Synthetic Muscular tissues, 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 following few months. Please ship us your occasions for inclusion.

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

Take pleasure in in the present day’s movies!

The purposeful replication and actuation of advanced constructions impressed by nature is a longstanding purpose 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 composed of a inflexible skeleton, mushy joint capsules, tendons, and printed contact sensors.

[ Paper ] through [ SRL ]

Two Boston Dynamics product managers speak about their favourite traditional 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 for looking in advanced and cluttered environments.

[ DRAGON Lab ]

Thanks, Moju!

OmniPlanner is a unified answer for exploration and inspection-path planning (in addition to goal attain) throughout aerial, floor, and underwater robots. It has been verified via in depth simulations and a large number 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 Heart for Info 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 multirobot groups underneath outside situations.

[ FZI ]

Welcome to the long run, the place there are not any different people.

[ Zhejiang Humanoid ]

That is our newest work on robotic fish, and it’s additionally the primary underwater robotic from 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 an outline that’s almost as sensible as a few of the humanoid promo movies we’ve seen these days.

[ 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 may’t wait to indicate 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 at Google DeepMind. Her deal with 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, primarily based on human objectives and values.

[ Waymo Podcast ]

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

Constructing general-purpose robots stays basically constrained by knowledge shortage and labor-intensive engineering. Not like imaginative and prescient and language, robotics lacks giant, various datasets that span duties, environments, and embodiments, thus limiting each scalability and generalization. This discuss explores how human knowledge and basis fashions educated at scale might help overcome these bottlenecks.

[ UPenn ]