Video Friday is your weekly choice of superior robotics videos, collected by your mates at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We additionally publish a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics occasions for the following 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
Take pleasure in 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 might seamlessly swap between its side-by-side and in-line wheel modes and stepping configurations relying on what’s required for navigating its setting. The robotic’s legs are completely 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 numerous floor configurations and balancing on one wheel, had been efficiently deployed zero-shot on the {hardware}.
Extremely (INCREDIBLY!) NASA says that that is truly occurring.
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 crew 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 cellular 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 will probably be launched collectively and launched throughout descent to the floor. They may land and function independently over the course of a lunar day (14 Earth days) and can be capable to 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 price, Moon landings have successful charge effectively below 50%. So let’s ship some robots there to land time 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 tissues: 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 tissue are delicate and versatile. They mix electrohydrodynamic (EHD) fiber pumps—slender tubes that transfer liquid utilizing electrical fields to generate strain silently, with no shifting components—with fluid-filled fiber actuators. These artificial muscles may allow extra agile untethered robots, in addition to wearable assistive methods with compact actuation built-in immediately into textiles.
[ MIT Media Lab ]
On this research, we developed MEVIUS2, an open-source quadruped robotic. It’s comparable in dimension to the Boston Dynamics Spot, geared up with two lidars and a C1 digicam, and might 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 stay efficiency? Arun highlights the reliability testing that goes into attempting a brand new habits for Spot.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
On this work, a multirobot planning and management framework is offered and demonstrated with a crew 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 are laborious to take care of within the wild. DreamWaQ++ bridges this hole by fusing each modalities by way of a resilient multimodal reinforcement studying framework. The consequence: 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 habits is barely uncanny.
[ DreamWaQ++ ]
I take challenge 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 setting. Cleansing your flooring is manner, manner tougher. 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 shifting their arms and fingers, customers can direct a robotic to carry out particular duties, or they will manipulate objects in a digital setting with high-dexterity management.
[ MIT ]
At Nvidia GTC 2026, we showcased how AI is shifting 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 appears to be like prefer it may very well be a bit of curvier than regular?
[ LimX Dynamics ]
Developed by Zhejiang Humanoid Robotic Innovation Heart Co., Ltd., the Naviai Robotic is an clever cooking gadget. It might probably autonomously course of elements, carry out cooking duties with excessive accuracy, regulate sensible kitchen tools in actual time, and full postcooking cleansing. Geared up with multimodal notion expertise, it adapts to day by day kitchen environments and ensures protected and secure operation.
That 7x is doing a little heavy lifting.
[ Zhejiang Lab ]
This CMU RI Seminar is by Hadas Kress-Gazit from Cornell, on “Formal Strategies for Robotics within the Age of Large Information.”
Formal strategies—mathematical strategies for describing methods, capturing necessities, and offering ensures—have been used to synthesize robot control from high-level specification, and to confirm robotic habits. Given the latest advances in robot learning and data-driven fashions, what position can, and will, formal strategies play in advancing robotics? On this discuss I’ll give a couple of examples for what we are able to do with formal strategies, talk about their promise and challenges, and describe the synergies I see with data-driven approaches.
[ Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute ]
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