Deployment Reports with links to supporting source material.
SmolVLA is a compact, efficient Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model designed for affordable robotics, trainable on a single GPU and deployable on consumer hardware. It matches the performance of larger VLAs through community-driven data and provides a reference implementation for training and inference.
Open Robotics announces the release of ROS 2 Kilted Kaiju, a new version of the Robot Operating System with support for Zenoh middleware, Python improvements, and enhanced ROSBag features. The release is supported on Ubuntu 24.04 and Windows, with plans for future improvements in the upcoming Lyrical Luth release.
NIST is launching the Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIA) to improve robot agility in manufacturing. The competition, a joint effort with the IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, will focus on tasks such as failure recovery, automated planning, and plug-and-play robot integration. The goal is to reduce programming costs and increase adaptability for small and medium manufacturers.