What's New
November 12: Yun Chang: Robot Scene Understanding for Extreme Environments: from subterranean to heavy equipment
Yun spent a decade at MIT earning a Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD, working in the SPARK Lab under Professor Luca Carlone. The research centered on robot perception — compressing the world into representations a machine can act on. Yun is now co-founding a stealth startup bringing autonomy to the large machines that run society's infrastructure.
Aug 6: Shivam Chopra: Forward and Inverse Kinematics
Shivam is a Senior Medical Device Engineer and Subsystem Technical Lead at Dexcom, where he works on next-generation wearable platforms. Every robotic arm faces the same two fundamental questions: given these joint angles, where is the end-effector? (forward kinematics) — and the harder one: given a target, what joint angles get me there? (inverse kinematics). The math behind both questions is something every roboticist eventually has to reckon with, and this talk is a ground-up walk through it.
July 9: Isaac Vandor talk about maritime robotics
Isaac Vandor is the developer and maintainer for the software running on famous underwater vehicles like Alvin and AUV Sentry. Isaac will talk about his work and experiences with underwater maritime robotics.
June 11: Ankush Dhawan: Meet Pupper, the Open-Source Robot Dog
Ankush is a PhD candidate in Robotics at Stanford University. Meet Pupper: an open-source quadruped robot built at Stanford that can walk, see, listen, and respond to the world around it. Born as a student project and now in its third generation, Pupper has become the centerpiece of Stanford's CS123 course, a teaching platform for AI-enabled robotics, and through the Dr. Pupper project at Stanford Medicine, a companion for children recovering in the hospital.
Meeting Report: Chris Lai on Kalman Filters
Chris Lai and the team from gave a rapidfire talk teaching us about Kalman Filters. Kalman filters are a constant source of confusion. No one doubts their value but it's easy to get lost in trying to understand the math or the right way to use them.
May 7: Adam Ring talk about simulation
Adam Ring will give the talk about simulation in robotics. In this talk, Adam will discuss how the right simulation approach can accelerate development, improve safety, and reduce costly real-world failures.
September 3: Alan Kilian talk: Powering Robots
Alan Kilian, a long time software and hardware person with a lifelong passion for Robotics will speak about aspects of power for robots. Batteries, Measurement, Circuitry and more.
Meeting announcement for March 5: Tom Ryder on current trends in Robotics
We are fortunate to have Tom Ryden, Executive Director of Mass Robotics as our speaker this month. Tom will discuss current trends in Robotics Startups and the industry in general
Meeting announcement for April 2: Kalman Filters
Chris Lai leads the Beaver Works Summer Program at MIT. Chris will discuss the motivation behind the Kalman Filter, and describe why (and most importantly) how it is used.
Meeting announcement for January 8 - URDF and Vibe Coding
Monthly Meeting Announcement January 8 at A2
2026 Meetings and Talks
Speakers for March, April and June 2026
Meeting notes from December main meeting
Thoughts about our December meeting
Meeting Announcement for December 11 at 7:00pm
Featured Talk: Joel Grimm and Christopher Lai will introduce us to the Autonomous RACECAR at MIT's Beaver Works Summer Institute
Introducing Hands-On Meetings!
Hands-on meetings are coming, starting on Oct 23. The usual place and time. Some of us will bring some partial robots or other widgets from our workshops and if you acquire a robot or robot kit before and want help building it or debugging it, bring it along. It will be a two hour meeting, without an agenda!
Projects
Stanford Pupper v3 x Boston Robot Hackers
Open-source quadruped robot built at Stanford that can walk, see, listen, and respond to the world around it. Born as a student project and now in its third generation, Pupper has become the centerpiece of Stanford's CS123 course, a teaching platform for AI-enabled robotics, and through the Dr. Pupper project at Stanford Medicine, a companion for children recovering in the hospital.
Dome ROBOT
A small simple differential drive robot built from scratch with no external help. Built with ROS2 and Linorobot2
iRobot Create-II
An iRobot Create-II (Roomba 960) controlled by a Raspberry PI and a Sick LASER scanner. Built with ROS2.
Access Ability Arm
A UFactory arm coupled with a custom gripper and associated computer vision code facilitating operator use
MIDI Blinky
A light organ for my organ
ROYGBIV bot
Based on the Turtlebot2i, with custom 3d printed rainbow colored plates, 2 cameras, and a gripper.
You In The Dog Multiverse
See what you would like in the dog multiverse.
Oscar
I wanted a tiny robot for my office desktop
Trippy
A holonomic robot based on the Killough platform used for my Mechatronics BS degree from the U of Minnesota.