Tiny Robot Bug Hops and Jumps on Video Friday

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.

RoboSoft 2025: 23–26 April 2025, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND

ICUAS 2025: 14–17 May 2025, CHARLOTTE, NC

ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA, GA

London Humanoids Summit: 29–30 May 2025, LONDON

IEEE RCAR 2025: 1–6 June 2025, TOYAMA, JAPAN

2025 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: 16–18 June 2025, HOUSTON, TX

RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELES

ETH Robotics Summer School: 21–27 June 2025, GENEVA

IAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY

ICRES 2025: 3–4 July 2025, PORTO, PORTUGAL

IEEE World Haptics: 8–11 July 2025, SUWON, KOREA

IFAC Symposium on Robotics: 15–18 July 2025, PARIS

RoboCup 2025: 15–21 July 2025, BAHIA, BRAZIL

RO-MAN 2025: 25–29 August 2025, EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS

CLAWAR 2025: 5–7 September 2025, SHENZHEN

World Robot Summit: 10–12 October 2025, OSAKA, JAPAN

IROS 2025: 19–25 October 2025, HANGZHOU, CHINA

IEEE Humanoids: 30 September–2 October 2025, SEOUL

CoRL 2025: 27–30 September 2025, SEOUL

Enjoy today’s videos!

MIT engineers developed an insect-sized jumping robot that can traverse challenging terrains while using far less energy than an aerial robot of comparable size. This tiny, hopping robot can leap over tall obstacles and jump across slanted or uneven surfaces carrying about 10 times more payload than a similar-sized aerial robot, opening the door to many new applications.

[ MIT ]

CubiX is a wire-driven robot that connects to the environment through wires, with drones used to establish these connections. By integrating with various tools and a robot, it performs tasks beyond the limitations of its physical structure.

[ JSK Lab ]

Thanks, Shintaro!

It’s a game a lot of us played as children—and maybe even later in life: unspooling measuring tape to see how far it would extend before bending. But to engineers at the University of California San Diego, this game was an inspiration, suggesting that measuring tape could become a great material for a robotic gripper.

[ University of California San Diego ]

I enjoyed the Murderbot books, and the trailer for the TV show actually looks not terrible.

[ Murderbot ]

For service robots, being able to operate an unmodified elevator is much more difficult (and much more important) than you might think.

[ Pudu Robotics ]

There’s a lot of buzz around impressive robotics demos — but taking Physical AI from demo to real-world deployment is a journey that demands serious engineering muscle. Hammering out the edge cases and getting to scale is 500x the effort of getting to the first demo. See our process for building this out for the singulation and induction Physical AI solution trusted by some of the world’s leading parcel carriers. Here’s to the teams likewise committed to the grind toward reliability and scale.

[ Dexterity Robotics ]

I am utterly charmed by the design of this little robot.

[ RoMeLa ]

This video shows a shortened version of Issey Miyake’s Fly With Me runway show from 2025 Paris Men’s Fashion Week. My collaborators and I brought two industrial robots to life to be the central feature of the minimalist scenography for the Japanese brand.

Each ABB IRB 6640 robot held a two meter square piece of fabric, and moved synchronously in flowing motions to match the emotional timing of the runway show. With only three-weeks development time and three days on-site, I built custom live coding tools that opened up the industrial robots to more improvisational workflows. This level of reliable, real-time control unlocked the flexibility needed by the Issey Miyake team to make the necessary last-minute creative decisions for the show.

[ Atonaton ]

Meet Clone’s first musculoskeletal android: Protoclone, the most anatomically accurate robot in the world. Based on a natural human skeleton, Protoclone is actuated with over 1,000 Myofibers, Clone’s proprietary artificial muscle technology.

[ Clone Robotics ]

There are a lot of heavily produced humanoid robot videos from the companies selling them, but now that these platforms are entering the research space, we should start getting a more realistic sense of their capabilities.

[ University College London ]

Here’s a bit more footage from RIVR on their home delivery robot.

[ RIVR ]

And now, this.

[ EngineAI ]

Robots are at the heart of sci-fi, visions of the future, but what if that future is now? And what if those robots, helping us at work and at home, are simply an extension of the tools we’ve used for millions of years? That’s what artist and engineer Catie Cuan thinks, and it’s part of the reason she teaches robots to dance. In this episode we meet the people at the frontiers of the future of robotics and Astro Teller introduces two groundbreaking projects, Everyday Robots and Intrinsic, that have advanced how robots could work not just for us but with us.