Despite the recent deluge of videos of humanoid robots doing backflips and kung-fu, the actual pace of progress towards humanoids that can do economically viable jobs at scale has at times seemed a bit plodding. There are some good reasons for this: a humanoid robot needs to be powerful enough to do useful work, safe enough for humans to walk past, and have enough battery life to limit how much of the day it’s hooked to a charger. But all three of those necessary features actively work against each other.

With its new Digit 5 robot, announced today, Agility Robotics may have found the sweet spot. Digit 5 is a humanoid worker that can lift 23 kilograms up 2.1 meters, can work in close proximity to people without relying on physical barriers, and can operate for more than 20 hours a day. This combination of power, safety, and battery life has resulted in a 1.8 m tall, 129 kg robot that prioritizes functionality over style and pretty much everything else, but this is exactly what it’s going to take to get humanoids a job.

Humanoid robot companies have been reluctant to talk about safety, because there are no easy answers to “what happens if your fundamentally unstable bipedal robot falls over onto me/my pet/my baby?” And there are still no easy answers, but Agility does have an answer that allows Digit to be verifiably safe. That answer is to make sure that it’s physically impossible for Digit to fall over on anyone, ever, by “autonomously avoiding, stopping or assuming a seated position,” according to today’s press release. In other words, as a person approaches Digit, Digit will put down whatever it’s carrying and then if necessary make sure that it’s stably seated on the ground before that person gets near. It may not be elegant, but it works, which is more than can be said for any other commercial humanoid that I’m aware of.

The other big change is Digit’s legs. Somewhat famously, Agility Robotics introduced first Cassie and then a whole series of Digit robots featuring bird-like ‘backwards’ legs. In his 2019 article for IEEE Spectrum, Agility co-founder Jonathan Hurst explained that this leg configuration was the result of a careful analysis of the physics of animal locomotion, rather than for the leg to look like any sort of animal in particular. The unfortunate reality for those of us who were fans of Cassie is that bird legs are optimal for dynamic motion, while human legs are better for squats and lifts, which will make sense to anyone who has seen an ostrich trying to lift a heavy box up off the floor and also anyone who has tried to outrun a cassowary.

How much will Digit 5 cost?

We also know a couple of things about Digit 5 that weren’t included in today’s announcement, thanks to Agility’s June SEC filing in advance of their plan to go public by the end of 2026. For example, at launch, Digit 5’s BOM (bill of materials) cost is likely to be somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000. This is just the cost of the parts that make up a Digit robot, not what it costs for Agility to actually build one. Based on real production data, Agility is anticipating that with some near-term optimizing and at a volume of 10,000 units per year, that cost should drop to under $50,000 per robot.

In this rendering, Digit 5 robots work in a factory with humans nearby, no safety barriers needed. When a human approaches, the robot puts down what it’s carrying and squats down so it can’t fall on anybody.Agility

Arguably less important than the per-robot cost is how Agility (and its customers) will profit from Digit 5. In the filing, Agility estimates (using “rounded estimates” which are “purely illustrative”) that Digit 5 robots will be offered to customers as a service at something like $8,500 per month. Based on 20 hours per day of work, and assuming that the total cost of a human worker to their employer is $30.50/hr, Digit 5 as a service could save employers $100,000 per year, per robot.

It’s important to note that all of these numbers are just estimates, and that all kinds of things (many of them not under Agility’s control) could cause them to change. They’re most useful as an illustration of Agility’s broad approach to making Digit 5 profitable. It’s also important to note the assumption here with such a direct comparison is that Digit 5 will be a more or less effortless drop-in replacement for human labor, which is not something that I’m entirely sure has ever happened with any robot, anywhere.

Where does Digit 5 go from here? Today’s press release says that “as of May 2026, Agility had more than $300 million in multi-year customer orders for Digit 5, with a sales pipeline of prospective customers across manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics.” That works out to comfortably under 1,000 robots, one-tenth of the full capacity of Agility’s RoboFab factory in Oregon.

Between now and all those robots, however, lies an unpredictable entry into the stock market through what’s called a SPAC merger. That’s expected to close within the next few months. Agility hopes to raise more than $620 million through the merger, and it will primarily spend the money to scale production of Digit 5, and get it to customers. Those in the EU and the UK should be able to buy the bots in 2027.

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

Enjoy today’s videos!

Traversing sparse 3D structures requires humanoid robots to perceive thin, overhanging geometry while executing agile, accurate whole-body motions. We study this problem through monkey-bar traversal, where the robot must jump to the structure, traverse it through sparse bar interactions, and land safely.

The list of obstacles that you can traverse to escape a robot is getting shorter.

[ ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab ]

YES GIVE ROBOTS TWO HEADS I LOVE IT!

[ General Robotics Lab ]

9/11 was the first documented use of robots for urban search and rescue and helped create the field of disaster robotics. Personnel began assembling on the afternoon of September 11 and worked the pile from late on September 11 through October 2, when the last available robot failed. The robots found no survivors, but they located remains and helped search for routes through the rubble toward basements and stairwells where trapped firefighters might have gone.

[ CRASAR ]

Unitree majorly fully open-sources the UnifoLM-WLA-1.0 embodied foundation model, achieving new SOTA results across multiple benchmarks among open-source models worldwide. A single model coordinates desktop and whole-body mobile manipulation, supporting cross-task and cross-end-effector generalization, driven by one model, whole-body coordination.

[ Unitree ]

Compliance is very important in physical interaction. In this work, we show how a multi-lined aerial robot uses its centroid and joint motion to achieve hybrid impedance—admittance control in contact-rich aerial manipulation tasks such as surface sliding. This work will be presented in IEEE IROS 2026.

[ DRAGON Lab ]

Thanks, Moju!

Remind me not to get too close to this.

[ RaiLab Kaist ]

Welcome to this edition of Things That Really Seem Like They Should Not Fly.

[ Texas A&M University Advanced Vertical Flight Lab ]

Achieving agile and generalized legged locomotion across terrains requires tight integration of perception and control, especially under occlusions and sparse footholds. Existing methods have demonstrated agility on parkour courses but often rely on end-to-end sensorimotor models with limited generalization and interpretability. By contrast, methods targeting generalized locomotion typically exhibit limited agility and struggle with visual occlusions. We introduce a unified reinforcement learning (RL) framework for agile and generalized locomotion that incorporates a novel attention-based map encoder in the control policy.

[ ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab ]

Finally, the killer app for humanoid robots! But we probably shouldn’t call it that.

[ Unitree ]

I suspect that this demo avoids many of the things that are actually difficult about doing dishes. Not just the water and the slippery soapiness, but also identifying when a dish is dirty as well as when it is actually clean.

[ Flexiv ]

Sure, I guess I might want a robot to deliver a burrito to me while I’m hiking to the top of a mountain in the rain...?

[ DEEP Robotics ]

AI has transformed the digital world. It writes our code, generates our images, reasons in our language. But the physical world—the plants that make our power, our fuel, our steel, and chemicals—it has barely touched. ANYbotics CEO and co-founder Péter Fankhauser on the bet behind the company: Why legged robots turned out to be the way into the world’s most demanding industrial plants, what it took to certify one for explosive atmospheres after experts called it impossible, and where autonomous industrial work goes next.

[ ANYbotics ]

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

Enjoy today’s videos!

I know these videos from Agility can be a little bit silly, but the couch drag in this one is impressive.

[ Agility Robotics ]

Stabilizing unsecured payloads against the inherent oscillations of dynamic bipedal locomotion remains a critical engineering bottleneck for humanoids in unstructured environments. To solve this, we introduce ReST-RL, a hierarchical reinforcement-learning architecture that explicitly decouples locomotion from payload stabilization. Successfully deployed on the Unitree G1 humanoid hardware, this modular approach demonstrates highly reliable zero-shot sim-to-real generalization across various objects and external force disturbances.

[ SteadyTray ]

Thanks, Ioana!

Figure is scaling compute so that its robots can...uh...have their compute scaled, I guess?

Solving for a robot in every home is not a data-and-compute problem, it’s a safety-and-cost problem.

[ Figure ]

The most important thing to know about this gripper is that koalas have two thumbs on each hand.

[ RAI Institute ]

DARPA Triage Challenge Finals are in November!

[ DARPA ]

Online, humanoid robots are very impressive to watch, but behind the scenes, most of those movements are carefully choreographed. Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University’s Safe AI Lab are instead teaching robots how to adapt. Their system, called APEX, allows a humanoid robot to navigate obstacles using adaptive, full-body maneuvers.

[ CMU ]

Researchers from North Carolina State University have created teardrop-shaped soft robots that leap upward or forward when exposed to infrared light—and will keep jumping as long as the light is present.

The robots are made of a liquid-crystal elastomer ribbon shaped like a teardrop, with a thin aluminum tube shaped like a V at one end. When exposed to light from an infrared lamp, the surface of the ribbon contracts, causing the ribbon to rotate. The stiff V at one end of the robot prevents the ribbon from simply rolling in place, causing the ribbon to twist tighter and tighter. This stores energy until the twist reaches a critical point when the ribbon releases that energy, causing the V at one end of the teardrop to snap downward and strike the surface. This launches the teardrop into the air.

[ NC State ]

Thanks, Ship!

