Video Friday: Autonomous Operation of Heavy Robotic Machinery

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

RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY

Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE

Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO

Enjoy today’s videos!

Bulk material handling is a critical, labor-intensive operation across various industries, traditionally performed by human operators using heavy hydraulic manipulators equipped with free-swinging, underactuated grippers. This work presents the first complete autonomous material-handling solution deployed on a real-world 40-ton material handler.

[ ETH Zurich ]

I don’t want to minimize this bedroom tidying by Figure (although I suppose I’m going to), but in the context of doing a task like this in place of a human, it really illustrates what these robots are comfortable with, and what they’re not.

[ Figure ]

Give me this over videos of robots doing backflips any day.

[ Hello Robot ]

Okay, but can it get them out of the can?

[ Generalist ]

The world’s first production-ready manned mecha. It can transform. It’s a civilian vehicle. It weighs ~500 kilograms with you inside.

[ Unitree ]

Curious about what happens when street dance meets embodied AI? From smooth choreography to dynamic flips, NIX is exploring movement, rhythm, and real-world interaction through embodied AI. We’ll make NIX available—FOR FREE!—to selected partners from global universities, robotics labs, and creative technologists.

[ Lumos ]

Thanks, Ni Tao!

We introduce and open-source the Unified Autonomy Stack, a novel solution for resilient autonomy across aerial and ground robot morphologies. The architecture combines multimodal perception, multibehavior planning, and multilayered safe navigation to deliver mission-level autonomy across diverse robot morphologies. It fuses lidar, radar, vision, and inertial sensing to enable robust localization and mapping, vision-language-based scene reasoning, multibehavior planning, and layered safety through map-based avoidance, deep learned policies, and control barrier functions. The system supports Global Navigation Satellite System–denied navigation in perceptually degraded environments, exploration, object discovery, and inspection, and has been validated on multirotor and legged robots in challenging settings, demonstrating resilient performance.

[ NTNU ]

Thanks, Kostas!

Cassie WAS the best robot!

The next video better be a Digit Centaur.

[ Agility ]

Any robot doing anything consistently over a long period of time is impressive. Having said that, you want to be very careful about claiming that any robot operates at “human performance levels,” especially in a somewhat complex manipulation task, because humans are very, very good at stuff like this.

[ Figure ]

Robust.AI cofounder and CTO Rodney Brooks, ranked #44 on the Forbes 250 America’s Greatest Innovators list, sits down for a Q&A ahead of his panel discussion at the Forbes America Innovates event in San Francisco. We asked him two questions: What makes innovation in robotics such a challenge? What does the current surge in AI mean for robotics today?

[ Robust AI ]

This is one of the best robotic research videos I’ve ever seen—and don’t worry, according to the credits it’s not AI. And make sure to watch after the credits!

[ Nature ]

EFGCL is a guided-reinforcement learning method that efficiently enables highly dynamic motions through the use of assistive forces. In this work, we successfully achieved several dynamic motions, including jumping, backflips, and lateral flips.

[ EFGCL ]

Thanks, Keita!

Legged robots: helping farmers one vegetable at a time.

[ University of Southern California ]

Humanoid robots promise general-purpose assistance, yet real-world humanoid loco-manipulation remains challenging because it requires whole-body stability, dexterous hands, and contact-aware perception under frequent contact changes. In this work, we study dexterous, contact-rich humanoid loco-manipulation.

[ Touch Dreaming ]

More than just technology, KATA Friends is a lifelike AI companion designed to see your world, feel your touch, and understand your heart. With expressive movements, evolving emotions, and natural conversations, Noa and Niko both grow alongside you to become a presence uniquely yours. From curious head tilts and playful reactions to ever-changing eye expressions and a soft, innocent voice, every interaction feels warm, personal, and alive.

[ SwitchBot ]

I really hate to say this, but despite how cute it is, Aibo may be showing its age.

[ Aibo ]

One of the biggest challenges in robotics right now isn’t the hardware. It’s data. While many data-collection methods are effective, handheld data collection can create a diverse dataset of environments, conditions, and strategies for completing manipulation tasks. The Koala platform codesigned the handheld grippers and robot grippers around the same linkage mechanism, the same degrees of freedom, and the same force transmission. The human feels through the linkages what the robot will feel through its actuators.