Boston Robot Hackers meeting Oct 15 at 7:00. Read for details

Executive Summary

Next Thursday, we will have our next monthly meeting of the Boston Robot Hackers . Mark it on your calendar now, and please register for the event—select October 15, 7:00 to 9:00. Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Locomotion Arjun’s MS thesis at Northeastern’s Silicon Synapse Lab tackled a robot that could both walk and fly: the Husky-Beta legged-aerial platform. Crossing rough terrain meant more than learning to walk — the robot also had to learn which mode of locomotion to use at all, switching between legged and aerial movement depending on the terrain ahead.

Open Silicon & Gate-Level Hardware Inspection

From a silicon and hardware engineering viewpoint: - **Interface Neutrality:** Mitigates dependency on proprietary BSPs, empowering open toolchains to address hardware directly. - **Supply Chain Verification:** Schematics and open pinouts allow deterministic audits against silicon errata. - **Lifecycle Decoupling:** Decouples physical hardware utility from commercial vendor end-of-life obsolescence.

Impact on the Open Ecosystem

Ensures that computational autonomy remains in the hands of the architect rather than closed silicon vendors.