I’ll be honest—I was prepared to be underwhelmed by the DARPA Lift Challenge, but there was such creativity in the heavy-lift drone designs that I’m excited for it to come back in 2028.

[ DARPA Lift Challenge ]

Thank you, Christian, for attempting to talk some sense into the internet.

[ Christian Hubicki ]

Humans use not only muscle signals but also stretched skin around joints as a cue for proprioception. To mimic this biological mechanism, we developed a three-layer joint-covering skin with 44 pressure- and stretch-sensitive elements for the musculoskeletal humanoid Musashi-W.

It’s not a replicant, but one day, it will be.

[ University of Tokyo ]

Thanks, Akihiro!

Having mobility issues with your robot? Just staple it to the end of an industrial robotic arm. Problem solved!

[ LimX Dynamics ]

But what if I am the sort of person who needs to speak to a manager?

[ Sharpa ]

In Turpan, China—known as the City of Fire—summer ground temperatures can exceed 50 °C. During the grape harvest, farmers traditionally carry heavy baskets back and forth under the intense heat, while every extra minute in the sun can affect the freshness of the fruit. This year, the DEEP Robotics Lynx M20S joined the harvest.

[ DEEP Robotics ]

This video showcases the achievements of the first OH! GYM! Project cohort, a group of university and graduate students who explored, developed, and deployed their own humanoid behaviors using the open-source AI Sapiens K1 platform. Over the course of one month, the students experienced the complete process of humanoid development—from creating motions in simulation to transferring them onto a physical robot through repeated Sim2Real experiments.

[ ROBOTIS ]

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 ]

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

Enjoy today’s videos!

This is very, very cool. But I’m trying to think of what the commercial use case will be, you know? I guess, high speed, incredibly dangerous package delivery to second-floor windows or something...?

[ Unitree ]

Humans have a remarkable ability to perform new physical skills from only one or a few examples. Our latest robot foundation model, GEN-1.5, exhibits the beginnings of that same ability: It can learn a new task in seconds, from a single example, without gradient updates or fine-tuning. It displays broad capabilities across one-shot and few-shots learning from demonstration, as well as zero-shot physical generalization. Although the tasks are simple and short-horizon, this is the first model we know for which one-shot and few-shots learning of physical skills have emerged at scale. We view these results as a significant step toward our mission of building general intelligence for the physical world.

I will make the cautionary point that for many of these “the model figured it out” tasks, the blog post can only say that there was no relevant pretraining data “to the best of our knowledge.”

[ Generalist ]

BeanBot is a robot inspired by Mexican jumping beans, and I need say no more.

[ IIT ]

As a professional bagpiper who definitely pays very close attention to whatever that annoying tapping noise is coming from the back of the band, I can attest to this group of robot drummers being absolutely top-notch.

[ AgileX Robotics ]

What does it take for an aerial robot to move through a sequence of arbitrary poses—fast, precisely, and continuously? Rather than teaching the robot a behavior from data, we asked how far a first-principles analytical model could take us. Through a collaboration between the AIMS Group at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and DRAGON Lab at the University of Tokyo, we developed the first sequential-convex-programming-based trajectory-optimization framework for generalized multirotors, covering both conventional and omnidirectional platforms.

[ DRAGON Lab ]

Thanks, Moju!

This is a nifty idea that adapts a kind of interface frequently used for robot training and uses it for human training instead.

[ MIT ]

Gravis Robotics brings robotic intelligence to heavy construction machines. Our retrofit kit, the Gravis Rack, turns off-the-shelf hydraulic machines into robots. Cameras, lidar, and onboard compute lets your machine see and understand its surroundings, and learning-based control lets it work close to its limits, moving more dirt with full, fast cycles.

[ Gravis Robotics ]

Robust brachiation requires precise hand movements to grasp and release bars together with highly coordinated whole-body motion. To address this challenge, we propose a learning-based framework centered on waypoint-guided reinforcement learning (WGRL). WGRL guides the end effector through waypoints while allowing RL to explore and generate dynamic whole-body behaviors. With this approach, the learned policy demonstrated robust brachiation across diverse courses with different bar heights, spacings, and orientations in sim-to-sim experiments. In the real world, our life-size dual-arm robot successfully traversed four consecutive bars.

[ EVARL ]

Thanks, Ayumu!

Well, here’s a different approach to welding in shipyards with robots.

[ Kawasaki ]

We should have a lot more robots in agriculture, if only they’d lettuce.

[ Flexiv ]

We’ve all had refs like these.

[ PHYBOT ]

I got stuck after the first 15 seconds of this video trying to imagine what any of these home humanoids would usefully do if they dropped a glass.

[ Zhejiang Humanoid ]

Shakey the Robot doesn’t get enough love.

[ SRI ]

This work introduces a novel approach to physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) by leveraging the joint torque sensors of standard collaborative robots. By mounting a passive, uninstrumented plexiglass touchpad to the robot’s flange, we transform the robot into a handwriting-based input interface.

[ TS-Robotics ]

Humanoids desperately need to stop making YouTube videos and get a job already, and Persona AI is one of the few humanoid companies that seems to be entirely focused on making that happen. Persona AI’s approach has been to carefully select a job that is economically viable for robots right now, and they’ve found one that was also the job of one of the very first industrial robots ever sold: welding.

IEEE Spectrum first spoke with Persona two years ago, shortly after it was founded by Nicolaus Radford and Jerry Pratt. Radford led the Valkyrie program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center back in the day and was also the founder of Nauticus Robotics, while Pratt led IHMC’s DARPA Robotics Challenge team before spending a couple of years as CTO of Figure.

The Challenge of Humanoids

As of our first conversation in 2024, Persona had committed to building an economically viable humanoid, but they hadn’t yet figured out where their focus was going to be. “We were all over the place,” Radford says. “Warehousing, automotive, we probably even mentioned the home.” These are the same environments with the same sorts of potential applications that basically every other humanoid robotics company is attempting to make economically viable, and despite an ever more exhaustive number of demonstrations, so far none have succeeded at any sort of useful scale.

The challenge for Persona, and really for every robotics company, is that it’s not enough that you have a robot that is simply capable of doing a task. It’s also not enough that your robot can do that task in a way that is efficient, reliable, and safe. What’s required is that your robot can make money for both you and your customer. Most humanoid companies seek to achieve this by targeting baseline “unskilled” human labor.

Persona did not see economic viability in the unskilled labor approach, Radford says. “We started forming this thesis around skilled trades and tool usage.” Persona is targeting much more expensive skilled labor with its robots, and the reason why this is feasible is because their entry point focuses on the kind of skills that robots are especially good at. “I like to call it ‘last-mover advantage.’ We’ve seen everything that everybody’s doing, and we’ve decided that there’s a different way.”

Persona AI/YouTube

A Humanoid for Shipyard Welding

The first task that Persona’s humanoid is focusing on is welding—using a handheld tool to connect one piece of metal to another. “Tool use is pretty difficult,” Pratt says. “And we want to use the same tools that humans do, which makes it more difficult.” That difficulty is offset somewhat by the fact that Persona’s humanoid will first focus on making long, linear welds that are relatively uncomplicated. “This is not the hardest style of weld,” Radford says, “but in shipbuilding you need a lot of them—hundreds of kilometers of linear welds per ship.”

Currently, Persona has two public partnerships: one with HD Hyundai, which is the world’s largest shipbuilder, and the other with POSCO, one of the largest steel producers in the world, both in Korea. Persona declined to get into detail, but Radford says that broadly speaking, the company is interested in customers who can support ‘hundreds’ of robots per location.

Shipyard welding is an enticing application for Persona because there is a deficit of skilled (and highly paid) workers, it’s taxing physical labor, and it’s a comparatively easy skill for a humanoid to learn.

The welding process is skilled in a very robot-friendly way. Because you can only weld as fast as metal melts, the top speed for the task is an easily manageable centimeter per second. And making a high quality weld involves millimeter-scale repeated motions, which robots excel at, especially over long periods of time—whereas humans tend to get tired or bored. Pratt expects that for these uncomplicated welds, performing on par with humans—if not eventually better—will be achievable soon.

Shipyards make a compelling case for a humanoid with legs, as opposed to a more stable wheeled base. “These open-air shipyards are a couple hundred meters long, with horizontal and vertical spars that you have to step over all the time,” Radford says. “You’ve got to work on the ground, overhead, and through portholes.” Persona considered other form factors, like four legs (or even more), but determined a two-legged robot would be the least disruptive to existing shipyard rhythms.

The Economic Viability of Humanoids

Deploying their robots in shipyards specifically brings additional advantages for Persona. The safety concerns that come with bipedal robots—such as potentially falling over on a human worker—are lessened because a shipyard environment is staffed with workers who are trained to work around potentially dangerous industrial equipment. The company is also less sensitive to competitive pricing because no other company is pursuing the use case. “We’re now in an industry where the value added by our robot can be high enough that we don’t have to cut corners on quality and features in order to reduce the price,” Pratt says. “With a robot for the home, for example, there would be a lot of competition and a ton of price pressure.”

