Hi everyone,

I’m Marvel, a computational neuroscientist at Cambridge building robotics infrastructure.

I’m trying to better understand where current robotics teams struggle most in production.

If you’re working on manipulation, humanoids, or industrial robotics, I’d love to hear:
What’s your biggest deployment bottleneck today?
What problem keeps coming up that existing tools don’t solve well?

I’m happy to share what I’m building if it’s relevant, but my main goal is to learn from teams actually deploying robots.

Thanks!😁

After months of learning robotics, I finally built my own mobile robot.

Tech stack:

ROS 2 Humble

LiDAR

Raspberry Pi

Differential drive

Autonomous navigation

I'm currently learning mapping, SLAM, Nav2, MoveIt, and robot software engineering. My goal is to become a robotics software engineer, so this is one of my first real hardware projects.

I'd love feedback from the community:

What would you improve next?

Any suggestions for sensors, software architecture, or autonomous features?

Thanks!

Saw this little guy at an event and it was actually my first time ever controlling a real robot! Filmed it just for fun. Was trying to get it to kick the ball, and after 5 failed attempts, I finally figured out how to make it go left and right 😂

A smart robotic goalkeeper that tracks a ball in real-time using OpenCV and dynamically moves a servo-controlled keeper arm to block shots.

I hope some of you find this project interesting—or maybe even inspiring for your own builds.

Any feedback or suggestions are very welcome!

GitHub: https://github.com/chayanforyou/Robokeeper-Firmware

I worked on this robot for 30 minutes per school day for 2 weeks only. I dont know how this worked. Also when I added in the movement as I allowed other people to run it the wepon was speed limited. Thats why there was a wepon test also on show to just show how fast the "wepon" was getting

I saw this ROBIE the Radio Controlled robot from RadioShack in an antiques centre in Nottingham, England. I would've bought it, however the battery compartment wasn't in great condition so would very likely never work again.

I recently graduated which meant I lost access to my schools 3D printers. Luckily I had an old iM.Master robot lying around. Its basically a cheaper Chinese LEGO Technic with motors, so I figured it'd be a fun to tinker. The problem was that it only worked through the official phone app. There was no documented API, no SDK, and no way to control it from my laptop.

So I decided to see if I could change that.

I captured the Bluetooth traffic, reverse-engineered the protocol, and built an open-source Python SDK for it. Right now I'm controlling it from a Raspberry Pi 5, and my end goal is to turn it into a little AI explorer by running local vision and language models on it.

I'm still adding features, but I thought this part of the project might be useful (or just interesting) to share in case anyone else ends up with one of these robots or wants to reverse-engineer a similar device.

Some highlights:

• Pure Python core (no dependencies)
• Reverse-engineered BLE advertising protocol
• High-level Robot() API
• Safety watchdog that automatically stops the robot
• Dry-run mode for developing without hardware
• Optional AI addon that lets a local LLM control the robot from camera input

Im currently not in a position to buy a pi-camera so I just mounted an old phone on the robot with some rubberbands , Object detection is ran on the hailo hat, and im currently running a qwen:2b-instruct to decide which movement command to execute next. It can already do simple tasks like "find a cup and drive toward it".

Everything is open source, and I'd love any feedback on the API, documentation, or project in general. PRs are always welcome too!

GitHub:
https://github.com/2alf/iM.Master-SDK

PyPI:
https://pypi.org/project/immaster-sdk/

If anyone happens to own one of these robots (or a compatible variant), I'd also be really interested to know if it works on your hardware.

before you judge, I had an inter school robotics competition took place within my school, where i had made a robot (which was not amazing) which was almost made complete out of scrap. There were two groups, one was my group, and the other one was another dude. the other group had one man it it and he had made a propeller plane that neither went up, forward, backward and only went down. the thing was made entire out off scrap. and guess what? he won second place. there were other school groups that had made better robots than both my and his group, yet he still won. He might have done some bribery but i don't care about that, i only want to piss him off by making a plane that actually works. I have a 10 month time period, what should i do?

P.S. I have little to no experience in making robots, or planes, or anything... so please go easy on me.

Im 15 years old and made this project on the side for fun. Any feed back would be great. Here is a description.

Parts:

• Pololu board, buck converter, android phone, 18 servos (25kg and 35kg).
• I used Acertics robotics design from youtube as a base and made some changes for improvement.

Code:

• It has every gait I could think of: tripod, wave, ripple, triple, and some custom ones.
• I has Self leveling using the phones gyro.
• Made a custom android app, and uses wifi or hotspot for controller, (let me know if you want a universal inverse kinematics app for robots: hexapods, quadrupeds, robot arms, etc)

Im currently working on a high torque and strength robot arm, let me know if you want an update on that. Here is my portfolio if you want to learn more or contact me: Portfolio.

I made this game that allows you to define a scene ( currently limited to MuJoCo ) define everything else and then reuse it later on hardware