Video Friday is your weekly collection of superior robotics videos, collected by your pals at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We additionally publish 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
Take pleasure in at this time’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 surroundings. The robotic’s legs are solely 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, have 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 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 might 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 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 value, Moon landings have successful price nicely beneath 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. In contrast to the inflexible servo motors utilized in most robots, these fiber-shaped muscle tissues are gentle and versatile. They mix electrohydrodynamic (EHD) fiber pumps—slender tubes that transfer liquid utilizing electrical fields to generate stress silently, with no transferring elements—with fluid-filled fiber actuators. These artificial muscles may allow extra agile untethered robots, in addition to wearable assistive programs 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 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 habits for Spot.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
On this work, a multirobot planning and management framework is offered 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 arduous to take care of within the wild. DreamWaQ++ bridges this hole by fusing each modalities by 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 habits is barely uncanny.
[ DreamWaQ++ ]
I take concern 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 surroundings. Cleansing your flooring is method, method 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 transferring their palms and fingers, customers can direct a robotic to carry out particular duties, or they will manipulate objects in a digital surroundings 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 assist and updates for Aibo!
[ Aibo ]
This robotic appears to be like prefer it may very well be a little bit curvier than regular?
[ LimX Dynamics ]
Developed by Zhejiang Humanoid Robotic Innovation Middle Co., Ltd., the Naviai Robotic is an clever cooking gadget. It could actually autonomously course of substances, carry out cooking duties with excessive accuracy, alter good kitchen tools in actual time, and full postcooking cleansing. Geared up with multimodal notion expertise, it adapts to every 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 Huge Knowledge.”
Formal strategies—mathematical strategies for describing programs, 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 function can, and will, formal strategies play in advancing robotics? On this speak I’ll give a number of examples for what we will 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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