The added value for shipbuilders, Radford explains, doesn’t come from replacing humans with robots. “Our current partnerships are running at a significant backlog, and they’re labor-constrained. So we want to help our customers’ top line, not necessarily their bottom line.” In other words, rather than trying to argue that their robots will lower shipbuilding costs, Persona is instead arguing that their robots will allow more ships to be built. “Even if our robot was more expensive than a human, that would still be valuable to these companies, because it could unlock additional revenue,” Radford says. And when the additional skilled labor does not exist, Persona’s robots could be the next-best option for shipbuilders who need to scale.

Shipyards are environments where legs are necessary for a robot to be useful.CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Persona’s Multipurpose Future

In the current commercial humanoid climate, where the emphasis seems to be on developing a “general purpose” robot (whatever that means) that will somehow justify itself through some undefined scale in some equally undefined and perpetually receding future, Persona stands out with their focus on a seemingly viable, near-term, and very specific business case. It hasn’t been easy, though. “It hurts us a little bit,” Radford says. “We’ve been told that we’re not thinking big enough.”

But a tool-using heavy industrial humanoid has plenty of future applications, many of which can be expanded from the welding skill even within shipyards. “Shipbuilding is a great beachhead,” Pratt says. “There are tons of adjacent markets, like grinding, painting, and other kinds of fabrication.” Persona’s ambition, Radford adds, is to be “the largest repository of industrial skills.”

It’s going to take time to get there. That time will be needed to collect tens of thousands of hours of expert demonstration data, create high-fidelity simulations, and conduct real-world testing. And however promising Persona’s approach may seem, the company still has to prove that its idea for an economically viable robotics company can be realized. It’s the same challenge that every humanoid robot company is facing. “A lot of the technical problems are the same no matter whether you’re in a house or a shipyard,” Pratt says. “Everybody’s got a great team and smart people, and we’re all knocking these problems out together.”

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.

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL

Enjoy today’s videos!

Speaking from experience, I can tell you that the best part of any DARPA challenge is when things go horribly wrong. And after you enjoy all the crashes (followed by all of the battery fires), get caught up with the DARPA Lift Challenge with video recaps of the final few days.

[ DARPA Lift Challenge ]

Drone delivery: coming soon to a moving vehicle (or perhaps even through an open window) near you.

[ HKUST Aerial Robotics Group ]

This tiny little robot called STEMbot (as in stem, not STEM) can climb up and around plant stems to check for pests. It’s not very fast, but it sure is adorable.

[ STEMbot ]

Monumental’s robots delivered the brickwork for a semi-detached home, laying around 20,000 bricks in a new community.

[ Monumental ]

Meet the world’s most “truss’t-worthy” robot.

[ Modlab University of Pennsylvania ]

Stanford BDML and Honeybee Robotics propose a payload to test gecko-inspired adhesives in spaaace!

[ NASA ]

How can a legged robot organize its own walking while maintaining a desired direction? In this work, we present a Differential Adaptive Steering (DAST) mechanism for directional adaptation in legged robots under decentralized adaptive control.

[ BRAIN VISTEC ]

I do not care even a little bit if a robot fails (safely, of course), as long as it recovers from that failure.

[ Sanctuary AI ]

Even for a robot that doesn’t drink champagne, those are some pretty light pours.

[ Kawasaki Robotics ]

If we as a society would just accept that the appropriate place to store clothing is in a pile on the floor, robots would have a much easier time of it.

[ LimX Dynamics ]

To be fair, this is also the speed at which I fold shirts.

[ Sharpa ]

Our DR02 humanoid robot takes on the stairs with stable, controlled movement—steady steps, steady progress.

[ DEEP Robotics ]

Two words: structural minifridge. Or is it mini fridge...? Whatever, THREE words.

[ AgileX ]

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.

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL

Enjoy today’s videos!

The DARPA Lift Challenge is taking place through this weekend. There are a couple of very brief overview videos from the past couple of days, which are only really interesting because they give you a quick look at some utterly bizarre heavy-lift drone designs. If you like what you see, DARPA has recorded livestreams of the entire event so far. We’ve posted one of those at the end of this section, and if you want to be impressed by some super-weird drones, check out this and this.

[ DARPA Lift Challenge ]

When NASA’s SkyFall helicopters take to the Martian skies, one of their tasks will be to hunt for frozen water—a critical resource for future astronauts—using ground-penetrating radar. For that radar to work, the rotorcraft will carry a flexible, fabric-based antenna that extends below the aircraft without interfering with landings or breaking at touchdown.

[ NASA ]

Why would you even want a five-fingered humanoid hand when you could have something so much better?

[ Flexiv ]

We’ve improved how GEN-1 learns to adapt to new actuators and new robots at the lowest level, with up to 10-20x gains on internal benchmarks. This significantly boosts performance on high-precision tasks like disassembling parts from a NIST board.

[ Generalist ]

This is certainly one of the best-looking humanoid robots out there.

[ Generative Bionics ]

A little on the technical side, but the concept here is important, I think: being able to control an assistive robot through touch.

[ Tac-Nav ]

We present SonicFly, a passive aeroacoustic perception framework that enables one unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to estimate and follow another using only the leader’s intrinsic flight sound.

[ General Robotics Lab ]

Okay, but... Get a job?

[ ROBOTIS ]

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “Covered List,” originally published in 2021, identifies communications equipment and services that it says pose a threat to national security. On 28 July, the FCC added mobile, communicating robots weighing more than 2 kilograms and power inverters commonly used in solar panels to the list, meaning that new products from any foreign country in these categories are no longer eligible for import.

The move is a Department of Defense–driven expansion of scattered federal efforts to further limit U.S. exposure to potentially sensitive Chinese technology, but it may impose major changes on the robotics industry in allied countries, too.

The FCC’s announcement says:

All foreign-produced advanced robotic devices pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of U.S. persons…unless the [Department of Defense determines that] a given foreign-produced advanced robotic device, or a class of such devices, does not pose such risks.

There are two important definitions here. The first is what an “advanced robotic device” is, and the second is what “unacceptable risk” means. Drones already went through their own round of this sort of regulation, so they’re exempt from this particular restriction, as are connected vehicles and medical devices. As far as the FCC is concerned, “advanced robotic devices” are mobile systems that incorporate on-board sensing and communications and have some amount of autonomy. There are a couple of loopholes, including systems weighing under 2 kilograms and any system that communicates at less than 200 kilobits per second, which opens up some creative possibilities. It’s important to note that this applies to new devices; those already certified are not restricted for sale or use.

As to the risks, the U.S. government says that foreign advanced robotic devices represent “a cybersecurity risk that threatens the security of critical infrastructure and thus the safety and security of U.S. persons.” There seem to be two main points to the justification, found in Appendix C. The first is that mobile robots are important to both the economy and the military, so the United States needs its own supply chain and industrial base rather than relying on foreign manufacturers. And second, mobile robots monitor critical infrastructure in sensitive locations, making them a security risk.

The Country That Must Not Be Named

As part of its justification for why foreign robots are a security risk, the DOD cites IEEE Spectrum’s article on a critical vulnerability in robots from Unitree, based in Hangzhou, China, along with several other news articles and reports about Chinese robotics. And despite the FCC swearing up and down that this action is “country neutral” and “not targeted at any country or countries,” U.S. national security sources told Spectrum that the perceived threat is obviously China. That’s how China feels about it, too, per a Chinese Ministry of Commerce 29 July press conference (translation of the first quote here):

On the surface, the FCC’s measures fly the banner of “non-discrimination,” but in substance they discriminate against and suppress Chinese enterprises and products…

China firmly opposes the U.S. overstretching the concept of national security and going after Chinese companies. Protectionism does not make the U.S. more competitive and will only hurt the interests of U.S. companies and consumers. China will continue to do what is necessary to firmly defend the legitimate and lawful rights and interests of Chinese companies.

It’s unclear what China is going to do about this—but how about the rest of the world? How can foreign companies that make advanced robotic devices get them cleared for FCC authorization? Among many, many other things, you’ll need to provide “a detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States for the advanced robotic device.”

Because China also produces a large fraction of robot components, even for robots assembled in the United States, it will have strong leverage in any related negotiations until U.S. robotics companies further diversify their supply chains.

RELATED: Proposed Chinese Robot Ban Is Latest U.S. Tech Sovereignty Move

Applicants must also submit their applications to the DOD and FCC by 1 January 2028, which is unfortunate for anyone who wants to develop an advanced robotic device after that point.

Robotics Industry Reactions

This is all very new, and reactions from the robotics community have been mixed.

Some American robotics companies may benefit in the local market from the newfound lack of competition in the commercial market. Brendan Schulman, Boston Dynamics’ vice president of policy, wrote an enthusiastic endorsement of the ban on LinkedIn: “I sense that this is just the first round in a series of policies that will define the success and growth of the industry for decades to come.” On the other hand, third-country buyers may just stick to Chinese products, as they generally have for drones and electric cars.

But not all companies expect major changes from the new regulation. American customers “need to know they can audit the technology, get support quickly, and keep the system operating without depending on a fragile overseas supply chain,” Nic Radford, the CEO of the U.S. humanoid robotics company Persona, tells IEEE Spectrum. In other words, he figures some customers wouldn’t have wanted Chinese humanoids anyway.

Philipp Frey, vice president of strategy for the Swiss quadruped company ANYbotics, agrees. He says their enterprise customers in the United States “increasingly evaluate robots on long-term reliability, cybersecurity, software capability, safety certification, serviceability, and ecosystem integration, not on hardware cost alone.”

