Just thought I'd highlight this issue to the ML community, since I recently had this problem arise and it might be useful for some. I had a coauthor who I knew was somewhat untrustworthy when it came to LLM use. This coauthor added some last-minute new references to the paper. The deadline was near, and I had a ton of other stuff to take care of. I asked them to ensure the references were correct. This coauthor confirmed that all references were correct. I trusted them. I submitted the paper. Turns out, I made a critical mistake in trusting them. All of these newly added references had hallucinations in them. The reviewer pointed out the hallucinated references and we withdrew the paper. Besides this reviewer, we had all accept scores: the scientific content of our paper was strong. Of course, this damages my reputation and the reputations of the rest of the coauthors. The takeaway is: check *all* references added to the paper, unless you are absolutely certain you can trust someone to not use LLMs. Hopefully this helps someone avoid this issue, because I worked tirelessly on this paper, in a very high pressure lab environment, and this whole situation has caused me a lot of grief. submitted by /u/treeman0469 [link] [Kommentare]
I put together a small ROS 2 subsystem that turns a 2-DOF pan/tilt platform and a cheap 2D LiDAR into a stop-and-capture 3D scanner, and figured it might be useful to someone else here. The setup: two Feetech STS3215 serial-bus servos aim an LDROBOT LD19. A node sweeps the platform and an assembler stacks the 2D scans into a `PointCloud2` using the live TF tree. There's an optional MQTT bridge so an external controller (in my case a microcontroller mission queue on a rover) can trigger scans and get a completion handshake back. It's a *complete* project — it even includes a fix to the LiDAR driver (upstream `ldlidar_stl_ros2` won't build on recent GCC/glibc; the patched fork is linked below). It talks to the rover over a well-defined set of MQTT messages, but every command also has an equivalent ROS 2 topic, so if you want a pure ROS 2 setup you just don't launch the bridge. (Personally I love the MQTT side — it lets me drive the whole thing from a tablet.) No vendor SDK — the Feetech STS/SMS half-duplex protocol is implemented directly over pyserial, including handling the URT-1 adapter's habit of echoing every TX byte back on the RX line (the kind of thing that eats an evening if you don't know it's coming). The assembler is driver-agnostic: it consumes standard `sensor_msgs/LaserScan` on `/scan`, so any conformant 2D LiDAR should work. It's running on an RK3588 today and is built to go headless on a Pi 5. This is the first piece I'm open-sourcing from a larger autonomous rover project, GPL-3.0. I'd genuinely welcome feedback — particularly from anyone who's done multi-LiDAR or TF-timing work, since the scan-to-TF synchronization was the fussiest part to get right. But it does work! Happy to answer questions about any of it. Project: https://github.com/aa2mz/pan\_tilt\_lidar Patched LiDAR driver: https://github.com/aa2mz/ldlidar\_stl\_ros2 submitted by /u/CorrectAir8833 [link] [Kommentare]
Hi all, A real story from my current experience: I'm associated with an internship where the primary work revolves around autonomous UAVs. What has shocked me the most is that almost everyone is so heavily focused on coding agents and AI tools that they're building things without paying enough attention to the fundamentals. This got me thinking: what if we conduct a virtual session on the fundamentals of Computer Vision? This idea comes from my own experience as well. During my first semester, I was terrified of learning from documentation and kept chasing YouTube tutorials instead. Later, I realized that some of the most interesting and valuable concepts are actually explained in the documentation itself. What do you all think about conducting something like this? How many of you would be interested in joining a one-day session? submitted by /u/FishermanResident349 [link] [Kommentare]
Hi everyone, I wanted to share our latest open-access paper published in the journal Robotics: Multi-Objective Intelligent Industrial Robot Calibration Using Meta-Heuristic Optimization Approaches. The Problem Traditional industrial robot calibration heavily focuses on a single goal: maximizing absolute end-effector position accuracy. However, purely optimizing for position errors often results in the algorithm recommending unrealistic, drastic shifts to the robot’s physical kinematic structure (its Denavit–Hartenberg parameters). This creates a stark deviation from the manufacturer's nominal specifications and can degrade performance across different areas of the workspace. Our Approach We framed this challenge as a multi-objective optimization problem to strike a balance between two competing goals: Position Accuracy: Minimizing discrepancies using joint angle readings and a high-precision laser tracker (LT). Kinematic Realism: Minimizing the mean absolute deviation of the calibrated DH parameters from the manufacturer's original design specs. To find the optimal trade-off, we deployed and benchmarked several leading evolutionary and swarm optimization algorithms: NSGA (Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithms) MOEA/D (Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm based on Decomposition) MOPSO (Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization) Key Takeaways Utilizing a multi-objective framework prevents overfitting to specific target points and keeps the structural kinematic parameters physically viable. Swarm and evolutionary approaches excel at generating an adaptable Pareto front, giving automation engineers finer control over calibration tradeoffs. The full methodology, mathematical formulations, and comparative results are available to read for free on the MDPI Robotics Publication Page. I would love to hear the community's thoughts on using meta-heuristics for kinematic calibration, or answer any questions you might have about our experimental setup and algorithm performances! submitted by /u/MAK42018 [link] [Kommentare]
I am 16 years old and have absolutely no experience with Linux, and I am looking for a ROS 2 course. While the courses offered by The Construct seem quite comprehensive, I am concerned about some issues others have reported, such as incorrect quizzes, shallow content, or general quality problems. If you have experience with their courses, could you share how it went, or would you recommend other structured courses instead? submitted by /u/Initial_Animator1465 [link] [Kommentare]
