Is This the Robotic Equal of Strolling Whereas Chewing Gum?

Video Friday is your weekly collection of superior robotics movies, collected by your pals at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We additionally publish a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics occasions for the following few months. Please ship us your occasions for inclusion.

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

Get pleasure from this week’s movies!

Westwood Robotics is proud to announce a serious replace: THEMIS Gen2.5, the world’s first industrial full-size humanoid robotic able to manipulation on the transfer!

Now that you just point out it, the bit on the finish the place the robotic picks up a can whereas strolling? I haven’t seen loads of that.

[ Westwood Robotics ]

Final yr, Helix confirmed {that a} single neural community may management a humanoid’s higher physique from pixels. In the present day, Helix 02 extends that management to your entire robotic—strolling, manipulating, and balancing as one steady system.

Why sure, I’m a traditional human and that is similar to the default state of my kitchen.

[ Figure ]

Harry Goldstein, our Editor in Chief, went to satisfy Sprout from Fauna Robotics. He was skeptical at first, however Sprout gained him over with its robotic appeal.

[ Fauna Robotics ]

Kimberly Elenberg is displaying how the information collected by robotic responders can save lives in mass casualty occasions.

[ Carnegie Mellon University ]

The tutorial robotics market is hard, however you’ve obtained at hand it to Sphero—going robust since 2011, which is fairly unbelievable.

[ Sphero ]

If you wish to fly in loopy circumstances, you must flight check in these circumstances. Right here’s how and why we do it!

[ Zipline ]

I need to be impressed extra by the concept of 3D printing pores and skin and skeleton on the identical time, however come on, animals have been doing that for actually lots of of years with out even making an attempt.

[ JSK Lab, University of tokyo ]

If there’s a marketplace for small bipedal robots that may each ski and be dinosaurs, LimX has it lined.

[ LimX ]

How do you remotely management robots that change form? We introduce a way for user-guided management of modular robots utilizing reconfigurable joint-space joysticks (JoJo) and real-time optimization. We exhibit this method on two totally different robots, Mori3 and Roombots. The video reveals examples of those robots performing object manipulation, locomotion, human-assistance, and reconfiguration, managed by our system.

[ EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab ] through [ Nature Communications ]

Quadrotor Biplane Tailsitter (QBiT) UAVs at 4 totally different sizes (4, 12, 25, and 50 lbs) developed at Texas A&M College. QBiT combines the mechanical simplicity of a quadrotor drone with the cruise effectivity of a fixed-wing plane.

[ Texas A&M University ]

There’s a brand new DARPA problem for “novel drone designs that may carry payloads greater than 4 instances their weight, which might revolutionize the best way we use drones throughout all sectors.”