A friend of mine built this website which might be interesting for the scientists among us! Feel free to check it out and give him feedback on the site.
kindred-histories.web.app
As always, this is a helper library for using Drake from @toyota-tri.bsky.social
#robotics #open-souce #robot-simulation #benchmarking #python
Slowly catching up on the release notes for Brom...
Here's the release notes for version 0.4.6. This is big for all the people who are starting (or are thinking about starting) to use Brom. We are getting better docs!
bromreleasenotes.substack.com/p/docs-are-a...
I never knew this!
The LLM code review bots are fantastic. Sure, the make mistakes that are easily identified but they also catch a lot of sneaky bugs. Really do wish I could use them in academic settings but the cost…
A thought-provoking set of thoughts related to AI-generated research.
I'm curious to see how (or if?) we choose to moderate this new form of research. I'm not sure how I feel about letting the community that generates this research policing themselves 😅, but I think it's a great way to start!
(As usual, I hope this makes it a bit easier to use @toyota-tri.bsky.social 's Drake toolbox.)
#Robotics #Simulation #OpenSourceSoftware
Check out the release notes here:
open.substack.com/pub/bromrele...
And, as usual, you can quickly install the newest version of Brom with:
pip install brom-drake
Brom Version 0.4.3-1 is out!
We've formalized a feature that we've been using to develop tests in Drake: the Puppetmaker.
This feature allows you to freely move an object around the scene (like a Puppet). (1/2)
Dr. Suh wrote a lot of great papers during his PhD, but this was one of my favorites:
proceedings.mlr.press/v229/suh23a/...
So interesting (but exciting) to see that HJ Terry Suh has started a robotics company with advising from his former PhD Advisor, Russ Tedrake.
www.carbon6robotics.com/leadership
Excited to see what they will build!
#robotics #automation
Glad to see these protected bike lanes going up around Summit & Pavonia in Jersey City. The city becomes easier and easier to ride my bike in every day. 😊 #ISeeYouJC
We added a single flag so that the `drakeify_my_urdf` function creates "better" collision geometries for you!
Read more about this in the release notes:
open.substack.com/pub/bromrele...
Brom Version 0.4.1 is out!
This time, we added features for helping with the "objects slipping out of hands" problem.
If you're familiar with how robotics simulators work, this is a problem of how most simulators handle collision geometries (i.e., they use convex hulls). (1/2)
Official start of L4DC’25
My friend recently made this word game! If you want to test your vocabulary (or if you want to expand it, like I do), then check it out:
word-boundary-challenge-edensjasmine.replit.app
Oof. This was actually BabyTron. 😭 They both have a similar Detroit accent, tho, so I understand why there is confusion.
I've been making a series of videos called "What the FUNDING" that highlight all the incredible science that federal funding supports. If DOGE just fcked up your NSF grant and you wanna collaborate on a video, lmk? I'm @science_irl on insta & TT
#scicomm 🧪 #nsf
(at least during the next few years).
Let's hope that the ramifications of this decision don't ripple much longer than the next election.
AND let's hope that "being the foremost country for scientific research" goes back to being a non-controversial/nonpartisan priority for the government. [2/2]
As a previous NSF GRFP Fellow, I've seen its alumni (my peers) go on to:
(i) develop novel tech for US businesses,
(ii) become professors at our nation's top universities, and
(iii) lead programs at various national labs + similar research orgs.
I'm sad that we won't get more of that [1/2]
A little bit of interesting history: in late 60s, early 70s, two PhD programs were established at the University of Michigan: computing and communication sciences (CCS) in LSA and computer, information, and control engineering (CICE) in CoE.
They had classes in automata theory, AI, info theory, algorithms, optimization, control theory, and even social decision making. It had a perfect Cyber-Physical Systems curriculum before CPS was a thing (well cybernetics was a thing): drive.google.com/file/d/12SEj...
The 2024 Turing Prize winners announced this morning: Barto & Sutton for "developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning". Well deserved. Built on 1959 Donald Michie's idea; matchboxes and colored beads learning tic-tac-toe. awards.acm.org/about/2024-t...
From what I've heard from former Uber employees, they are capable of understanding commute patterns and have unintentionally (?) influenced them in the past. 😔 I hope they're not doing this in Ann Arbor.
Early this morning Firefly's Blue Ghost vehicle soft landed on the Moon. 10 science payloads onboard. www.space.com/the-universe...
A great workshop for senior PhD
students and postdocs interested in pursuing academic positions: nextprof.engin.umich.edu/nextprof-nex...
1/10 We study LLMs empirically, as we do for many natural systems, as distinct from traditional mathematics and formal computer science. That's OK, but don't be confused about how well we understand them. It is more like how we try to understand economics than, say, electrical engineering.
Willems’ behavioral system theory is an amazing way to think about systems in an abstract and unified manner. I have found myself thinking about it in very different contexts, from model reduction, to learning, to abstractions.
And then finally there are Brom's Production objects.
I will return to these in a later post, but if you want to start playing around with any of these things, then install Brom by running:
pip install brom-drake
Also, you can view the code here:
github.com/kwesiRutledg...
Second, the drakeify_my_urdf function.
Importing a URDF that you've downloaded from the internet into Drake can sometimes be a pain. There are often multiple manual passes you have to make over it. This function aims to help with that.
Call this function and it should spit out a compatible URDF.