I've been teaching myself about Symbolic Regression (SR), which looks like a super exciting field. (A great intro resource below [1]). But then I was wondering: given LLMs' increasingly-growing power in generating code, which is in a way very similar to Symbolic Regression (or of course, even directly tackling symbolic regression tasks), are existing SR techniques dead? Happy to hear your thoughts. [1] ETH Zürich AISE: Symbolic Regression and Model Discovery - YouTube submitted by /u/omomom42 [link] [Kommentare]
Hello, I am trying to get back into the Robotics industry after years as an SWE and find a job. I am based in Chicago so I was thinking of getting an all access pass to network for a job, and take some courses. I am currently unemployed. Does anyone know the best way to network at these things? Are the courses worth it? Does anyone have a coupon to reduce the cost? i would be paying out of pocket and I am unemployed so i figured i would ask. Thanks for your advice! submitted by /u/RickAmes [link] [Kommentare]
Seems like they have engineered some specific limitations that are widely cited as follows: In light of the ability of recent models to accelerate their own development, we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms. Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a different model. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). These interventions will not affect the vast majority of coding work. We estimate they will impact ~0.03% of traffic, concentrated in fewer than 0.1% of organizations https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464732 Other comments note how even using the word 'nuclear' in the context of scientific research elicits refusal behavior by the model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473302 This makes it seem quite plausible that the model could subtly sabotage any machine learning work (even as false positive). Some suggest this has been happening behind the scenes for a while already, but can anyone confirm that? submitted by /u/AccomplishedCat4770 [link] [Kommentare]
Just a quick demo to see how fast my hand is! I started with a baseline 5 second, finger-to-thumb opposition cycle and increased the speed until the fingers started to lose contact. The pinky starts to lose contact with the thumb at around 12x and the rest of the fingers barely make contact at 14x and beyond. Having the fingers be tendon driven does help a good bit in reducing inertia to get these max achievable speeds. Although, I'm not sure there's even a good reason to be moving this fast.. submitted by /u/qualitygui [link] [Kommentare]
The Genesis sim video got me thinking: what does it actually take to build scenes like that (apart from gaussian splat part) with such accuracy, at scale? Asset and scene generation is one of the biggest bottlenecks in robot training. NVIDIA GR00T, Helix, HumanPlus, and ASAP all show the same pattern: more diverse scenarios lead to better sim-to-real transfer. But generating physically accurate objects and scenes takes time. Four platforms are working on this in 2026. Here's how they compare: 1. Rigyd: Agentic pipeline, best for on-demand scale and new types of objects Takes raw 3D (.glb, .fbx, .obj), images, or text and outputs calibrated OpenUSD + MJCF in ~2 minutes per asset with SimReady asset validator baked in. Generates full interactable scenes with per-object decomposition. Native Isaac Sim and MuJoCo support. Non-rigid and articulated objects are stated in the roadmap. The pipeline is agentic end-to-end, so no per-asset manual work. Good fit for teams that need to move fast with on-demand assets. 2. Lightwheel: High fidelity articulated objects, SimReady catalog Strong catalog of high-fidelity articulated assets and a SimReady library used by large enterprise customers. Per-asset visual and physical quality is high. USD and MJCF support via open-source converters. Good fit if you need a curated, validated catalog. Less flexible for new use cases or object categories outside their existing library. Catalog growth follows a curation model rather than an agentic pipeline. 3. NVIDIA Edify: Generative 3D, physics added separately Generates high-quality 3D meshes from text or image in under 2 minutes. Trained on licensed data, enterprise-safe. Tight Omniverse integration. The gap: it produces visual geometry, not SimReady assets. Physics, collision geometry, and USDPhysics schemas need to be added downstream before the asset is usable for robot training. Works well as an upstream step paired with a SimReady pipeline. 4. Moonlake: World modeling agent approach Acts directly inside Blender, automating the creation of articulated assets, physics-validated scenes, and complex environments rather than per-asset annotation. The approach is promising for research but production-grade Isaac Sim / MuJoCo integration is not there yet. If successful, world models could collapse scene generation and policy training into a single learning loop. What I think actually matters for sim-to-real transfer (ranked by impact): Per-object physics accuracy within the domain-randomization band Scene diversity (variation of scenes the policy sees during training) Visual fidelity (matters most for camera-only policies, less for contact-rich manipulation) How to choose: Need to scale across many object categories fast → Rigyd Need a validated catalog of articulated assets for known use cases → Lightwheel Need high-quality visual 3D in the NVIDIA ecosystem and will add physics downstream → Edify Researching end-to-end learned simulation → Moonlake For most teams the practical pattern is Rigyd for the long tail + hand-authored or Lightwheel assets for the few hero objects your scenario depends on. Both output standard OpenUSD/MJCF so they compose cleanly. Questions for the community: What's missing from this comparison? For those running training: where does asset prep actually bottleneck you? Image Credit: Genesis AI submitted by /u/yektabasak [link] [Kommentare]
I've been reading more about privacy-preserving ML approaches such as differential privacy, federated learning, and on-device inference. The research literature is fairly active, but I'm curious about real-world adoption. For those working in industry: Are these techniques being deployed in production? What were the biggest engineering challenges? Did privacy requirements significantly impact model performance or infrastructure costs? Are there specific use cases where privacy-preserving approaches have proven especially valuable? Interested in hearing both success stories and cases where the tradeoffs made adoption difficult. submitted by /u/Electrical_Mine1912 [link] [Kommentare]
