Normally, I begin off these annual highlights posts by saying that it was the very best yr ever for robotics. However this yr, I’m not so certain. At the end of 2024, it actually appeared like AI and humanoid robots have been poised to make a transformative quantity of progress in the direction of some type of practicality. Whereas it’s actually true that progress has been made, it’s arduous to rationalize what’s truly occurred in 2025 with the sum of money and hype that has suffused robotics over the course of the yr. And for higher or worse, humanoids are overshadowing every little thing else, elevating questions on what’s going to occur if the businesses constructing them in the end don’t succeed.
We’ll be going into 2026 with each optimism and skepticism, and we’ll maintain doing what we all the time do: speaking to the consultants, asking as many arduous questions as we will, and ensuring to share all the cool robots, even (or particularly) those that you simply received’t see anyplace else.
So thanks for studying, and to all you superior robotics people on the market, thanks for sharing your work with us! IEEE Spectrum has a bunch of thrilling new stuff deliberate for 2026, and as we shut out 2025, right here’s a fast look again at a few of our greatest robotics tales of the yr.
Eddie Man
Humanoid robots are arduous, and so they’re arduous in a number of other ways. For a few of these methods, we a minimum of perceive the issues and what the options will probably contain. However there are different issues that haven’t any clear options, and most humanoid corporations, particularly the well-funded ones, appear quite happy to wave those problems away whereas persevering with to boost extraordinary quantities of cash. We’re going to maintain calling this out at any time when we see it, and count on much more skepticism in 2026.
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Safety is a kind of pesky little issues that’s tremendous vital in robotics however that early-stage robotics companies usually deal with as an afterthought as a result of it doesn’t drive funding. Chinese language producer Unitree is basically the one firm with humanoids robots which can be obtainable sufficient and inexpensive sufficient for intelligent folks to carry out a safety audit on them. And to the shock of nobody, Unitree’s robots had serious vulnerabilities, which as of but haven’t all been mounted.
The factor I respect concerning the people at Amazon Robotics is how relentless they’re to find artistic options for problems at scale. Amazon merely doesn’t have time to fiddle, and so they’re designing robots to do what robots do finest: specific repetitive tasks in structured environments. Within the present local weather of robotics hype, it’s refreshing, truthfully.
Did I point out that humanoids robots are arduous? Whether or not or not anybody can ship on the guarantees being made about them (and personally, I’m leaning an increasing number of strongly in the direction of not), progress is being made in the direction of humanoids that are much more capable and versatile than they ever have been. The collaboration between Toyota Research and Boston Dynamics on giant conduct fashions is only one instance of how far we’ve come, and the way far we nonetheless need to go.
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My least favourite story to put in writing occurred proper on the finish of the yr—iRobot filed for bankruptcy. This was not a complete shock; regulators shutting down an acquisition by Amazon in 2024 basically gutted the corporate, and it’s been limping alongside in the direction of the inevitable since then. Proper after the information was introduced, we spoke with iRobot co-founder and ex-CEO Colin Angle, who had lots to share about the place issues went improper, and what we will study from it.
Evan Ackerman
My favourite story of 2025 was as a lot about cows because it was about robots. I used to be astonished to study simply what number of totally autonomous robots are arduous at work on dairy farms around the world, and totally delighted to additionally study that these robots are actively enhancing the lives of each dairy farmers and the dairy cows themselves. Dairy farming is limitless arduous work, however thanks to those robots, small household farms are in a position to maintain themselves sustainable (and sane). Everyone wins, because of the robots.
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