Alison Cossette@alison_cossette680

There are 240 million children worldwide living with learning disabilities, and many struggle to access physical books independently. Ladybug: The Robot Reader was built to change that. Ladybug is an autonomous robotic system that reads physical books aloud from cover to cover with no human intervention. Built on the SO-101 robotic arm, it uses a perception-action loop powered by Claude Vision to assess the workspace, decide what to do next, and execute — opening a closed book, reading each page spread, turning pages, and closing the book when finished. Claude Vision analyzes camera frames to classify page types (content, title page, table of contents, index, blank) and extract text. ElevenLabs then streams natural-sounding speech in real time using a sentence-level prefetch pipeline so audio plays continuously without pauses. Motor skills — opening, closing, and page turning — are trained using ACT (Action Chunking with Transformers) policies. The system includes intelligent retry logic with frame hashing to detect failed page turns and automatically retry them. Ladybug supports multiple reading modes: verbose (reads everything), skim (headers and titles only), and silent (text extraction only). It also features a web dashboard for remote monitoring and a dry-run mode for testing without hardware. Our mission is accessibility in education — putting an autonomous reading companion in every special education classroom. We want 1,000,000 lady bug robot readers available to children around the world.

⏱️ Build the next generation of Autonomous Agents in the heart of Europe’s AI Revolution. 📅 May 13 – 20, 2026 May 13 – 19: Online Build Phase. May 19: An exclusive on-site build day at Milan AI Week for selected participants. May 20: Awards Ceremony. 📍On-site Venue (May 19–20): Fiera Milano (Rho), Milan, Italy 🤝 Join solo or with a team. 🎟 FREE Milan AI Week conference ticket included for participants. 💰 $32,000+ prize pool 🧑‍💻 Apply now to turn your autonomous agent into a market-ready enterprise solution.

📅 May 11–19, 2026 • May 11 – 19: Online Build Phase. • May 18 (Hybrid Build Day – Online & Onsite) • May 19 (Demos & Awards – Online & Onsite) 🌍 Hybrid event. Join online from anywhere or build onsite at the venue. 🏆 Winners will be announced live on stage at the AI & Big Data Expo North America on May 19 📍 On-site Venue (May 18–19): San Jose McEnery Convention Center, CA, USA 🤝 Join solo or with a team. 🎟 FREE AI & Big Data Expo North America ticket included for participants that are able to join the on-site phase. 🏆Compete for a $10,000 prize pool 🧑‍💻 Apply now to design, prototype, and showcase enterprise-ready innovation.

In this hybrid hackathon powered by Arc and Circle, developers will build the next generation of Agentic economic applications using Circle’s Nanopayments infrastructure with settlement on Arc in USDC. For the first time, high-frequency, usage-based transactions between users, APIs, and AI agents can operate without gas overhead eroding margin. Arc provides stablecoin-native settlement with predictable, dollar-denominated USDC fees and deterministic, sub-second finality — enabling real-time coordination and economically viable per-action pricing at scale. 📅 April 20 – 26, 2026 • Apr 20 – 25 (Online): Submit projects by Apr 25. • Apr 25 (On-site Build – SF, CA): Teams refine projects. • Apr 26 (On-site Demos & Awards – SF, CA): Live pitches & winners announced. Get guidance from Arc and Circle experts through on-site support. 📍 On-site Venue (April 25-26): MindsDB SF AI Collective 3154 17th St, San Francisco, California, USA 🤝 Go solo or team up, it's your flow. 🏆 Compete for a $15,000+ Prize Pool. 📍 Please note: If approved for the on-site experience, you’ll also have the opportunity to showcase your project live. Travel and accommodation will not be covered. 🧑🏻‍💻 Secure your spot now – sign up before the Kick-Off Stream!