ANYbotics also plans to apply for conditional approval of future products, Frey says. That will involve a national-security review by the DOD or the Department of Homeland Security, disclosing company beneficial ownership, supply-chain risks, and declaring a plan for establishing a significant manufacturing presence in the United States.

Gavin Kenneally, CEO of the U.S. quadruped company Ghost Robotics, is more explicit about the risks that Chinese robot strategy poses to the United States. “Active and purposeful spyware is deployed inside the U.S. on Chinese robots. Examples of predatory pricing abound. And this isn’t just a competition between U.S. and Chinese robotics companies; it’s between private U.S. companies and China’s coordinated national strategy,” Kenneally tells Spectrum. “If today’s announcement encourages stronger cybersecurity and a more level competitive environment, that’s good for customers and good for the robotics industry.”

So is an industry-wide ban the best way to guard against threats? American approaches to Chinese technology security risks have been “ad hoc and fragmented,” wrote the Brookings Institution sociologist Kyle Chan in a report published 9 July. Chan called for the Bureau of Industry and Security, part of the Department of Commerce, to centralize federal information gathering and decision-making on how to handle risky foreign devices. He also called for better public input mechanisms for these issues, and a continuous, proportionate process that tightened or relaxed targeted import restrictions in response to well-defined risks.

That would allow American industry to continue benefiting from partnerships with Chinese manufacturers in less sensitive links of the supply chain, Chan argues. Those links will evolve over time, requiring continued assessment, but without those partnerships, crude bans “could make it more difficult for American startups and researchers to develop new software and end up slowing innovation across the U.S. robotics ecosystem,” he writes.

For a while there, it seemed as though robotics as a whole was stuck in a mad rush towards building humanoid robots mostly because it was very possible (and very lucrative) to do so, even without near-term goals that were necessarily realistic. Some of the magic of those first couple of years of the humanoid explosion has stuck around, but there’s also been an industry-wide sobering leading to pointed questions about practicality and value. In other words, starting a commercial humanoid company now is a much different proposition than it would have been just a few years ago.

On 15 July, Walden Robotics emerged from stealth with US $300 million in funding at a valuation of $1.1 billion. Walden is a spinout of Toyota Research Institute (TRI), and it’s spent the last 10 or so years working on hard problems in robotics with the goal of transitioning from research to real-world applications. That seems like the amount of time and experience that it might reasonably take to develop a practical and value-driven approach to deploying general-purpose humanoid robots, and Walden has chosen an excellent starting point by skipping the legs.

“It’s ironic,” says Walden cofounder and CEO Russ Tedrake. “I thought about legs for 20 years; that’s the class I teach at MIT. There are many reasons to build a robot with legs. But the question is, what’s the addressable market? And what percentage of it is covered by a wheeled base?” It’s this focused, practical thinking that sets Walden somewhat apart from many (if not most) of the other companies in this space. Rather than developing a robot first and searching for a viable commercial use case second, Walden instead identified applications where robots can provide value now, and designed a robot that could safely and efficiently meet those needs.

Walden Robotics

Walden Robotics’ Manufacturing Focus

Russ Tedrake is the CEO and cofounder of Walden Robotics.Walden Robotics

Tedrake is light on the details about what specific applications Walden is targeting at this point (citing confidentiality with current commercial partners). Manufacturing and logistics environments where there are a lot of relatively simple and repetitive tasks that aren’t friendly to conveyor belts and preprogrammed robot arms are a good bet. Even in these environments, however, robots still have to find a useful niche because they’re going up against human workers who are more flexible while also cheaper to employ. So the question is: How do you make an argument to a customer that a robot is actually a better solution than their existing human workers?

“You need to find applications with high utilization—where the robot is used 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” says Tedrake. “Manufacturing is a global imperative right now, and it makes the economics work.” Economic viability is a necessary condition, but it’s not a sufficient one for Walden, or for their partnership with Toyota. People are a big part of Walden’s plan, too.

One of Walden’s major strengths is the company’s partnership with Toyota, which is not all that surprising given that Walden is a spinout from TRI, which is Toyota’s Silicon Valley–based R&D arm. “Toyota was very proud of the work we had done at TRI, and was ready to go big in this space,” says Tedrake. “Part of the excitement of having Toyota as a partner is that their culture is deeply people-first. When talking to Toyota’s leadership, I was never asked how much money this is going to make, but I was asked how it will improve the quality of life for all people.”

The robot’s chonky design allows it to meet the high-payload requirements of useful manufacturing work.Walden Robotics

In this context, at least in the short term, Walden’s approach to improving the quality of life for people is to take over those aforementioned repetitive manufacturing tasks with robots. Tedrake hopes that this will lead to workplaces where skilled craftspeople are able to do even more with their hard-earned expertise, increasing their efficiency, productivity, and happiness all at the same time—a noble goal, although there’s only so much Walden itself can do to make this happen, and not all customers will share Toyota’s priorities.

Wheeled Humanoid Robots in Factories

Many other humanoid robotics companies are also targeting these logistics and manufacturing spaces with general-purpose robots, and they’re doing so by making robots that are as humanlike as possible. The theory is that a humanoid form factor is necessary when operating in human environments. And there are certainly arguments in favor of a humanoid with legs—stairs exist, for one, and legged robots have a smaller footprint compared with ones that have wheels.

But a large wheeled base offers some significant advantages, as Tedrake points out. You’re incentivized to cram the base full of batteries, since more weight near the floor keeps the robot stable, which also solves the problem of running out of power during the middle of the workday. More importantly, a statically stable robot that moves around on a wheeled base can bypass the safety challenges that are currently keeping legged humanoids physically separated from real humans—most prominently, the fact that legged robots can fall over. “Factories already have autonomous mobile [wheeled] robots,” explains Tedrake. “They already have safety cases built around AMRs. You can piggyback on that with a wheeled base.”

Simple, rugged grippers make the robot suitable for commercial deployment.Walden Robotics

Walden’s perspective on manipulation is similar. Many humanoid companies are using five-fingered hands that are highly dexterous but also highly complex, which Tedrake believes is not a pragmatic approach in the context of commercial deployments. “There’s a question of what you need to do the tasks, but the real question is just durability,” Tedrake says. “We have been deployed in a Toyota factory, and at the end of the week, the hands take a beating, so we built hands that can take that. I have not seen a more dexterous hand that could have done the work our hand has done.”

Walden’s long-term plan is to build “general-purpose robots.” It’s not always clear what a general-purpose robot is, because (I would argue) nobody is quite sure what “general purpose” means. It’s certainly not referring to robots that can do everything; I think the closest we can get are robots that can be taught to do a useful number of different skills, which is why I prefer the term “multipurpose.” It’s a little pedantic, I know, but I think the distinction is important because it moderates expectations in the near term.

Part of where Walden’s optimism towards general purposeness comes from is TRI’s earlier research on diffusion policy, which helps robots learn new skills more quickly by leveraging previously learned skills as a foundation. “Fundamentally, multitasking is a way to get to a general-purpose robot,” Tedrake says. “I believe there is a single platform that can do a lot of tasks that are of high value for real customers. That will give us the experience we need to give birth to this deployed general-purpose capability.”

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.

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL

Enjoy today’s videos!

Introducing Gemini Robotics 2—the intelligence layer powering the next generation of truly adaptable robots. As it takes its first literal steps, this major advance unlocks intelligent whole-body control, advanced dexterity, and multirobot collaboration.

[ Google DeepMind ]

THE ROADMAP! NOOOOO!

[ Agility ]

Videos like this always make me wonder how repairable these robots are. Very, I would hope.

[ Unitree ]

Humans routinely communicate through abstractions of their bodies, including shadows, silhouettes, and reflections. Here, we present a robotic system capable of dynamic shadow expression using a 21-degrees-of-freedom dexterous hand with compliant soft skin and a learned shadow self-model.

[ General Robotics Lab ]

Human-to-quadruped motion transfer is an odd concept, but I’m here for it.

[ Disney Research ]

Meet Stretch 4.0—the one-armed, three-wheeled robot that can navigate your home safely. Would you rather a humanoid robot or Stretch?

[ Hello Robot ]

And now, this, for some reason.

[ PNDbotics ]

I’m not sure we’re allowed to be impressed if you resize a badminton court to accommodate your robot.

[ PHYBOT ]

Golden eagles care not for drones.

[ Team BlackSheep ]

University of Southern California researchers work with NASA and others to train robot dogs for planetary exploration on Mars, the moon, and beyond!

[ Research in Applied Decisions: RAD Lab ]

Thanks, Cristina!

WABOT-1 was arguably the birth of the humanoid robot in Japan. We’ve come a long way, and it’s good to be reminded where we started.

[ Takanishi Lab ]

If only this video was at 1x instead of 5x we could have had 15 hours of Memo folding laundry.

[ Sunday Robotics ]

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.

Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL

Enjoy today’s videos!

In just six months, our team turned GENE.01 into a fully functional humanoid platform that can walk, sense and interact. Its full-body multimodal skin perceives touch, proximity, force, and temperature, bringing Physical AI closer to safe and natural collaboration with people. Not a render. Not a concept. This is GENE.01. The future of Physical AI is taking its first steps.

