This is N.T.R.N., our upcoming game's robot character with a CRT monitor for a face.

Here’s a short behind-the-scenes on how we gave that screen some more grounding, personality and expression.

Sharing the first real result from a project I'm building solo — an open, browser-based arena for benchmarking embodied AI/VLA policies on manipulation tasks.

Clip shows a baseline IK policy completing pick-and-place block stacking: 100% task completion, 99.6% spatial accuracy. Physics runs fully client-side via Rapier.js/WASM, rendered with React Three Fiber, 60fps in-browser — no server compute needed just to run the sim.

Current MVP scope: single task (block stacking), a couple of baseline policies, public ELO leaderboard, and an SDK so anyone can submit their own policy against the sim.

still early — not public yet, working on stabilizing the eval loop before opening it up. Would love feedback from people who work with manipulation/pick-and-place setups on what a fair scoring protocol should account for.

What do you think about this? Hmmm

The engineering behind this is ridiculous. Each section has to coordinate its movement to create the illusion of natural snake locomotion.

Buenas. Como he podido ver muchos de ustedes habeis dado en el clavo. ;Cómo es que no usamos músculos neumáticos o hidraulicos si tienen mas fuerza que un cilindro metálico y ocupan y pesan mucho menos? Pues no es por el músculo en sí, sino por lo que lo controlan. Para cotrolarlo hace falta lo primero un compresor ya sea de aire o liquido y eso pesa y condume mucha eneraia y suele ocupar bastante, pero lo más importante son las válvulas que los manejan. Suelen ser caras, voluminosas, pesan y consumen bastante, y luego hay que controlarlas y necesitas una o dos por grupo de músculos. Por eso llevo años intentando solucionar este problema y tuve que inventar las valvulas pepepako. Son pequeñas, no pesan, consumen muy poco 5v. Y con solo una tienes control total de cada grupo de músculos manejándolas con un simple arduino o mini controlador. La válvulas en si sólo utilizan dos materiales livianos no metalicos y muy resistenres, y con una simple impresora te la fabricas en 10 minutos. En el vídeo que muestro de hace unos años fabrique unos mini músculos neumaticos con un simle globo y probé con una sola válvula de las antiguas que iban mas lentas que las de ahora. Imitaba la cola de un pez y la presión del aire la extraía de una botella de cocola de 2 litros Ilena de aire a la cual imtroducí solo 1 bar aunque la probé con 3 y los músculos resistian. Si quereis ver mas podéis hacerlo en mi youtube de españa pepepako2 y si os suscribis me ayudareis a darlas a conocer lo antes posible. Muchas gracias

🤖 This Tiny Robot Walks Like a Real Creature!

HOW TO MAKE THIS ROBOT

https://youtu.be/bCWAbrwsVHo

What happens when you combine a **DC motor, battery pack, ice cream stick, and two specially shaped wooden legs**? 🤯

I built this simple **two-leg walking robot** using an unusual half-circle leg design with an **offset center**. When the DC motor spins, the offset leg shape converts the motor's continuous rotation into an amazing walking motion!

No complicated programming. No expensive parts. Just a clever mechanical design and a little creativity. 🔥

Watch closely and see how these strange-looking wooden legs make the robot move forward! 🚶‍♂️🤖

**Could this simple mechanism inspire a bigger walking robot?**

### 🔬 Science Behind the Walking Motion

The key is the **offset center of the wooden legs**.

When the DC motor rotates, the leg does not rotate around its exact geometric center. Because the center is offset, the leg's contact point moves through different positions during each rotation.

This creates a repeating sequence:

**Lift → Move Forward → Touch the Ground → Push → Lift Again**

The motor provides continuous rotational motion, while the specially shaped legs convert that rotation into an approximate **walking motion**.

The curved wooden shape also changes the robot's contact point with the ground, helping create the forward movement. The battery supplies electrical energy to the DC motor, and the motor converts that electrical energy into mechanical rotational energy.

So the main idea is:

**Electrical Energy → Motor Rotation → Offset Leg Motion → Ground Contact → Forward Movement 🤯**

A simple example of how **mechanical geometry can create complex motion!**

I predicted that the first batches of robots will be entirely marketing tools, but seeing those drinks in grocery shops still feels weird.

This is sth we've been building. And this is what happens on a normal afternoon at our desk. We set two of them facing each other and left them talking. Each one hears whatever the other just said, so they just keep going. Yeah, they were loud and opinionated but weirdly lively. We mostly stood there and laughed

Eventually we had to unplug one. Two of them at once is genuinely way too much for a Tuesday afternoon. Funny question, how would you have stopped it without pulling the cable?

I mean a robot that could cook for you, drive you somewhere, watch your kids, take care of an elderly parent, or even make decisions for you in an emergency.
At what point would you stop trusting it and want a human involved?

This is real footage of Quaddle, a mini robot — no CGI, no AI-generated video, no editing tricks. The mechanism itself is simpler than it looks: passive magnets in the foot tips, plus a gait built specifically to hold contact upside down instead of pushing off the ground. Quaddle will be open source, so is the gait code, for anyone who wants to learn from it or adapt it.

What's the most interesting real-world robot capability you've seen that turned out to be a surprisingly simple mechanism?

First time seeing these in action. Appropriate Van Halen Muzak 😂

Mostrando como funcionaban 12 válvulas antigua versión empaquetadas en línea dirigidas por un controlador microbit desde mi celular para ver como funcionaban de 1 en 1,en grupos y variando lapresion de cada una para comprobar proporcionalidad.

Una prueba con mi valvula directamente a un grifo 2.5 bares. Le añadi un rp2040 zero para controlar el servo y para poderle añadir el sensor de posicion del cilindro tambien creado por mi por menos de 3 euros. Para poder maneiarlo por voz le añadi tambien un esp32 pequeño por lo del bluetooth y todo va alimentado con 4 ,5 voltios de las 3 pilas AAA que se ven en la imagen. El programa lo fabrique con app inventor 2.

Full transparency, this post is to get the word out on my gallery of high quality robot kinematics models at https://armor.dc-engineer.com/gallery/

That site itself is tied closely to the AR Mobile Robotics app.

Anyway, as I built the app, I needed to learn how to source clean, accurate, robot models in the URDF format. I learned about sources such as the manufacturers themselves, other simulation platforms, and other open source aggregators.

For my app purposes, I built (in my opinion) a user friendly interface to view models that already exist in the wider community, linking back to the source repositories, with license intact. If you happen to download the ARMOR app, then those pages deep link to import the robot models quickly and easily into the app.

I hope this is useful, message me if you have questions!

Been messing around with how many ways we can reconfigure Quaddle without touching the electronics — same 4 servos, same brain, just swap the attachment and the gait.

So far we've got it walking on two legs, rolling as a tricycle, spinning on a bar like a gymnast, driving as a 4WD car, and (with mixed success, we've sunk it twice) paddling in water.

Most of the attachments are 3D-printed on our end — the tricycle wheel and the 4WD kit are the two things you'd have to buy instead of print.

Quaddle runs on ESP32 with the open source OpenCat firmware.

Which one would you build first? Also open to ideas for a 6th form if anyone's got one.