Robotics & embodied AI projects: top picks for 2026

A Python code collection and textbook of robotics algorithms covering localization, mapping, SLAM, path planning and control.

A simulation platform for robotics and embodied AI combining a multi-physics engine, a photo-realistic renderer, and a cross-platform compiler behind a Python interface.

A plugin and skill set that lets AI coding agents generate, check and fabricate CAD models from plain-language requests.

Unity ML-Agents Toolkit lets Unity games and simulations serve as environments for training AI agents with reinforcement and imitation learning.

A Chinese-language embodied AI knowledge base and curated index covering algorithms, infrastructure, control, and hardware, plus a hands-on RoboTwin 2.0 tutorial.

A Python framework for building browser-based web UIs and small apps without writing HTML, CSS or JavaScript.

A general-purpose physics engine for fast, accurate simulation of articulated bodies in contact, widely used in robotics and machine learning research.

Open-source robotics vision-language-action (VLA) models from Physical Intelligence, with pre-trained checkpoints and fine-tuning examples.

PyTorch implementations of reinforcement learning algorithms, designed as a reliable, consistent baseline for research and applications.

A standard Python API for single-agent reinforcement learning environments, plus a set of reference environments, forked from OpenAI's Gym.

Open world foundation models, datasets and tools from NVIDIA for building physical AI in robots, autonomous vehicles and smart infrastructure.

A multi-core friendly C++ rigid body physics and collision detection library for games and VR applications.

Open-source Rust toolkit for logging, visualizing, querying and streaming multimodal robotics and sensor data over time.

A MIT-licensed starter kit for deploying and customizing AI Town, a virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize, built on Convex.

Open 3D Engine (O3DE), a multi-platform, real-time 3D engine for building games, cinematic 3D worlds and simulations.

Open-source Rust software that runs a tiny biped duck robot, covering motion control, gamepad, updates and camera streaming.

Open-source 3D-printable designs and parts lists for the SO-100/SO-101 low-cost robot arms, built to work with the LeRobot library.

A curated awesome-list of robotics books, courses, simulators, software libraries, conferences, journals and competitions.

A curated, bilingual-tagged list of online robotics courses, university lectures, books and hands-on resources for self-learners.

An open-source, 3D-printable mini quadruped robot built on the ESP32 with an OLED face and servo-driven walking.

Free, cross-platform Java app for designing model rockets and simulating their flight, aerodynamics and trajectory before building.

A 9B-parameter open-weight multimodal model for visual understanding, spatial reasoning, agentic tool use, and embodied-AI research, built on Qwen3.5 and C-RADIOv4-H.

A training framework for Stable Baselines3 reinforcement learning agents, with tuned hyperparameters, pre-trained agents and hyperparameter optimization scripts.

NVIDIA research monorepo with four projects for long video generation, world models and robot world-action models, each in its own directory.

Open-source ESP32-based quadcopter flight controller firmware and hardware design, built from general-purpose parts for education and research.

An AI-driven Xianxia (cultivation) world simulator where every cultivator is an LLM-powered agent that acts within a rule-based world.

An open framework for building embodied agents that use LLM planners, VLA manipulation models and memory to run robot tasks in simulators and on real robots.

A training framework for LLMs, VLMs, diffusion and embodied models on NVIDIA GPUs and Kunlun XPUs, built on Megatron-LM and torch-native backends.

ASPIRE is a framework where coding agents iteratively refine reusable robot skills for simulated and real-robot manipulation tasks instead of training model weights.

Python bindings and robot-policy layer on the ApxInf Rust inference engine, serving VLA models like PI-0.5 on Jetson Thor/Orin and RTX GPUs.

An interactive TypeScript and Three.js solar system simulator that shows how gravity shapes orbits, with a guided tour and real astronomical data.

Open-source leader and follower robot arm kit with 5 DOF plus a gripper, 3D-printable parts, and LeRobot-compatible joint layout for teleoperation and imitation learning.

An offline-capable interactive web app that reconstructs the local night sky in the browser for any place and time.