Synthetic Muscle groups, Boston Dynamics, and Extra Movies

Video Friday is your weekly collection of superior robotics movies, collected by your pals at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We additionally put up 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

Take pleasure in as we speak’s movies!

The useful replication and actuation of advanced constructions impressed by nature is a longstanding objective for humanity. Creating such advanced constructions combining mushy and inflexible options and actuating them with synthetic muscle tissues would additional our understanding of pure kinematic constructions. We printed a biomimetic hand in a single print course of comprised of a inflexible skeleton, mushy joint capsules, tendons, and printed contact sensors.

[ Paper ] through [ SRL ]

Two Boston Dynamics product managers speak about their favourite basic BD robots, after which I speak about mine.

And that is Boston Dynamics’ LittleDog, doing legged locomotion analysis 16 or so years in the past in what I’m fairly certain is Katie Byl’s lab at UCSB.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

That is our newest work on the trajectory planning methodology for floating-based articulated robots, enabling the worldwide path looking in advanced and cluttered environments.

[ DRAGON Lab ]

Thanks, Moju!

OmniPlanner is a unified resolution for exploration and inspection path planning (in addition to goal attain) throughout aerial, floor, and underwater robots. It has been verified by means of in depth simulations and a mess of area exams, together with in underground mines, ballast water tanks, forests, college buildings, and submarine bunkers.

[ NTNU ]

Thanks, Kostas!

Within the ARISE mission, the FZI Analysis Middle for Data Expertise and its worldwide companions ETH Zurich, College of Zurich, College of Bern, and College of Basel took a significant step towards future lunar missions by testing cooperative autonomous multi-robot groups beneath outside circumstances.

[ FZI ]

Welcome to the long run, the place there aren’t any different people.

[ Zhejiang Humanoid ]

That is our newest work on robotic fish, and can be the primary underwater robotic of DRAGON Lab.

[ DRAGON Lab ]

Thanks, Moju!

Watch this one easy trick to make humanoid robots cheaper and safer!

[ Zhejiang Humanoid ]

Gugusse and the Automaton’ is a 1897 French movie by Georges Méliès that includes a humanoid robotic in almost as practical of a means as among the humanoid promo movies we’ve seen currently.

[ Library of Congress ] through [ Gizmodo ]

At Agility, we create automated options for the toughest work. We’re extremely happy with how far we’ve come, and might’t wait to point out you what’s subsequent.

[ Agility ]

[ Humanoids Summit ]

Anca Dragan isn’t any stranger to Waymo. She labored with us for six years whereas additionally at UC Berkeley and now, Google DeepMind. Her give attention to making AI safer helped Waymo because it launched commercially. On this ultimate episode of our season, Anca describes how her work allows AI brokers to work fluently with folks, based mostly on human targets and values.

[ Waymo Podcast ]

This UPenn GRASP SFI Seminar is by Junyao Shi, on “Unlocking Generalist Robots with Human Knowledge and Basis Fashions.”

Constructing general-purpose robots stays essentially constrained by knowledge shortage and labor-intensive engineering. Not like imaginative and prescient and language, robotics lacks massive, various datasets spanning duties, environments, and embodiments, limiting each scalability and generalization. This speak explores how human knowledge and basis fashions skilled at scale may also help overcome these bottlenecks.

[ UPenn ]