Every time I switch jobs, I promise myself to focus on relaxing. Always ending up starting a few side projects 🥲

Just wrote about using Pixi for ROS 2 development.

pixi.sh + robostack.github.io simplifies dependency management across ROS 2 distributions while supporting both conda and PyPI packages in a single tool.

Full post: jafarabdi.github.io/blog/2025/ro...

#ros2 #pixi #docker #robotics

Spent the last two days updating github.com/krishpop/muj... to work with the latest mujoco 3.2.7, lighting looks a bit weird otherwise happy with the results. Also made it use pixi, so hopefully now it's easier to reproduce and update to new mujoco versions.

github.com/JafarAbdi/mu...

1/5 I love NVIDIA hardware. At Robust.AI we use it on-robot for vision, neural networks, & planning. Someone's marketing team beats me up on why we don't use their robot programming system. I have replied "it doesn't get me excited". "But why not?" they incredulously say. I now have an answer.

Interesting how we used to wait for Boston Dynamics videos but now Unitree's the one taking over my LinkedIn feed with their incredible robots. What an exciting time to work in robotics!

I spent today experimenting with MuJoCo's new model editing feature mujoco.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pr.... It's super cool especially the in-place recompilation

I just spent an hour debugging something not working, turns out I was running `colcon build` in the wrong directory 🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠

Cool paper on the Tencent wheeled service robot, found by @chongzhang.bsky.social on the other site
- 80kg total weight
- 4 wheels, but can walk as well
- can go up/down stairs and carry 50kg (human) payload
- Paper on the control stack: arxiv.org/abs/2411.09935

One thing I wish was different in ROS 2 is not having to inject a `ros2_control` tag in the URDFs, the pattern to have `is_isaac`, `is_gazebo`, or `is_XXXX` for each interface makes them hard to maintain

Hello, world!! Trying this new platform, my name is Jafar. I work with robots. I'm interested in open-source, ROS, and motion planinng.