Last week the Rose City Robotics team was in Las Vegas. You know that place where everything that happens there stays there? You know what we did on our big night out? We got VIP tickets to BattleBots Destruct-a-thon. Yes we are robot nerds. If you are in manufacturing, you have likely been inun...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
Congratulations Robotics Collaborative rookie FTC team! Our 7th-and-8th grade team 30603-Vikings just competed in our rookie season for the 2025-2026 FIRST Tech Challenge Decode , a global robotics competition for 7th-12th graders —and crushed the rookie goal. In August 2025, our nonprofit Rob...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
A lot of the newest “pixel-to-action” robotics demos look magical until you ask the uncomfortable question: how much data did it take? In one recent interview with Sharpa Robotics, the algorithm developer reported they used over 300 of hours of teleoperation data to teach a robot a complex, multi...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
When people say “computer vision“ or “machine vision“ they usually picture a camera pointed at a part, a neural network, and a bounding box. Joseph Cole, PhD doesn’t start there. Joe starts one layer deeper: how the signal is formed in the first place, what constraints the hardware imposes, and...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
In a recent internal interview, I sat down with RCR Cofounders Duncan Miller and Joseph Cole, PhD to unpack something Joe knows firsthand: what it really takes to make defect detection work in production. Joe spent five years at Applied Materials building and tuning defect metrology algorithms f...
Samantha Town
Events and Outreach
I no longer believe a junior web developer is a viable career path. Senior web developer is next on the chopping block. I manage my AI agent like it's a junior dev. I only provide prompt engineering, then submit PR code reviews and change requests. The exact same way I used to work with a human j...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
Forget the hype. Robotics isn’t about humanoids or sci-fi futures. It’s a discipline grounded in mathematics, physics, software, and hardware. Tools used to solve real problems. At its core, robotics is about building systems that sense the world, make decisions, and act with purpose. Anyone can...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
By the time you've SSH’d into your robot for the fifth time in one day, zip ties in one hand and a battery cable in the other, you start to realize: robotics isn’t just software. And it’s definitely not just simulation. As a software engineer coming into robotics, I didn’t fully get it either. I...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
When Boston Dynamics released its latest demo of the Atlas humanoid robot last week—this time under the joint stewardship of Hyundai and Toyota—it wasn’t just a showcase of robotics flair. It was a subtle but significant shift in what we expect from autonomous systems: not just balance and mobili...
Samantha Town
Events and Outreach
As robots become more capable and autonomous, a major challenge remains: enabling real-time decision-making at the edge. NVIDIA's latest innovation, Jetson Thor, tackles that challenge head-on. Launched as part of NVIDIA’s broader push into Physical AI, Jetson Thor is a compact, high-performance...
Samantha Town
Events and Outreach
At Rose City Robotics, we believe your tools should reflect your values. That’s why we created an open-source portfolio and blog site template along with a course and step-by-step guide to help you through the process. Our new free course Build Your Professional Portfolio Website: From Code to ...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
Most robotics courses are simulations dressed up as skill-building. They keep you watching, not doing. You don’t deploy code, you press “play.” You don’t train a robot, you follow a slide. At Rose City Robotics, we created Engineer Boldly for those who are ready to break that loop — and build r...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
High Schoolers Are Publishing Robotics Research. Here's How.In 2025, publishing a robotics paper isn't a flex. Instead, it's proof of curiosity, capability, and a real-world impact shaped by advanced technologies. If you're a student, parent, or mentor wondering how to turn a robot project into...
Samantha Town
Events and Outreach
At Rose City Robotics, we believe ambition deserves the best tools — and that includes knowing where to find funding. If you’re leading or supporting a high school FRC robotics team, NASA’s Robotics Alliance Project (RAP) may be one of the most powerful resources you’re not yet using. Every year...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
Startupedition luncheon • June 24 • 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM • Metro Region Innovation Hub Why this event mattersGenerative AI has upended the software world—now it’s coming for robots. The automation industry is racing toward its own “ChatGPT moment,” where transformer models, real-time perception, a...
Samantha Town
Events and Outreach
To help launch Portland Startup Week, the Rose City Robotics Collaborative (RCR) hosted a community networking lunch in partnership with Electron Robotics. Held at the Metro Region Innovation Hub, the gathering welcomed members of the robotics community from across the Pacific Northwest for an af...
Samantha Town
Events and Outreach
When Joe Cole, PhD gave his talk last weekend to the Portland Area RoboTics Society (P.A.R.T.S.), it was an intimate gathering of passionate hackers in a local hackerspace, a place where real ideas spark and technical minds connect to build physical hardware. As co-founder and Chief Executive Of...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development
A recap of our May 22 bootcamp with the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute This week, Rose City Robotics welcomed university students and faculty to the Metro Region Innovation Hub for a hands-on Generative AI bootcamp delivered in partnership with the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI). The after...
Samantha Town
Events and Outreach
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What does it look like when entrepreneurs, engineers, and researchers come together to experiment with real-world robotics? At Rose City Robotics, we brought that vision to life with our Robotics Lunch and Learn: Startup Edition—a hands-on technical workshop focused on the cutting edge of roboti...
Samantha Town
Events and Outreach
At Rose City Robotics, we are proud to join the celebration of National Robotics Week, happening April 5–13, 2025! This nationwide event highlights the power of robotics to inspire students, promote STEM education, and showcase the incredible innovations shaping our future. National Robotics Wee...
Duncan Miller
Operations / Business Development