustness, this deploys straight to hardware. No real-world fine-tuning. Deployment: months of on-site adaptation → days. Tune into the NVIDIA livestream on 12 August to hear how these companies are closing the sim2real gap: NVIDIA Robotics ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
Lukas Ziegler120,143 次观看 • 2 个月前
