Video Friday: Exploring the Ubiquity of Robots at CES 2026

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!

We’re excited to announce the product version of our Atlas® robot. This enterprise-grade humanoid robot offers impressive strength and range of motion, precise manipulation, and intelligent adaptability—designed to power the new industrial revolution.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

I appreciate the creativity and technical innovation here, but realistically, if you’ve got more than one floor in your house? Just get a second robot. That single-step sunken living room though….

[ Roborock ]

Wow, SwitchBot’s CES 2026 video show almost as many robots in their fantasy home as I have in my real home.

[ SwitchBot ]

What is happening in robotics right now that I can derive more satisfaction from watching robotic process automation than I can from watching yet another humanoid video?

[ ABB ]

Yes, this is definitely a robot I want in close proximity to my life.

[ Unitree ]

The video below demonstrates a MenteeBot learning, through mentoring, how to replace a battery in another MenteeBot. No teleoperation is used.

[ Mentee Robotics ]

Personally, I think that we should encourage humanoid robots to fall much more often, just so that we can see whether they can get up again.

[ Agility Robotics ]

Achieving long-horizon, reliable clothing manipulation in the real world remains one of the most challenging problems in robotics. This live test demonstrates a strong step forward in embodied intelligence, vision-language-action systems, and real-world robotic autonomy.

[ HKU MMLab ]

Millions of people around the world need assistance with feeding. Robotic feeding systems offer the potential to enhance autonomy and quality of life for individuals with impairments and reduce caregiver workload. However, their widespread adoption has been limited by technical challenges such as estimating bite timing, the appropriate moment for the robot to transfer food to a user’s mouth. In this work, we introduce WAFFLE: Wearable Approach For Feeding with LEarned Bite Timing, a system that accurately predicts bite timing by leveraging wearable sensor data to be highly reactive to natural user cues such as head movements, chewing, and talking.

[ CMU RCHI ]

Humanoid robots are now available as platforms, which is a great way of sidestepping the whole practicality question.

[ PNDbotics ]

We’re introducing Spatially-Enhanced Recurrent Units (SRUs) — a simple yet powerful modification that enables robots to build implicit spatial memories for navigation. Published in the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), this work demonstrates up to +105% improvement over baseline approaches, with robots successfully navigating 70+ meters in the real world using only a single forward-facing camera.