Independent projects — infrastructure, robotics, technology surveys, and corporate research
Category · 8 entries

Technology Trends

August 26, 2026 Technology Trends

Technology Trends in VLA (Vision-Language-Action)

Vision-Language-Action folds camera input and natural-language instructions into a single model that outputs robot actions directly. From RT-2 to OpenVLA to Physical Intelligence's π0 lineage, surveying the spread of a design philosophy that refuses to separate perception from control.

August 20, 2026 Technology Trends

Technology Trends in Navigation

From the classical pipeline of maps, costmaps, and path planning, to end-to-end approaches via reinforcement learning, to foundation models built on Vision-Language models. Surveying where autonomous mobile robot navigation stands today.

August 14, 2026 Technology Trends

Technology Trends in Local LLMs

Ollama's monthly download count grew 520x in three years. Surveying how the rapid rise of open-weight models and maturing quantization techniques are turning large language models into something that runs on a home PC.

August 8, 2026 Technology Trends

Technology Trends in Semantic Segmentation

From transformer-based SegFormer and Mask2Former to the Segment Anything family, which can carve out any object from a prompt. Surveying where segmentation stands as it moves away from fixed classes.

August 2, 2026 Technology Trends

Technology Trends in Object Detection

The YOLO family moving toward NMS-free designs, and transformer-based detectors like RF-DETR, which broke 60 mAP on COCO. Surveying the state of object detection in 2026, all the way to open-vocabulary detection driven by nothing but a text prompt.

July 27, 2026 Technology Trends

Technology Trends in Visual-SLAM

From classical feature-point methods to deep-learning-based end-to-end estimation, and on to a reinvention of map representation via 3D Gaussian Splatting/NeRF. Surveying where Visual-SLAM — self-localization and mapping from cameras alone — stands today.

July 21, 2026 Technology Trends

Technology Trends in LiDAR-SLAM

From the LOAM lineage to direct methods like FAST-LIO, and on to D-LIO, published in 2026. Surveying the evolution of LiDAR-and-IMU-based self-localization and mapping, set against newbot's own implementation.

July 17, 2026 Technology Trends

Technology Trends in SLAM

From filter-based methods to graph optimization, and now to learning-based, AI-native approaches. Tracing the lineage of SLAM (simultaneous self-localization and mapping) and where current research stands.