[ Generative Bionics ]

Why create robot intelligence for just one hand, when we could have it learn from many? GEN-1, our latest embodied foundation model, now supports a broad range of end effectors from 5-finger hands, to specialized tools, and everything in between. Each hand is a different sensorimotor interface by which GEN-1 experiences the physical world. Scaling pretraining across thousands of these interfaces teaches GEN-1 a universal physical common sense that transfers to new hands and new ways to grasp, push, pull, twist, and more.

And to illustrate this concept, a surprise spatula.

[ Generalist ]

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and flight validation of a flat-packable flying wing built primarily from corrugated cardboard. The aircraft is manufactured from three laser-cut sheets and assembled through a fold-and-lock architecture that forms load-bearing wing structures with minimal tooling and no permanent fasteners. The full airframe can be assembled in under 15 minutes, demonstrating strong potential for rapid deployment, low-cost logistics, and scalable field use.

[ AIR Lab ]

A $14,000 open-source data-collection system that includes beat-down capability.

[ MEVION ]

Thanks, Kento!

Together with Niantic Spatial and Nvidia, [we] can now scan a real deployment site with off-the-shelf hardware, reconstruct it into a photorealistic Gaussian splat, and run massively parallel RL [reinforcement learning] training. The policies trained in our Gym environment then transfer zero-shot to the real robot and environments they were trained for. This enables faster deployment of more capable and robust policies for the end user.

[ Flexion ]

I don’t know why, but the version of Tron 2 with the stubby little legs is just adorable.

[ LimX Dynamics ]

Uh, get a real job already...?

[ PNDbotics ]

Well, I guess we can all stop asking what humanoid robots are good for.

[ EngineAI ]

I think the right thing to do here is only post the disclaimer included with this video: “This film is a conceptual creative production, and certain scenes are presented for demonstration purposes only and do not represent the actual in-store operating process. The final store environment, robot appearance, and functionality are subject to the actual deployment. During actual operations, the robot will autonomously perform only designated preparation steps for specified ice cream products, and its hands will be fitted with protective gloves that comply with applicable food safety requirements.”

[ Sharpa ]

Drone delivery is now an essential part of the South West London Pathology (SWLP) modernization agenda. Since February 2026, our highly automated aircraft have been delivering urgent NHS samples across south west London, with service up to 85% faster than ground transport. We are thrilled to be part of this initiative, supporting clinicians in providing timely, effective care for patients and contributing to a greener, more resilient NHS.

[ Wing ]

Take a closer look at what’s next for the Aurora Driver. Designed to move freight farther, faster, and more efficiently, this next generation of the Aurora Driver delivers greater performance, built to last one million miles and cut hardware cost in half.

[ Aurora ]

How does a robot learn to recognize an object it’s never encountered? In this case, a demo can be worth a thousand words. Short human demonstrations can be used to create fully automated training datasets, sidestepping the prompting limitations that hold back vision-language models. Rather than describing objects with language, the system tracks what a person touches and manipulates during a demo, follows those objects through time, and clusters detections to handle objects merging or splitting apart in the scene. This bypasses a core weakness of VLMs, which struggle to reliably detect unusual or novel objects even with repeated, carefully engineered prompts.

[ Robotics and AI Institute ]

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.

Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL

Enjoy today’s videos!

In this work, we present a systematic evaluation of contemporary humanoid technology for laparoscopic surgical tasks. We develop a humanoid-based laparoscopic teleoperation framework using general-purpose instruments and assess its capabilities through benchtop characterization, dry-lab user studies spanning diverse surgical experience levels, and in vivo porcine studies. Across these evaluations, we quantify technical feasibility, task performance, and clinical readiness relative to established surgical platforms. Together, our study provides an evidence-based assessment of the current capabilities and limitations of humanoids for surgical applications, highlighting both their promise and the key technical challenges that must be addressed before clinical deployment.

[ UC San Diego ]

Thanks, Ioana!

Today, we preview ACT-2, the first robotics model to achieve reliability by unifying broad generalization with high performance.

Sunday also has this 3-hour video (!) of Memo folding laundry in “never seen environments.” Let’s just not ask, because we almost certainly don’t want to know.

[ Sunday Robotics ]

Spot is not the first quadruped to try its legs at last few meters package delivery, but the challenge is not really those last few meters—it’s going to be not driving the human coworker nuts, is my guess.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Quadrupedal locomotion in complex environments requires multiple motor skills, stable gait transitions, and perceptive control over a broad range of speeds. APT-RL (Action Pretrained Transformer-based Reinforcement Learning) is a unified framework for high-speed, multiskill locomotion. A single policy selects and transitions between gaits and motor skills using only onboard perception and computation. In real-world experiments, KAIST HOUND traversed stairs, hurdles, stepping-stones, gaps, and fallen branches. It reached an instantaneous peak speed of 4.25 meters per second while traversing a 60-centimeter step and 6 m/s during a drop-down transition on a three-step staircase.

[ KAIST DRCD Lab ]

We will have much more on this next week.

[ Walden Robotics ]

Today, we introduce Lumo-2, our next-generation latent world-action model for generalist embodied robot learning.

[ Astribot ]

Following Atlas’s first-of-its-kind live performance at the FIFA World Cup 2026, we caught up with Seth Davis, senior program manager, to learn how this demonstration came together and what it takes to succeed in the field (and on the pitch).

[ Boston Dynamics ]

No teleoperation. No cuts. Long take. One of the world’s few complete demonstrations of long-horizon mobile manipulation, bringing fully autonomous humanoid robots another step closer to us.

[ LimX ]

Thanks, Jinyan!

Impressive. But get a job.

[ MagicLab ]

We saw some footage of this last week, but here’s a much better video.

Wing-propelled diving birds flap their wings to move through air and water, yet the wing morphology and kinematics that enable this behavior remain poorly understood because of the difficulty of collecting in situ data. The impact of flapping frequency, wing size, and stiffness on locomotion in—and transition between—the two media are still unknown. We compared data from diving birds against experiments using a flapping-wing robot capable of flying, swimming, plunge diving, and exiting the water. We show that frequency adaptation, flexible wings, and powerful actuation enable seamless transitions without folding wings or legs, that large wings enhance flight without substantially reducing underwater efficiency, and that tail-body distance and egress angle affect water exit. These results clarify how birds (and robots) balance multifluid locomotion constraints.

[ EPFL LIS ]

There are many words that I would never, ever use to describe a drone. Stealthy. Subtle. Whatever the opposite of obnoxious is. Much of this is because of the giant angry bee sound that drones tend to make, but it’s also the way that they look in flight: With uncannily linear movements and an even less canny ability to hover perfectly still, they tend to draw the eye as affronts to nature.

In a paper presented this week at Robotics Science and Systems 2026 in Sydney, roboticists from Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., demonstrated a drone called Phantom Twist that is essentially invisible to humans, being an order of magnitude more difficult to see in flight than a typical quadrotor. They accomplished this with the aid of computational design, and while the resulting hardware is, I would argue, also an order of magnitude more of an affront to nature than a typical quadrotor represents, it’s pretty amazing how well it works.

Phantom Twist spins so fast, it’s practically invisible.Michael Rubenstein/Northwestern University

The trick here is easy to see, even if the drone isn’t. By spinning in flight at between 15 and 25 hertz, Phantom Twist takes advantage of humans’ decidedly mediocre visual system to turn a solid spinning object into an opaque smear. Human eyes take some amount of time (typically about 100 milliseconds) to integrate what we see before sending the full scene off to our brains for processing. Moving objects can cause problems for this system, because if the movement is fast enough, our eyes are forced to average that motion across the scene, combining it with whatever is in the background and resulting in a transparent blur. This effect is called persistence of vision. For something that spins like Phantom Twist, that motion blur comes from the drone’s rapid rotation, and it works because most of the drone is cleverly designed to be empty space.

Drones that spin in flight are nothing new—we’ve covered a bunch of them in the past, including Picolissimo and any number of samara drones inspired by the spinning flight of maple seeds. What makes Phantom Twist unique, and also very odd, is that the design was computationally optimized for low visibility.

Controlling how drones like this fly

Before we get into that, though, a quick note about how drones like this can even fly controllably, because it’s not at all obvious. With just a single motor and no control surfaces, the only possible control input is through the motor itself, and by pulsing the motor speed up or down at just the right time during each rotation, the drone can translate in any direction. Altitude control comes from changing overall motor thrust, and the drone‘s spinning nature makes it passively stable.

Carbon fiber rods connect batteries, a controller, some counterweights, and a motor and propeller. The research robot also includes optical tracking tags.Michael Rubenstein/Northwestern University

The bits that you need for this kind of drone include the motor and propeller, a couple of batteries, a controller, some counterweights (which could be replaced with more batteries or payload), 0.8-mm carbon fiber rods to tie it all together, and a connector for the handheld launcher that gets the whole thing up to speed. The actual arrangement of these components is surprisingly flexible, and that’s where the invisibility comes in.

“The design space is high dimensional,” explains Northwestern’s Michael Rubenstein. “It’s very difficult for a human to reason through all the trade-offs between the physical constraints required for stable flight and the visual appearance of the spinning drone, and I don’t think we would have easily arrived at this low-visibility design ourselves.”

