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
Enjoy today’s videos!
Lume is a sculptural floor lamp designed to feel at home the moment you place it. It’s crafted from anodized aluminum and high-gloss finishes, shaped into a slender, balanced form that quietly conceals its complexity. Every surface is refined to feel smooth, precise, and enduring. When it moves, it’s quiet and deliberate. When it’s still, it holds its place with ease.
Apparently, and let me stress that ‘apparently,’ Lume can make the bed, fold laundry, and do other chores involving soft materials. I’m intensely skeptical because it feels like that video has more footage of people staring out of windows and dancing for no reason beyond the robot actually doing anything. And when you do see the robot working at a task, it’s cut up into lots of different pieces of footage in a way that is typically used to distract from either plodding speed, frequent failures, or both. So, yeah. There may be a lot to like about the philosophy here, but even at a suspiciously cheap US$2,500 for a pair of these robots, more detail is certainly called for before they’ve earned your preorder.
[ Syncere ]
In Science Robotics, researchers from MIT Media Lab and collaborators from Politecnico di Bari present Electrofluidic Fiber Muscles, a new class of artificial muscle fibers for robots and wearables. Unlike the rigid servo motors used in most robots, these fiber-shaped muscles are soft and flexible. They combine electrohydrodynamic (EHD) fiber pumps—slender tubes that move liquid using electric fields to generate pressure with no moving parts—with fluidic fiber actuators. The muscles are driven by electric fields and operate silently, with no external pumps or reservoirs.
[ MIT ]
We first saw this thing at ICRA@40 a few years ago, but the paper is out now.
[ Nature Communications ] via [ LASA ]
I do like tea, and I suppose there could be worse applications for a robot than this one, since it leverages both payload and complex terrain mobility.
[ DEEP Robotics ]
We’ve created GEN-1, our latest milestone in scaling robot learning. We believe it to be the first general-purpose AI model that crosses a new performance threshold: mastery of simple physical tasks. It improves average success rates to 99% on tasks where previous models achieve 64%, completes tasks roughly 3x faster than state of the art, and requires only 1 hour of robot data for each of these results. GEN-1 unlocks commercial viability across a broad range of applications—and while it cannot solve all tasks today, it is a significant step towards our mission of creating generalist intelligence for the physical world.
[ Generalist ]
Legged manipulators offer high mobility and versatile manipulation. However, robust interaction with heterogeneous articulated objects, such as doors, drawers, and cabinets, remains challenging because of the diverse articulation types of the objects and the complex dynamics of the legged robot. In this paper, we propose a robust and sample-efficient framework for opening heterogeneous articulated objects with a legged manipulator.
[ OpenHEART ]
By deeply coupling real-time depth perception with reinforcement learning motion control, Adam achieves natural human-like stair-stepping gait, showing outstanding dynamic stability and environmental adaptability.
[ PNDbotics ]
The way these robots deliver packages will never not be amusing to me.
[ DEEP Robotics ]
Tether performs autonomous real-world functional play involving structured, task-directed interactions. We introduce a policy that performs trajectory warping anchored by keypoint correspondences, which is extremely data efficient and robust to significant spatial and semantic environment variation. Running the policy within a VLM-guided multi-task loop, we generate a stream of play data that consistently improves downstream policy learning over time.
[ Tether ]
What happens when your walls begin to move? This paper explores the design of human-robot interaction for architectural-scale, shape-changing environments.
[ Interactive Structures Lab ]
I will admit to being somewhat disappointed about the reality of the Unreal Robotics Lab.
[ URLab ]
We’re not done yet! Illinois is back in the Final Four for the first time since 2005, and we’re cheering all the way to the championship. This video features teleoperated G1 and AI Worker robots.
[ KIMLAB ]
Fighting robots are cool. Destroying expensive electronics while fighting robots is not cool. We make robots out of plastic so our electronics survive.
[ Weaponized Plastic Fighting League ]
The post “Video Friday: This Floor Lamp Will Do Your Chores” by Evan Ackerman was published on 04/10/2026 by spectrum.ieee.org