UBC Engineering Physics

Just another day in the Project Lab

@jeffclune It's happening on multiple levels and there is some push back. x.com/stevehou/statu…

Sadly I think many companies will start to require this. The incentives are too strong here in terms of automating computer work. reuters.com/sustainability…

Very cool work from @SonyAI_global - especially this shot at 13:30 into the clip: youtu.be/FrGq8ltb-_E?si…

A good TV cast of the robot half-marathon race is here: youtube.com/live/zqgc9C3cC…

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

consistency is the key

Another humanoid robot falls during a live marathon. The impact shows how heavy it is.

2026 Robot marathon fail & fun compilation

有点F1的感觉 北京机器人马拉松比赛 …嘿嘿

TienKung Ultra finished the full 21.0975 km in 1:15:00 — fully autonomous, zero human intervention. 🤖 No repeat win this time. But it was easily one of the most striking robots on the course — clean gait, stable motion, and the most human-like running form out there. It took home the “Best Design” award, and that actually says more than the podium this time. Because this isn’t a marathon-only build. TienKung Ultra is a general-purpose humanoid, already moving toward real-world deployment. And it didn’t show up alone. Teams from Peking University, Fudan, HUST, BIT, Beihang, HKUST(GZ), TUM and more were all building on the same TienKung platform. That’s what an open ecosystem looks like — shared hardware, shared stack, different solutions on top. And just a day before, it took the Robot Warrior Challenge — fully autonomous through obstacle tasks modeled on real-world rescue and hazardous operations. That’s the part that matters. This is no longer just about speed. It’s about autonomy — and whether these systems can actually handle real environments. That’s what future winners are going to look like.

Hopefully many of you got to watch clips from the robot half marathon in Beijing. If not here are some interesting posts.

Thank you Emiko and @ubcengineering for putting this video-tour together. :) Auto-caption has mislabeled "our optical projects" to "our obstacle projects". Oh well.

In the age of generative LLMs "ephemeral software" is taking over. From an antenna design or an Arduino solution to a telemetry dashboard or a spreadsheet analysis of financials. We won't save implementations to reuse. LLMs will create the functionality from scratch on demand.

Then they showed they can stabilize a simple plasma simulation with it. Their work builds on the research of Alan Kaptanoglu and Steven Brunton (@eigensteve).

@tate_mccartney, Oksana and @rishilandra developed a hybrid Reduced Order Modelling controller, based on Physics-constrained, low-dimensional models for magneto hydrodynamics using first-principles and data-driven approaches.

@aviationarchive Soon.

Making airplane propellers in 1917. Profiling machine, during peace time is used to carve out antiques, here it makes 4 props at once, accurate to 1/1000th of inch. Filmed at factories in Elizabeth, NJ; Buffalo, Detroit, and Dayton, OH. Vintage manufacturing is amazing. 😎

🎓 First lecture is live on YouTube! ▶️ Introduction to Deep Learning Research 🔬 Lesson 01: Course intro + McCulloch & Pitts binary neuron 🧠 Using maths & coding as languages of research 📐💻 youtu.be/rg4QyMFONNQ

Self driving reinforcement learning RC micro-car with customizable state space representation. This is a simple platform that allows us to test different training algorithms and environments in real. Excellent work by Sasan,Mahdi, Felipe, Will and Itai. Thank you @wayve_ai.

All known life in one image. Neat.

#finaltouch before Project Fair. The electromagnetic BB8 rolling ball. All those E&M classes are paying off. Thanks to @ANSYS for making their software available for our students for free. And also to @BambulabGlobal for their amazing printers. Each hemisphere is a 16 hour print.