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!
EPFL scientists have integrated discarded crustacean shells into robotic devices, leveraging the strength and flexibility of natural materials for robotic applications.
[ EPFL ]
Finally, a good humanoid robot demo!
Although having said that, I never trust videos demos where it works really well once, and then just pretty well every other time.
[ LimX Dynamics ]
Thanks, Jinyan!
I understand how these structures work, I really do. But watching something rigid extrude itself from a flexible reel will always seem a little magical.
[ AAAS ]
Thanks, Kyujin!
I’m not sure what “industrial grade” actually means, but I want robots to be “automotive grade,” where they’ll easily operate for six months or a year without any maintenance at all.
[ Pudu Robotics ]
Thanks, Mandy!
When you start to suspect that your robotic EV charging solution costs more than your car.
[ Flexiv ]
Yeah uh if the application for this humanoid is actually making robot parts with a hammer and anvil, then I’d be impressed.
[ EngineAI ]
Researchers at Columbia Engineering have designed a robot that can learn a human-like sense of neatness. The researchers taught the system by showing it millions of examples, not teaching it specific instructions. The result is a model that can look at a cluttered tabletop and rearrange scattered objects in an orderly fashion.
[ Paper ]
Why haven’t we seen this sort of thing in humanoid robotics videos yet?
[ HUCEBOT ]
While I definitely appreciate in-the-field testing, it’s also worth asking to what extent your robot is actually being challenged by the in-the-field field that you’ve chosen.
[ DEEP Robotics ]
Introducing HMND 01 Alpha Bipedal — autonomous, adaptive, designed for real-world impact. Built in 5 months, walking stably after 48 hours of training.
[ Humanoid ]
Unitree says that “this is to validate the overall reliability of the robot” but I really have to wonder how useful this kind of reliability validation actually is.
[ Unitree ]
This University of Pennsylvania GRASP on Robotics Seminar is by Jie Tan from Google DeepMind, on “Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World.”
Recent advancements in large multimodal models have led to the emergence of remarkable generalist capabilities in digital domains, yet their translation to physical agents such as robots remains a significant challenge. In this talk, I will present Gemini Robotics, an advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) generalist model capable of directly controlling robots. Furthermore, I will discuss the challenges, learnings and future research directions on robot foundation models.
[ University of Pennsylvania GRASP Laboratory ]
The post “Video Friday: Biorobotics Turns Lobster Tails Into Gripper” by Evan Ackerman was published on 12/05/2025 by spectrum.ieee.org