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.
ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA
Enjoy today’s videos!
So, humanoid robots are nearing peak human performance. I would point out, though, that this is likely very far from peak robot performance, which has yet to be effectively exploited, because it requires more than just copying humans.
[ Unitree ]
“The Street Dance of China” Turning lightness into gravity, and rhythm into impact.This is a head-on collision between metal and beats. This Chinese New Year, watch PNDbotics Adam bring the heat with a difference.
[ PNDbotics ]
You had me at robot pandas.
[ MagicLab ]
NASA’s Perseverance rover can now precisely determine its own location on Mars without waiting for human help from Earth. This is possible thanks to a new technology called Mars Global Localization. This technology rapidly compares panoramic images from the rover’s navigation cameras with onboard orbital terrain maps. It’s done with an algorithm that runs on the rover’s Helicopter Base Station processor, which was originally used to communicate with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. In a few minutes, the algorithm can pinpoint Perseverance’s position to within about 10 inches (25 centimeters). The technology will help the rover drive farther autonomously and keep exploring.
[ NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory ]
Legs? Where we’re going, we don’t need legs!
[ Paper ]
This is a bit of a tangent to robotics, but it gets a pass because of the cute jumping spider footage.
[ Berkeley Lab ]
Corvus One for Cold Chain is engineered to live and operate in freezer environments permanently, down to -20°F, while maintaining full flight and barcode scanning performance.
I am sure there is an excellent reason for putting a cold storage facility in the Mojave desert.
[ Corvus Robotics ]
The video documents the current progress made in the picking rate of the Shiva robot when picking strawberries. It first shows the previous status, then the further development, and finally the field test.
[ DFKI ]
Data powers an organization’s digital transformation, and ST Engineering MRAS is leveraging Spot to get a full view of critical equipment and facility. Working autonomously, Spot collects information about machine health - and now, thanks to an integration of the Leica BLK ARC for reality capture, detailed and accurate point cloud data for their digital twin.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
The title of this video is “Get out and have fun!” Is that mostly what humanoid robots are good for right now, pretty much...?
[ Engine AI ]
ASTORINO is a modern 6-axis robot based on 3D printing technology. Programmable in AS-language, it facilitates the preparation of classes with ready-made teaching materials, is easy both to use and to repair, and gives the opportunity to learn and make mistakes without fear of breaking it.
[ Kawasaki ]
Can I get this in my living room?
[ Yaskawa ]
What does it mean to build a humanoid robot in seven months, and the next one in just five? This documentary takes you behind the scenes at Humanoid, a UK-based AI and robotics company building reliable, safe, and helpful humanoid robots. You’ll hear directly from our engineering, hardware, product, and other teams as they share their perspectives on the journey of turning physical AI into reality.
[ Humanoid ]
This IROS 2025 keynote is from Tim Chung who is now at Microsoft, on “Catalyzing the Future of Human, Robot, and AI Agent Teams in the Physical World.”
The convergence of technologies—from foundation AI models to diverse sensors and actuators to ubiquitous connectivity—is transforming the nature of interactions in the physical and digital world. People have accelerated their collaborative connections and productivity through digital and immersive technologies, no longer limited by geography or language or access. Humans have also leveraged and interacted with AI in many different forms, with the advent of hyperscale AI models (i.e., large language models) forever changing (and at an ever-astonishing pace) the nature of human-AI teams, realized in this era of the AI “copilot.” Similarly, robotics and automation technologies now afford greater opportunities to work with and/or near humans, allowing for increasingly collaborative physical robots to dramatically impact real-world activities. It is the compounding effect of enabling all three capabilities, each complementary to one another in valuable ways, and we envision the triad formed by human-robot-AI teams as revolutionizing the future of society, the economy, and of technology.
[ IROS 2025 ]
This GRASP SFI talk is by Chris Paxton at Agility Robotics, on “How Close Are We To Generalist Humanoid Robots?”
With billions of dollars of funding pouring into robotics, general-purpose humanoid robots seem closer than ever. And certainly it feels like the pace of robotics is faster than ever, with multiple companies beginning large-scale deployments of humanoid robots. In this talk, I’ll go over the challenges still facing scaling robot learning, looking at insights from a year of discussions with researchers all over the world.
[ University of Pennsylvania GRASP Laboratory ]
This week’s CMU RI Seminar is from Jitendra Malik at UC Berkeley, on “Robot Learning, With Inspiration From Child Development.”
For intelligent robots to become ubiquitous, we need to “solve” locomotion, navigation and manipulation at sufficient reliability in widely varying environments. In locomotion, we now have demonstrations of humanoid walking in a variety of challenging environments. In navigation, we pursued the task of “Go to Any Thing” – a robot, on entering a newly rented Airbnb, should be able to find objects such as TV sets or potted plants. RL in simulation and sim-to-real have been workhorse technologies for us, assisted by a few technical innovations. I will sketch promising directions for future work.Reference: https://ift.tt/OrnbfsG
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