The visibility (or not) of Phantom Twist is primarily driven by the extent to which different components line up with each other from the perspective of someone looking at the drone. The more components that line up with each other as the drone flies, the less background you see through the spinning drone, and the more visible the drone becomes. Because you might be looking at the drone from a number of different angles, and also because the drone has to be stable enough for controlled flight, there are a bunch of different things that need to be optimized all at once, which is why computational design is effective here.

Phantom Twist’s final design was generated using an iterative optimizer which had a goal of minimizing a metric called learned perceptual image patch similarity, or LPIPS, while making sure that the design could still physically work. LPIPS is the difference between two images: a background image, and a background image with an overlay of the simulated spinning drone. The smaller that difference is, the more invisible that design is. It’s tricky for a human to consider all of the variables at once, but Rubenstein says that the final design does make intuitive sense, because “the automated pipeline prefers placements where components don’t visually overlap as it spins, or where the components are too close to the center of rotation.”

Two iterations of Phantom Twist drones are shown with their handheld launching mechanisms. The better-optimized version [bottom row] relocates the launcher interface to remove components that are too close to the central axis, making them more visible.Michael Rubenstein/Northwestern University

Out of a starting set of around 20,000 feasible Phantom Twist configurations, the optimized design (the one that you see or don’t see in the pictures and videos) has a LPIPS score of 0.0104. A human-designed Phantom Twist is about twice as visible, with a LPIPS score of around 0.2, and a conventional quadrotor (of the same size) would be over 10 times more visible. And there’s still a bit more optimization that could be done with the electrical wiring as well as increasing the baseline transparency of the components themselves.

Phantom Twist is currently controlled using an optical tracking system, which means that it’s not yet capable of flying outside of a controlled environment. But Rubenstein has built other drones along similar principles in the past, which have successfully flown outside, and he’s optimistic about using those techniques to break Phantom Twist out of the lab. The spinning behavior might even enable some useful sensing capabilities, he says. “An interesting possibility is mounting a camera on the spinning body. As the vehicle rotates, it could capture imagery in every direction, effectively creating a 360-degree view of its surroundings that could be used for onboard navigation and control.”

As for what a drone like Phantom Twist could be used for—assuming that the sound can be mitigated somewhat (and there are potential approaches to making that happen), a stealthy microdrone could do all sorts of things with covert surveillance being the most obvious application. For his part, Rubenstein says that he’s personally excited about the potential for watching wildlife, “where a less-intrusive drone could observe animals while minimizing its impact on their natural behavior.” The elephants in particular would certainly appreciate that.

For a deeper dive into all the particulars of this project, read the paper: Computational Design of a Low-Visibility UAV Using a Human-Aligned Perceptual Metric, by Jingxian Wang, Chen Yu, David Matthews, Emma Alexander, Sam Kriegman, and Michael Rubenstein from Northwestern University, which is being presented this week at RSS 2026 in Sydney.

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.

RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY

Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL

Enjoy today’s videos!

For the first time, two full teams of humanoid robots played an 11-vs-11 soccer match on hardware, bringing one of robotics’ most ambitious long-term visions closer to reality. Never before have two full-sized humanoid robot teams played a soccer game against each other.

[ RoboCup ]

Engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can swim underwater and flap out of the water to continue flying through the air, much like a diving bird. The robot can help scientists study the mechanics that enable these actions in aquatic aviators and may help launch a new class of aerial-aquatic drones and vehicles.

[ MIT ]

We’re excited to announce our breakthrough robotic hands for the NEO platform: hands that match or exceed human-level dexterity, strength, safety, and reliability. Designed from the ground up, these 25-DoF hands combine 25 fully actuated degrees of freedom with a tendon-driven system, rich tactile sensing, and built-in compliance. The result is a hand capable of true in-hand manipulation, precision tool use, and delicate interaction.

[ 1X ]

This match, Tech United played against IRIS at the midsize league at RoboCup 2026 in Incheon, South Korea.

[ Tech United ]

Atlas arrived pitchside at NYNJ Stadium in front of 80,000 people gathered to see Brazil vs. Norway. After performing some of the sport’s most memorable player celebrations, Atlas helped kick off the second half by delivering the match ball!

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Navigating discrete terrain such as stepping stones remains a major challenge for legged robots. Conventional approaches often rely on dense environment reconstruction from cameras or lidar, which can be affected by latency, occlusions, and significant computational overhead. We show that proximity sensors integrated into the bottom of a quadruped’s feet enable safe, terrain-seeking autonomous locomotion.

[ Paper ]

On this holiday, Digit is on grill duty. It turns out precise force control is good for more than payload handling. Happy 4th of July from all of us at Agility.

[ Agility ]

We’ve created GEN-1, our latest milestone in scaling robot learning. We believe it to be the first general-purpose AI model that crosses a new performance threshold: mastery of simple physical tasks. It improves average success rates to 99 percent on tasks where previous models achieve 64 percent, completes tasks roughly 3x faster than state-of-the-art, and requires only one hour of robot data for each of these results. GEN-1 unlocks commercial viability across a broad range of applications—and while it cannot solve all tasks today, it is a significant step toward our mission of creating generalist intelligence for the physical world.

[ Generalist ]

Four years at Figure.

[ Figure ]

Reachy Mini is becoming your real AI companion. The Conversation App makes it able to talk fluently with you, help you with your to-do list, remind you of important tasks, and even chat about music. Long-term memory, voice interaction, always ready to help.

[ Reachy Mini ]

Is this sort of thing now a real job for humanoid robots, then?

[ Unitree ]

Quite a story, but is it a real job?

[ EngineAI ]

If you have a cute animal logo for your research, I will always share it.

[ BIEVR-LIO ]

This is very delicate work, although the real challenge would be picking those nuts out of a jumbled bin full of randomly sized nuts, which is how most of us live our lives.

[ Sanctuary ]

Not for me, thank you, although I’m not saying that most of the other humanoid robots out there are any better looking, fundamentally.

[ UBTECH ]

Robotics professor Dr. Christian Hubicki judges robot soccer skills while knowing very little about soccer himself.

[ ORL ]

In this presentation, Brendan Schulman, vice president of policy at Boston Dynamics, outlines the critical role of government engagement in driving the success of the humanoid robotics industry. He demonstrates how legged robots like the Spot quadruped and Atlas humanoid are moving beyond factory settings to deliver real-world value in infrastructure inspection, industrial manufacturing, and public safety. Schulman highlights the intersection of AI and robotics, showcasing how large behavioral models and reinforcement learning enable robots to navigate slippery floors and autonomously avoid workplace hazards. Ultimately, he calls for a proactive national robotics strategy focused on workforce training, safety standards, and ethical frameworks to support supply chain resilience and global competitiveness.

[ Humanoids Summit ]

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.

RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY

Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

Enjoy today’s videos!

NASA is considering a mission concept for an advanced, nuclear-powered rover to be deployed to the Moon’s South Pole as part of the agency’s Moon Base plans. The PROMISE (Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration) mission concept relies on the Curiosity Mars rover mission’s testbed rover. Some elements of the Perseverance Mars testbed rover shown in this video could be used as well. As exact duplicates of Curiosity and Perseverance, the testbed rovers are equipped with flight-proven engineering systems capable of carrying technology as well as science instruments that would advance Moon Base efforts.

A Mars rover for the Moon? That’s some OPTIMISM right there.

[ JPL ]

This is the absolute best thing since Festo’s AirPenguin.

The project explores soft, lightweight robots that can gently float around people in indoor environments and invite playful, affectionate, and everyday interactions. Unlike conventional drones, our robot is designed to be quiet, soft, touch-safe, and socially approachable. Through this work, we ask what future indoor companion robots might feel like if they were not rigid machines, but gentle floating beings that share space with us.

[ Paper ]

Thanks, Mingyang!

Today, we’re launching our home robot, Isaac 1. Deliveries will begin this fall.

US $500 per month, with some basic task autonomy, plus teleoperation.

[ Weave Robotics ]

A couple of things from this new Figure video: Thing one is that the cart-pulling is a good illustration of how clumsy humanoid robots still are at basic tasks relative to humans. Thing two is that there are absolutely no humans anywhere near these robots. You can see one guy at 0:19, which I can only assume is an accident, because these robots are not safe to be around from an industrial safety perspective.

[ Figure ]

Our very own Kohava Mendelsohn met some robots at ICRA in Vienna, and only one of them was murderous.

[ ICRA 2026 ]

Welcome to Robot Park, where we’re building the future with Apollo 2. Robot Park is where Apollo learns today, getting the experience needed to make a difference tomorrow. Today we’re announcing Robot Park, our nearly 90,000-square-foot facility where Apollo 2 is collecting real-world training data needed to advance autonomous humanoid robots.

[ Apptronik ]

UBTech Robotics, the world’s first publicly traded humanoid robot-maker, has launched a humanlike robot that features lifelike silicone skin and “emotional AI,” as Chinese tech firms increasingly transition robots from the factory floor to the family living room.

[ SCMP ]

Spherephones are redefining how we experience sound. Created at Georgia Tech, this wearable uses spatial audio to alert users to movement from every direction—including behind and below. Built for safer human-robot collaboration, the technology is expanding into gaming and accessibility applications. See how music is becoming a new language for awareness and interaction.

