Physical AI is artificial intelligence integrated with sensors and actuators that lets machines perceive, reason about, and act inside the real physical world. Instead of only generating text or images on a screen, a Physical AI system drives a robot, a vehicle, or a robotic arm to do work that changes its environment. That single … Read more
When I first stood next to a bipedal robot that was walking on its own, I had a moment of quiet vertigo. The machine looked almost human, moved with a slow grace, and carried a head full of cameras where its eyes should be. I remember thinking, how did we get here, and how long … Read more
If you have ever wondered what happened to Honda ASIMO, the short answer is this: Honda retired the humanoid robot in March 2022 after more than 20 years of public development. The company announced the end of the ASIMO program once the platform had fulfilled its role as a technology demonstrator, and Honda began redirecting … Read more
A harmonic drive is a precision reduction gearbox that transmits motion through the controlled elastic deformation of metal, achieving gear reduction ratios of 30:1 up to 320:1 in a compact, coaxial package. In robot joints, this technology (also called strain wave gearing) has become the default choice for high-precision motion control because it delivers zero … Read more
Sim to real transfer in robotics is the process of training a robot’s control policy inside a physics simulator and then deploying that same policy to a physical real-world robot, ideally without any retraining. I have spent years watching this field mature from a research curiosity into a production-ready workflow, and in it underpins everything … Read more
A robot simulator is a software framework that creates physics-based virtual models of robots and their environments so engineers can test, validate, and refine autonomous systems without relying solely on physical hardware. I have spent years building and testing robotic platforms, and I can tell you that the leap from prototype to working system almost … Read more
When I first heard about NVIDIA Isaac Sim, I imagined just another physics engine. After spending weeks testing it for a robotic manipulation project, I realized it is something much larger. Isaac Sim is a scalable, GPU-accelerated robotics simulation platform built on the NVIDIA Omniverse framework, used to develop, test, and train AI-powered robots in … Read more
If you are building a robot in , you have three serious open-source options to simulate it before you ever touch real hardware: Gazebo, Webots, and CoppeliaSim. Each one has a different philosophy, a different community, and a different set of trade-offs that will either save you weeks of work or cost you weeks of … Read more
Nav2 is the professionally-supported successor to the ROS Navigation Stack, providing autonomous navigation for mobile robots built on ROS 2. If you have ever wondered how a robot decides where to go, plans a path around obstacles, and actually drives itself to a goal, Nav2 is the answer most production robotics teams reach for in … Read more
MoveIt is an open-source motion planning, manipulation, and kinematics framework for ROS (Robot Operating System) that enables robots to plan and execute collision-free trajectories in complex environments. Built originally in 2012 and now maintained by PickNik Robotics, MoveIt has been deployed on more than 150 robots worldwide, ranging from research arms to industrial manipulators. If … Read more