Bored with Folding Your Laundry or Making Your Mattress?

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

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY

Summer season College on Multi-Robotic Techniques: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE

Take pleasure in right now’s movies!

Lume is a sculptural flooring lamp designed to really feel at house the second you place it. It’s crafted from anodized aluminum and high-gloss finishes, formed right into a slender, balanced type that quietly conceals its complexity. Each floor is refined to really feel easy, exact, and enduring. When it strikes, it’s quiet and deliberate. When it’s nonetheless, it holds its place with ease.

Apparently, and let me stress that ‘apparently,’ Lume could make the mattress, fold laundry, and do different chores involving delicate supplies. I’m intensely skeptical as a result of it looks like that video has extra footage of individuals staring out of home windows and dancing for no motive past the robotic really doing something. And while you do see the robotic working at a job, it’s minimize up into a number of completely different items of footage in a method that’s sometimes used to distract from both plodding pace, frequent failures, or each. So, yeah. There could also be loads to love in regards to the philosophy right here, however even at a suspiciously low-cost US$2,500 for a pair of those robots, extra element is actually known as for earlier than they’ve earned your preorder.

[ Syncere ]

In Science Robotics, researchers from MIT Media Lab and collaborators from Politecnico di Bari current Electrofluidic Fiber Muscle tissue, a brand new class of synthetic muscle fibers for robots and wearables. Not like the inflexible servo motors utilized in most robots, these fiber-shaped muscle mass are delicate and versatile. They mix electrohydrodynamic (EHD) fiber pumps—slender tubes that transfer liquid utilizing electrical fields to generate strain with no shifting components—with fluidic fiber actuators. The muscle mass are pushed by electrical fields and function silently, with no exterior pumps or reservoirs.

[ MIT ]

We first noticed this factor at ICRA@40 just a few years in the past, however the paper is out now.

[ Nature Communications ] through [ LASA ]

I do like tea, and I suppose there may very well be worse purposes for a robotic than this one, because it leverages each payload and complicated terrain mobility.

[ DEEP Robotics ]

We’ve created GEN-1, our newest milestone in scaling robotic studying. We imagine it to be the primary general-purpose AI mannequin that crosses a brand new efficiency threshold: mastery of easy bodily duties. It improves common success charges to 99% on duties the place earlier fashions obtain 64%, completes duties roughly 3x sooner than state-of-the-art, and requires only one hour of robotic information for every of those outcomes. GEN-1 unlocks industrial viability throughout a broad vary of purposes—and whereas it can not resolve all duties right now, it’s a important step in the direction of our mission of making generalist intelligence for the bodily world.

[ Generalist ]

Legged manipulators provide excessive mobility and versatile manipulation. Nonetheless, sturdy interplay with heterogeneous articulated objects, similar to doorways, drawers, and cupboards, stays difficult due to the various articulation varieties of the objects and the complicated dynamics of the legged robotic. On this paper, we suggest a sturdy and sample-efficient framework for opening heterogeneous articulated objects with a legged manipulator.

[ OpenHEART ]

By deeply coupling real-time depth notion with reinforcement studying movement management, Adam achieves pure human-like stair-stepping gait, exhibiting excellent dynamic stability and environmental adaptability.

[ PNDbotics ]

The way in which these robots ship packages won’t ever not be amusing to me.

[ DEEP Robotics ]

[ Tether ]

What occurs when your partitions start to maneuver? This paper explores the design of human-robot interplay for architectural-scale, shape-changing environments.

[ Interactive Structures Lab ]

I’ll admit to being considerably disenchanted in regards to the actuality of the Unreal Robotics Lab.

[ URLab ]

We’re not accomplished but! Illinois is again within the Ultimate 4 for the primary time since 2005, and we’re cheering all the best way to the championship. This video options teleoperated G1 and AI Employee robots.

[ KIMLAB ]

Combating robots are cool. Destroying costly electronics whereas combating robots is just not cool. We make robots out of plastic so our electronics survive.