[ Georgia Tech ]

Humanoid robots are meant to carry out long-horizon autonomous missions in a world built for humans. This is hard. These missions consist of many steps, each of which requires them to perceive, navigate, and interact with the environment. This is exactly Flexion’s goal: building the general-purpose intelligence that turns any robot into a useful helper.

[ Flexion ]

We’re introducing KinetIQ Ascend—our reinforcement-learning approach designed to reach 99.9 percent manipulation reliability at human speed and beyond.

[ Humanoid ]

Dr. Sebastian “Basti” Scherer has worked in field robotics since the first DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004. He runs the AirLab at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and is the director of safe embodied AI at FieldAI. While much of the industry is focused on local skills like tabletop manipulation, Dr. Scherer sees the greatest value in solving dirty, dull, and dangerous tasks that require operating in uncertain environments where the robot needs to “just work.” When robots “just work,” they become less like robots and more like tools. “That’s the big challenge that we have to overcome,” he says. “And that’s the challenge that FieldAI is really primed to solve.”

[ FieldAI ]

Look, I really appreciate how valuable robots like ElliQ can be, and robots that do good work and offer a financial benefit are incredibly important, especially in the context of family care. But in my opinion, you really shouldn’t suggest that a robot with FaceTime or whatever is an equal replacement for in-person human companionship, nor should you suggest that AI can replace a human wellness coach. If you can’t afford those things, then sure, ElliQ can offer some of those capabilities in a very limited way, but that’s all.

[ ElliQ ]

Very cool moves! Now get a job!

[ DEEP Robotics ]

Drawing inspiration from restaurant waiters in Morocco and Turkey, among other places, we equip a robot with a hanging tray to transport objects from one location to another without dropping them or spilling their contents. We incorporate this approach into an interactive robot waiter demonstration, which uses computer vision and visual servoing to steer toward a person with a raised hand to serve them.

[ Paper ]

If you’re going to make robots wear skirts or shorts or pants, you have to give them butts, or it’s just not going to work. That is all.

[ TechShare ] via [ Kazumichi Moriyama ]

It’s Los Alamos, so of course we have robots. Some work inside gloveboxes, while others probe unexploded ordnance in the field and aid with repetitive lifting, Doc Ock–style. Legend has it there’s a fro-yo robot in the cafeteria.

[ LANL ]

Here are a couple of talks from the recent Humanoids Summit in Japan, from Ali Agha of FieldAI as well as Hiroshi Ishiguro.

[ Humanoids Summit ]

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.

RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY

Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

Enjoy today’s videos!

The best way of introducing a new robot hand is to have a disembodied one crawling across a table.

[ Tangent Robotics ]

MIT CSAIL’s Improbable AI Lab Director Pulkit Agrawal explains his “SoftMimic” approach to making robots safer around humans.

[ SoftMimic ]

I now have absolutely no interest in a humanoid robot for my home unless it can do this.

[ PNDbotics ]

The DARPA Lift Challenge is open to the public August 6-9, 2026, at the National Museum of the US Air Force.

[ DARPA ]

Getting Digit to step and shuffle around an obstacle on the floor is a real test of reactive footstep planning. Digit has to spot something small and moving, recalculate where to place each foot, and keep working—all without breaking stride or losing balance. That’s the same dynamic footwork Digit uses to navigate clutter and foot traffic on a real warehouse floor.

[ Agility Robotics ]

This is the most aggressive firefighting robot I’ve ever seen.

[ DEEP Robotics ]

Wait a sec, Dusty can print things on floors besides construction layouts? How is this not in every city, making sidewalks exciting and fun everywhere?!

[ Dusty ]

I am the first to admit that for US $4,900, the performance of the Unitree R1 is very impressive. But what is it going to do out in the world such that it will give you some sort of return on that investment?

[ Unitree R1 ]

Event cameras are extraordinarily powerful because they can see motion, but what if everything is moving because your camera is moving? Oh no!

[ University of Zurich Robotics & Perception Group ]

Can we understand whale behavior and language? Harvard SEAS Professor Stephanie Gil explains the possibility of understanding animal language and behavior using AI-driven robots and machine learning. With ongoing whale research and advancements in artificial intelligence, the potential for animal communication with whales could become a tangible reality.

[ Harvard SEAS ]

Rodney Brooks, founder and chief technology officer of Robust.AI, sits down with Forbes Assistant Managing Editor Kerry Dolan to discuss how he came up with the idea of the Roomba vacuum cleaner and the future of robotics.

[ LinkedIn ]

Here are a couple of interesting presentations from UIST 2025, including everyday objects that move around your home with a mind of their own and a project featuring teamwork between helium balloons and ground robots called Buoyancé.

[ UIST 2025 ]

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.

RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY

Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

Enjoy today’s videos!

Eno is our first agentic robot: an AI agent and a general-purpose robot working as one system. It reasons, plans, and acts in the real world. Human in capability, not in form. Every detail with a purpose, reduced to what matters. Designed not to resemble us, but to extend us. Eno is built end to end at Genesis.

[ Genesis ]

Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are field-testing advanced capabilities for potential future Moon and Mars rovers. In the Colorado Desert near Plaster City, California, teams used a prototype rover called ERNEST (Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain) to test software for a potential future long-range lunar mission. The software enables the rover, developed at JPL, to operate autonomously and travel extreme distances with minimal intervention from human operators.

ERNEST is a lot more capable than it may look; here’s some recent research showing the kinds of terrain it can handle:

[ NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab ]

Table tennis can produce moments that are difficult even for experienced players to anticipate…like when the ball clips the net and suddenly changes direction. For the Ace research project at Sony AI, these events were a key test of the system’s ability to operate reliably in unpredictable real-world conditions. Ace addresses this uncertainty by simulating counterfactual ball trajectories in real time. In the video, the green overlays show these alternative paths the system considers while planning its response.

And check out some of these rallies that the robot has with Miyuu Khiara.

[ Sony AI ]

This video of an ANYmal deployment in a concrete plant is worth watching because it makes explicit how quadrupeds make money in inspection contexts: Among other things, “a cracked crusher foundation [was] caught before a week-long shutdown, avoiding roughly $630,000 in lost production.” That pays for a lot of robots.

[ ANYbotics ]

A lot of interesting footage here from GITAI’s prep for a robotic satellite servicing demo mission. The thruster test-firing isn’t a robot, exactly, but it may be the coolest part.

[ GITAI ]

Anyone who’s tried to take a half decent photo underwater knows that it’s basically impossible, so let’s try and teach robots to cope.

[ Bi-AQUA ]

Thanks, Masato!

Handling delicate, irregular or unpredictable objects is one of the hardest problems left in automation, and one of the most important. It’s what’s holding back the next wave of robots from doing more in the real world. That’s why we’re working with PSYONIC on a new approach. Their Ability Hand, worn by hundreds of people every day, captures real-world data on touch, pressure and grip. Our GoFa cobot brings the industrial-grade accuracy and repeatability to turn that human data into reliable robotic performance.

[ ABB Robotics ]

Sanctuary AI has achieved world-class performance on a complex wire-plugging production task with a global Tier 1 automotive supplier. In this demonstration, Sanctuary AI’s Physical AI successfully performs a high-speed wire-plug insertion task, achieving a validated task success rate of over 99.5% with a cycle time of just 2.54 seconds, meeting live production benchmarks established by the customer.

WHY IS THIS STRESSING ME OUT SO MUCH?

[ Sanctuary ]

This video is quite obviously fake, but I suppose maybe there’s a market for extra beefy quadrupeds? Maybe?

[ Kepler ]

I cannot overstate how much I do not want any robot to look at what I’m wearing and then attempt to sell me things based on what it thinks it can guess about my personality or interests.

[ MagicLab ]

I am here for fed-up robots learning how to move boxes by just kicking them.

[ ATARI Lab ]

Ah, yes, very useful and very important robots that make me very uncomfortable.

[ Paper ]

I built GrowBot ( a ~6”, two-servo bipedal robot) that runs entirely on a $15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, ~$100 in parts. An LLM drives it directly: it reads the raw IMU stream with no translation layer and narrates its own motion (“rocked side to side like a baby”), riding on a 50-Hz reinforcement-learning walk policy trained in sim and transferred to the real body.

The idea here is to build an open course around this project, Brit says, “so everyone can experience physical AI right now in a low-risk way.”

[ GrowBot ]

Thanks, Brit!

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.

RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY

Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

Enjoy today’s videos!

We present MotionDisco, a framework that discovers contact-rich, long-horizon humanoid loco-manipulation motions from scratch, without relying on teleoperation or motion retargeting from human demonstrations.

Some of the discovered behaviors are a little nutso:

[ MotionDisco ]

Not sure I’d say any of this is ‘effortless’ but those claws are pretty cute.

[ Deep Robotics ]

It turns out running a workout class is a decent way to stress-test whole-body range of motion. Coordinating fluid movement across every joint at once—timing, velocity, balance compensation—is one of the harder control problems in humanoid robotics.

[ Agility ]

Our very own Gwendolyn Rak made a robotic shoulder-friend at Computer Human Interaction in Barcelona.

