Video Friday is your weekly collection of superior robotics videos, collected by your folks at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We additionally submit a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics occasions for the subsequent few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA
RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY
Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE
Get pleasure from right now’s movies!
“Roadrunner” is a brand new bipedal wheeled robotic prototype designed for multimodal locomotion. It weighs round 15 kg (33 lb) and may seamlessly swap between its side-by-side and in-line wheel modes and stepping configurations relying on what’s required for navigating its atmosphere. The robotic’s legs are totally symmetric, permitting it to level its knees ahead or backward, which can be utilized to keep away from obstacles or handle particular actions. A single management coverage was skilled to deal with each side-by-side and in-line driving. A number of behaviors, together with standing up from varied floor configurations and balancing on one wheel, had been efficiently deployed zero-shot on the {hardware}.
Extremely (INCREDIBLY!) NASA says that that is truly taking place.
NASA’s SkyFall mission will construct on the success of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which achieved the primary powered, managed flight on one other planet. Utilizing a daring midair deployment, SkyFall will ship a workforce of next-gen Mars helicopters to scout human touchdown websites and map subsurface water ice.
[ NASA ]
NASA’s MoonFall mission will blaze a path for future Artemis missions by sending 4 extremely cell drones to survey the lunar floor across the Moon’s South Pole forward of astronauts’ arrival there. MoonFall is constructed on the legacy of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. The drones can be launched collectively and launched throughout descent to the floor. They’ll land and function independently over the course of a lunar day (14 Earth days) and can be capable of discover hard-to-reach areas, together with completely shadowed areas (PSRs), surveying terrain with high-definition optical cameras and different potential devices.
For what it’s value, Moon landings have successful fee nicely underneath 50%. So let’s ship some robots there to land again and again!
[ NASA ]
In Science Robotics, researchers from the Tangible Media group led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, along with colleagues from Politecnico di Bari, current Electrofluidic Fiber Muscle tissue: a brand new class of artificial muscle fibers for robots and wearables. Not like the inflexible servo motors utilized in most robots, these fiber-shaped muscle groups are gentle and versatile. They mix electrohydrodynamic (EHD) fiber pumps—slender tubes that transfer liquid utilizing electrical fields to generate strain silently, with no transferring components—with fluid-filled fiber actuators. These artificial muscles may allow extra agile untethered robots, in addition to wearable assistive techniques with compact actuation built-in straight into textiles.
[ MIT Media Lab ]
On this examine, we developed MEVIUS2, an open-source quadruped robotic. It’s comparable in measurement to the Boston Dynamics Spot, geared up with two lidars and a C1 digital camera, and may freely climb stairs and steep slopes! All {hardware}, software program, and studying environments are launched as open supply.
[ MEVIUS2 ]
Thanks, Kento!
What goes into making ready for a reside efficiency? Arun highlights the reliability testing that goes into attempting a brand new conduct for Spot.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
On this work, a multirobot planning and management framework is introduced and demonstrated with a workforce of 40 indoor robots, together with each floor and aerial robots.
That soundtrack, although.
[ GitHub ]
Thanks, Keisuke!
Quadrupedal robots can navigate cluttered environments like their animal counterparts, however their floating-base configuration makes them weak to real-world uncertainties. Controllers that rely solely on proprioception (physique sensing) should bodily collide with obstacles to detect them. People who add exteroception (imaginative and prescient) want exactly modeled terrain maps which might be exhausting to take care of within the wild. DreamWaQ++ bridges this hole by fusing each modalities via a resilient multimodal reinforcement studying framework. The end result: a single controller that handles tough terrains, steep slopes, and high-rise stairs—whereas gracefully recovering from sensor failures and conditions it has by no means seen earlier than.
That cliff conduct is barely uncanny.
[ DreamWaQ++ ]
I take subject with this from iRobot:
Whereas the pyramid exploration that iRobot did was very cool, they did it with a custom-made robotic designed for a really particular atmosphere. Cleansing your flooring is approach, approach more durable. Right here’s a bit extra element on the pyramids factor:
[ iRobot ]
Extra robots within the circus, please!
[ Daniel Simu ]
MIT engineers have designed a wristband that lets wearers management a robotic hand with their very own actions. By transferring their arms and fingers, customers can direct a robotic to carry out particular duties, or they’ll manipulate objects in a digital atmosphere with high-dexterity management.
[ MIT ]
At Nvidia GTC 2026, we showcased how AI is transferring into the bodily world. Guests interacted with robots utilizing voice instructions, watching them interpret intent and act in actual time—powered by our KinetIQ AI mind.
[ Humanoid ]
Props to Sony for its continued help and updates for Aibo!
[ Aibo ]
This robotic seems prefer it could possibly be somewhat curvier than regular?
[ LimX Dynamics ]
Developed by Zhejiang Humanoid Robotic Innovation Heart Co., Ltd., the Naviai Robotic is an clever cooking machine. It might probably autonomously course of substances, carry out cooking duties with excessive accuracy, alter good kitchen gear in actual time, and full postcooking cleansing. Geared up with multimodal notion expertise, it adapts to every day kitchen environments and ensures protected and steady operation.
That 7x is performing some heavy lifting.
[ Zhejiang Lab ]
This CMU RI Seminar is by Hadas Kress-Gazit from Cornell, on “Formal Strategies for Robotics within the Age of Huge Knowledge.”
Formal strategies—mathematical methods for describing techniques, capturing necessities, and offering ensures—have been used to synthesize robot control from high-level specification, and to confirm robotic conduct. Given the current advances in robot learning and data-driven fashions, what function can, and may, formal strategies play in advancing robotics? On this discuss I’ll give a number of examples for what we are able to do with formal strategies, focus on their promise and challenges, and describe the synergies I see with data-driven approaches.
[ Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute ]
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