Video Friday: Weekly Robotics Roundup

Robotics Illustration

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

Upcoming Robotics Events

Enjoy today’s videos!

Featured Robotics Videos

This single-leg robot is designed to “form a foundation for future bipedal robot development,” but it appears to be effective as is.

KAIST Dynamic Robot Control and Design Lab

It is impressive that 17,000 social robots have been sold. Aldebaran will be missed.

Aldebaran

It is encouraging to see actual challenging shoves as part of biped testing.

Under Control Robotics

Ground Control made multilegged waves at IEEE’s International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2025 in Atlanta! We competed in the Startup Pitch Competition and demonstrated our robot at our booth, on NIST standard terrain, and around the convention. We were proud to be a finalist for Best Expo Demo and participate in the Robot Parade.

Ground Control Robotics

Thanks, Dan!

Humanoid is a U.K.-based robotics innovation company dedicated to building commercially scalable, reliable, and safe robotic solutions for real-world applications.

It features an impressive bootup screen.

Humanoid

Thanks, Kristina!

Quadrupedal robots have demonstrated remarkable agility and robustness in traversing complex terrains. However, they remain limited in performing object interactions that require sustained contact. In this work, we present LocoTouch, a system that equips quadrupedal robots with tactile sensing to address a challenging task in this category: long-distance transport of unsecured cylindrical objects, which typically requires custom mounting mechanisms to maintain stability.

LocoTouch paper

Thanks, Changyi!

In this video, Digit is performing tasks autonomously using a whole-body controller for mobile manipulation. This new controller was trained in simulation, enabling Digit to execute tasks while navigating new environments and manipulating objects it has never encountered before.

While the demonstration is impressive, it is worth noting that those shelves do not represent any market I have encountered.

Agility Robotics

It is always fascinating to see robots presented as incidental solutions to problems rather than as standalone entities.

The question that remains is, “Why is there water on the floor?”

Boston Dynamics

Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced the control of physics-based and robotic characters that track kinematic reference motion. We propose a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that trains a single policy conditioned on a set of weights, spanning the Pareto front of reward trade-offs. Within this framework, weights can be selected and tuned after training, significantly speeding up iteration time. We demonstrate how this improved workflow can be used to perform highly dynamic motions with a robot character.

It has been a week since ICRA 2025, and TRON 1 already misses all the new friends it made!

LimX Dynamics

ROB 450 in Winter 2025 challenged students to synthesize the knowledge acquired through their Robotics undergraduate courses at the University of Michigan to use a systematic and iterative design and analysis process to solve a real open-ended robotics problem.

What’s the Trick? A talk on human versus current robot learning, given by Chris Atkeson at the Robotics and AI Institute.

Robotics and AI Institute (RAI)

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