Here’s a bit more about it:

[ MIT ]

At AIRoA, we’re bringing robots into real homes. Check out our exclusive first video to see how they work in our development hub and real-life household settings! The project aims to develop home robots that can assist people with everyday tasks and become long-term companions in daily life. In this video, we demonstrate Toyota’s Human Support Robot (HSR) deployed in real homes, where it assists residents with everyday tasks such as tidying rooms and fetching objects.

[ AI Robot Association ]

Thanks, Naoaki!

MIDAS Hand is a fully open-source, tactile-sensor-integrated dexterous robotic hand platform for manipulation, teleoperation, and robot learning research. MIDAS stands for Modular low-Impedance Direct-drive Anthropomorphic Sensing Hand.

[ MIDAS Hand ]

Thanks, Jun Kim!

This video presents a novel flight maneuver for a flying bipedal robot. During forward flight, the robot performs aerial braking by swinging its legs to adjust the orientation of foot-mounted thrusters.

[ Paper ]

Seems like a really good application for autonomy, to be honest.

[ Built Robotics ]

In this time-lapse, controllers on the ground are repositioning Dextre, our robotic handyman currently installed at the end of the Canadarm2. They used Dextre to unload equipment from the unpressurised Dragon trunk. Such a beautiful choreography to watch with Earth in the background!

[ European Space Agency ]

This video demonstrates how AI Sapiens learns and performs humanoid motions from video-based motion capture using only a smartphone camera, without professional motion capture equipment. ROBOTIS plans to release an open-source motion generation and learning pipeline for AI Sapiens, enabling users to generate humanoid motions from video and bring them to the real robot.

[ ROBOTIS ]

NAO LIVES!

[ Maxtronics ]

Tumblenauts are a swarm of minimalist, bacteria-inspired robots designed for collaborative inspection of pressurized microgravity habitats such as the International Space Station. Unlike current intra-vehicular robots that rely on complex actuator-dense mechanisms for precise motion, the Tumblenauts use a stochastic run-and-tumble locomotion and collective cooperation inspired by bacterial colonies.

[ Self-Organizing Swarms and Robotics Lab ]

LUMOS Robotics Founder and CEO Yu Chao officially introduces Project EDGE—inviting global builders, universities, robotics labs, and creative technologists to explore the future of humanoid robotics together. To supercharge the global developer community, we are providing 100 complimentary LUMOS NIX robots to selected global partners.

[ Lumos Robotics ]

How do you progress from early childhood computational thinking to advanced high school robotics? Sphero’s product offerings are intentionally scaffolded to scale for students by building critical skills and concepts at every grade level.

[ Sphero ]

Thirteen years ago last August, I was camped out in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory press room in Pasadena, Calif., waiting to see whether the Curiosity rover would survive its descent and skycrane-assisted landing on the surface of Mars. It did, and it was awesome.

Since then, Curiosity (also known as Mars Science Laboratory) has traveled nearly 37 kilometers, drilled into and sampled 42 different rocks, and as of publication has snapped nearly 763,000 photos. The fact that this robot is still hard at work, getting real science done at the age of 13, is absolutely incredible—not only is Mars an actively hostile environment for robots, but the only kind of maintenance that JPL engineers can do is to send very, very careful software updates.

Nevertheless, the clever folks at JPL have managed to keep Curiosity safe, warm, mobile, and sciencing, despite well-worn wheels and less and less power every day. One of those folks is Alexandra Holloway, the assistant team chief for engineering operations for Curiosity, who spoke to IEEE Spectrum about keeping Curiosity roving, what its future looks like, and how JPL has used that experience to make rovers like Perseverance even more capable.

How astonished should we be that after 13 years on Mars, Curiosity is not only still doing science, but actually getting more capable?

Alexandra Holloway is the assistant team chief for engineering operations on the Curiosity Mars rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Alexandra Holloway

Alexandra Holloway: I’m astonished! The longevity comes from a lot of ongoing work. It’s not just that Curiosity was built robustly; it’s also because we’re continuously putting in effort to ensure it can continue to have that lifespan. I think about all the different kinds of embedded systems there are, from cars to refrigerators, and none of them have the kind of longevity that we have with the rover. It’s mind-boggling, and it’s inspiring.

Is the Perseverance rover, which is nine years younger than Curiosity, significantly different in terms of its hardware and software?

Holloway: In terms of hardware, the rovers are actually very similar. Both use a RAD 750 processor and have the same amount of memory. However, Perseverance has an extra processor specifically for visual odometry, which allows it to drive autonomously. This difference reflects their primary mission designs: Perseverance was designed for driving long distances, while Curiosity is a mission focused on sampling as it goes. So Perseverance’s onboard scheduling capabilities are there to optimize its driving. In fact, just last year, Perseverance surpassed Curiosity’s driving distance after only about three years on Mars.

Curiosity Rover Memory and Software Fixes

Do you have some examples of significant tweaks the team has made to keep Curiosity roving?

Holloway: One of my favorite examples comes from a processor anomaly that happened on Sol 2172 [Ed. note: “Sol” is the term for a Martian day—about 24 hours and 40 minutes]. Curiosity has two computers, A and B. We landed on A, swapped to B due to a NAND memory anomaly early on (Sol 200). For years, we were chugging along on B, until one day there was a problem—B booted up, but it couldn’t mount its drive partition. We’d never seen this before. To preserve B’s data, we swapped back to A, which we hadn’t trusted in two thousand Sols. A also had a degraded memory, with only two gigabytes of usable storage space instead of four. We painstakingly transferred data from B over to A and then down to Earth, and eventually we ran out of stuff we wanted to transfer, which was really good, because A then started acting funny in the same way it did on Sol 200. It was acting like its memory was coming unsoldered. That’s bad.

We quickly swapped back to B, formatted it, and got it working again. The problem then became that we couldn’t trust A’s memory at all, but we needed a second computer as a “lifeboat” for diagnostics and transfers if B failed again. We realized we had one other place of memory: where we keep our flight software. We have four copies of the flight software (two current versions and two older versions) in different banks of very small amounts of memory, just 32 megabytes each. What if we just jettisoned the old flight software copies and used that 64-megabyte NOR memory as our file system for computer A?

So that’s what we did. It was so elegant! Computer A is operating with less than 1 percent of its original memory, but we can run a mission on it. A small mission, but we haven’t had to jettison any core capabilities. We can still drive, we can manage data, we can even theoretically do science. Everything works fine, just much slower and much smaller. That flight software release was even called “R-Hope“ because we hoped it would work.

What are the constraints on Curiosity’s lifespan?

Holloway: Our biggest hardware challenge is wheel wear. It looks like we’re driving on this sandy terrain with some rocks in it, and our intuition said that we could just drive over these rocks and they’d get pushed down into the sand and it would be no big deal. But what we ended up seeing was that those little rocks are actually the tips of giant boulders buried in the sand, and they’re razor sharp. Our wheels were getting ripped apart driving over them, especially our front wheels, so we started driving backwards.

We also monitor consumables. We consider the number of times we move our actuators. That’s a consumable. Curiosity hasn’t taken a selfie in a while, and one of the reasons is that it’s really hard on the joint actuators. Our onboard memory is a consumable, but surprisingly we’re not anywhere near our life cycle for memory. Our biggest consumable is power; we have an RTG, a nuclear power source, which decreases its output as it ages.

Newer missions are flying Snapdragon [processors], but Curiosity’s RAD 750 is a power hog. One of the things that we’ve rolled out that’s going really well is a way of reducing the amount of time we spend with the computer powered on, by harvesting time when we finish activities early and going to sleep, which lets us turn off the computers and some of the heating. Another thing we’re looking at is doing stuff in parallel when we’re on, like being able to drive or use the arm while communicating with an orbiter.

So power is decreasing, and that’s causing us to do all this parallelism work and become more efficient and nuanced in the way we operate. But we are not having any degraded science output at this time. Our wheels are still going, our arm is still okay for now, knock on wood. I would say maybe the bottleneck is budget.

Curiosity Rover’s Impact on Future Mars Exploration

What have you learned from Curiosity that will improve future missions?

Holloway: As an embedded flight software person, I think about how we can change, add, or modify software capabilities during the mission. There’s definitely a sweet spot for loading and patching flight software—some of these concepts were pioneered on Spirit and Opportunity and then inherited by Curiosity and Perseverance, making it easier to understand and change the software.

Some of the things that I wish we had now on [the Mars Science Laboratory] include a better understanding of where our power is going. I want to see how much power each component is drawing every minute, so that we could architect a software system that could balance loads better. We have some of this information that was built in by the engineers who designed the rover, but as an operator, I want something slightly different. So if I were building a mission, I would have those discussions earlier and get operators into the room to say, “what do you want your data products to look like?”

The key takeaway for designing future missions is to talk to all your users early in the design process. It needs to happen upfront.

What does Curiosity’s long-term future look like?

Holloway: That’s a conversation that happens, and it’s a really delicate one. We have a lot of science instruments, and a lot of them have to do with contact science and sampling and rely on the arm. If we lose the arm, what science can we still do? Well, we have a lot of remote sensors too, like cameras, environmental sensors, and radiation sensors. All of these things are important for the future of space exploration and humans on Mars.

From a power perspective, our RTG is projected to start degrading science output in the sixth extended mission, but we’re going to be fine through 2035 and potentially even beyond that. So we have a long and exciting future ahead of us. We need to figure out the best way of operating within our constraints, but we’re still kicking.