Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

CoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN, TEXAS

Enjoy today’s videos!

Nvidia just paid US $12.9 billion for the company that acquired Pollen Robotics, and this must be why.

Meet Microduck. 🦆 The 25-centimeter, 780-gram robot that waddles, falls, gets back up, and learns new tricks.

Packed inside: 15 degrees of freedom, a front camera, an 8x8 lidar, two IMUs, mics, a speaker, NFC, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Out of the box, Microduck already walks, sits, crouches, roller skates, picks up objects with its articulated beak, and recovers from falls on its own. Drive it with a game controller, plug-in accessories, and NFC tagged objects, run autonomous behaviors, or gather several Microducks for races and football.

Software fully open source. Ready for whatever you throw at it.

On pre-order for an astonishingly low $399, and ships before Christmas.

[ Microduck ]

Thanks, Matthieu!

If you’ve chosen to ignore all the earlier DARPA Lift Challenge videos that we’ve posted, now you can get all caught up in about five minutes.

[ DARPA ]

You had me at “54-gram robot that out-jumps a kangaroo.”

[ IEEE Transactions on Robotics ]

Sometimes, you just need a video like this.

Most fish-inspired robots are built for one size and one job, so scaling them up or down usually means starting from scratch. A team of engineers says it has found a way to solve that problem. They’ve unveiled ScaFi, a robot modeled on fish like cod and mackerel.

[ New York University ]

Thanks, Leah!

Martin writes, “We’re a small robotics team in Czechia, Europe, building practical hardware around the Unitree G1. Here’s a short demo of our lightweight gripper picking up a strawberry; the gripper weighs under 200 grams and is designed for simple, sensitive manipulation without adding a complex multifinger hand.

[ Sentio Robotix ]

Thanks, Martin!

Hybrid visual markers that are useful for both cameras and lidar is a neat idea.

[ Hello Robot ]

Thanks, Binit!

EmoLo brings emotion-inspired expressive locomotion to Open Duck Mini V2, a low-cost, open-source bipedal robot inspired by Disney’s BDX droids. With a single reinforcement learning policy, the robot can generate distinct walking styles associated with different emotional expressions, showing how characterful and expressive whole-body motion can be achieved on an accessible robotic platform.

[ EmoLo ]

Thanks, Masato!

If it’s possible for a robot with a completely immobile face to look frustrated, this robot absolutely does, starting at three minutes into this video.

[ DLR RM ]

Noble Machines deployed its first general-purpose robots to a Fortune Global 500 industrial customer within 18 months of the company’s launch and met its first delivery milestone, made possible by its AI-driven whole-body control and industry-leading end-to-end autonomy.

[ Noble Machines ]

We’ve reduced the time it takes to go from physical prompt → robot behavior. The faster anyone can teach a robot to do something new, the easier it becomes to scale physical work.

[ Generalist ]

I know this video is mostly a gimmick, but I would totally rent a moderately heavy lift quadruped for a couple of days to help with a move.

[ DEEP Robotics ]

Is taking two minutes to excellently fold a shirt too long, or do we even care how long it takes, as long as it’s a robot doing it?

[ Tokyo Robotics ]

TRON 2 × Wuji Hand 2 handles TCM pharmacy work: picking, weighing, grinding, and packaging. The omnidirectional base frees the hands, while precise gripping and dual-arm force control enable midair operations.

[ LimX Dynamics ]

Person who genuinely knows things about robots, Christian Hubicki, explains everything about robots smashing into walls.

[ Christian Hubicki ]

Navigation enables a robot to turn perception and motion into purposeful autonomy. Unlike locomotion, which produces stable movement, navigation must be used to continuously localize the robot, interpret changing surroundings, select a route, and avoid obstacles to reach a goal safely. Moving this capability to a new robot or scene can require new data, simulation assets, robot interfaces…

Source

A hand-written CUDA inference runtime for Vision-Language-Action robots that decides what to remember, what to forget, and when it's simply too late to think.

The post Can an LLM Forget the Right Things? appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Increasingly, companies are building humanoid robots that perform impressive athletic feats to mark the field’s progress. Now, Chinese robotics company Unitree says its new “Superman” robot can run 12.66 meters per second, faster than Usain Bolt’s top recorded speed.

Getting a humanoid robot to run at all requires split-second control and has been a significant engineering challenge occupying roboticists for decades. That’s why sprinting, as well as jumping, have become popular targets for robotics companies keen to demonstrate their technology’s prowess.

Unitree’s latest demonstration pushes the boundaries by not only outrunning the fastest human ever, but also jumping around 6 feet 7 inches into the air from a standing start, a full foot more than the human record.

“This new machine has only been in development for a little over three months, with significant room for further improvement in the coming months,” Unitree said in an X post that accompanied a video of the accomplishments.

The records have not been externally verified, and the sprinting speed was a peak reading taken over a shorter stretch rather than a full 100 meters like Bolt’s record. The robot’s legs are also only 2 feet 9 inches long, according to Unitree, which results in an ungainly, arm-waving gait while running.

The effort is nonetheless impressive and adds to Unitree’s growing reputation as the company leading the pack of humanoid robot developers. And the timing of the announcement was no accident, coming just days before Unitree’s stock market debut and shortly before the World Humanoid Robot Games, which opened on August 22.

The company’s Shanghai IPO was a blockbuster, recording an initial 629 percent gain on the company’s first day of trading. It was briefly valued at around $66 billion before closing at a more modest $51 billion. However, some analysts have cautioned the excitement around the company’s technology may be getting ahead of market realities.

“The IPO is expensive, and the investment ​risk is already ​quite high,” ⁠Wang Zhuo, partner of Shanghai Zhuozhu Investment Management, told Reuters. “Unitree generates much of its sales from research and demonstrations, but ​wider application is still far away.”

But the company holds a dominant grip on the emerging humanoid market that may justify some of the hype. Chinese firms control roughly 90 percent of the global humanoid robot market, with Unitree alone shipping 5,500 of the 13,000 to 18,000 humanoids sold worldwide in 2025, the most of any manufacturer. In contrast, US humanoid champions Figure AI, Agility Robotics, and Tesla each shipped around 150 units.

China’s success is down to “a combination of policy support, public investment, mature supply chain, and advancements made in AI software and hardware,” Lian Jye Su, a tech analyst at consultancy firm Omdia, told Rest of World.

This is leading to an increasingly combative response from the US. On July 29 the Federal Communications Commission banned new imports of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots. The move was framed as a matter of national security, though it has also been seen as an attempt to give domestic developers a leg up.

Beijing predictably objected, with foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning telling a press conference that “protectionism does not make the US more competitive, and it will only hurt the interests of US companies and consumers.”

Given the rapid progress made by companies like Unitree, it seems likely it’s going to take more than trade barriers for the US to catch up. In the meantime, we might see more human athletic records fall to China’s leading humanoid developers.

The post Unitree Claims New Humanoid Robot Outruns Usain Bolt appeared first on SingularityHub.

Most LLM inference runtimes have no idea a physical deadline exists. This one refuses admission rather than miss a 33ms robot control cycle, evicts KV cache by meaning instead of age, and is written entirely in hand-written CUDA — no cuBLAS, no libtorch.

The post Can an LLM Forget the Right Things? appeared first on Towards Data Science.