Robot Halloween Videos: Humanoids, Hands, Vacuums, more

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

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

Get pleasure from in the present day’s movies!

Completely satisfied Halloween from UCL!

[ University College London ]

Completely satisfied Halloween from KIMLAB!

[ Kinetic Intelligent Machine Lab ]

Completely satisfied Halloween from the DRAGON Lab!

[ DRAGON Lab, University of Tokyo ]

Thanks, Moju!

Completely satisfied Halloween from Agility Robotics!

[ Agility Robotics ]

Completely satisfied Halloween from HEBI Robotics!

[ HEBI Robotics ]

Now you can pay 1X $500/mo to gather knowledge in your house.

And it’s about what you’d count on:

[ 1X ] by way of [ WSJ ]

At our take a look at warehouse, we recreate our prospects’ inbound operations, from the dock configuration and conveyors, to the freight and past. Step inside our Stretch testing facility to be taught in regards to the the newest developments in warehouse automation and discover how we guarantee sturdy, dependable efficiency in the actual world.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Effectively that is simply imply. Vital, however imply.

[ Istituto Italiano de Tecnologia ]

SpikeATac is a a multimodal tactile finger combining a taxelized and extremely delicate dynamic response (PVDF) with a static transduction methodology (capacitive) for multimodal contact sensing. Named for its `spiky’ response, SpikeATac’s multitaxel PVDF movie supplies quick, delicate dynamic alerts to the very onset and breaking of contact, offering the flexibility to cease shortly and delicately when greedy fragile, deformable objects.

[ ROAM Lab, Columbia University ]

Successfully integrating numerous sensory representations is essential for sturdy robotic manipulation. Nonetheless, the everyday strategy of characteristic concatenation is usually suboptimal: dominant modalities corresponding to imaginative and prescient can overwhelm sparse however vital alerts like contact in contact-rich duties, and monolithic architectures can not flexibly incorporate new or lacking modalities with out retraining. Our methodology factorizes the coverage right into a set of diffusion fashions, every specialised for a single illustration (e.g., imaginative and prescient or contact), and employs a router community that learns consensus weights to adaptively mix their contributions, enabling incremental integration of latest representations.

[ GitHub ]

Thanks, Haonan!

Basic-purpose robots ought to possess human-like dexterity and agility to carry out duties with the identical versatility as us. A human-like kind issue additional permits the usage of huge datasets of human-hand interactions. Nonetheless, the first bottleneck in dexterous manipulation lies not solely in software program however arguably much more in {hardware}. We current the open-source ORCA hand, a dependable and anthropomorphic 17-DoF tendon-driven robotic hand with built-in tactile sensors, absolutely assembled in lower than eight hours and constructed for a fabric value beneath 2,000 CHF.

[ ORCA ]

College of Chicago pc scientist Sarah Sebo is programming robots to offer empathetic responses and carry out nonverbal social cues like nodding to higher construct belief and rapport with people. The purpose is to develop robots that may enhance efficiency in human-robot teams, corresponding to enhancing studying outcomes for kids.

[ University of Chicago ]

DJI has a robot vacuum now, which is okay. So far as I could make out, we’ve reached the purpose the place nearly each robotic vacuum is (for higher or worse) simply that: superb.

[ DJI ]

This ICRA 2025 keynote is from Angela Schoellig at Technical College of Munich, on “Powering Robotics with AI.”

[ ICRA 2025 ]

This Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute (CMU RI) Seminar is from Nancy Pollard, on “Bringing Dexterity to Robot Hands within the Actual World.”

Dexterous manipulation is a grand problem of robotics, and superb manipulation expertise are required for a lot of robotics functions that we envision. On this overview discuss, I’ll talk about my view of some main components that contribute to dexterity and talk about how we will incorporate them into our robots and methods.

[ CMU RI ]