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.
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, SOUTH 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
CoRL 2025: 27–30 September 2025, SEOUL
IEEE Humanoids: 30 September–2 October 2025, SEOUL
World Robot Summit: 10–12 October 2025, OSAKA, JAPAN
IROS 2025: 19–25 October 2025, HANGZHOU, CHINA
Enjoy today’s videos!
Throwing is a fundamental skill that enables robots to manipulate objects in ways that extend beyond the reach of their arms. We present a control framework that combines learning and model-based control for prehensile whole-body throwing with legged mobile manipulators. This work provides an early demonstration of prehensile throwing with quantified accuracy on hardware, contributing to progress in dynamic whole-body manipulation.
[ Paper ] from [ ETH Zurich ]
As it turns out, in many situations humanoid robots don’t necessarily need legs at all.
[ ROBOTERA ]
Picking-in-Motion is a brand new feature as part of Autopicker 2.0. Instead of remaining stationary while picking an item, Autopicker begins traveling toward its next destination immediately after retrieving a storage tote – completing the pick while on the move. The robot then drops off the first storage tote at an empty slot near the next pick location before collecting the next tote.
[ Brightpick ]
Thanks, Gilmarie!
I am pretty sure this is not yet real, but boy is it shiny.
[ SoftBank ] via [ RobotStart ]
Why use one thumb when you can instead use two thumbs?
[ TU Berlin ]
Kirigami offers unique opportunities for guided morphing by leveraging the geometry of the cuts. This work presents inflatable kirigami crawlers created by introducing cut patterns into heat-sealable textiles to achieve locomotion upon cyclic pneumatic actuation. We found that the kirigami actuators exhibit directional anisotropic friction properties when inflated, having higher friction coefficients against the direction of the movement, enabling them to move across surfaces with varying roughness. We further enhanced the functionality of inflatable kirigami actuators by introducing multiple channels and segments to create functional soft robotic prototypes with versatile locomotion capabilities.
[ Paper ] from [ SDU Soft Robotics ]
Lockheed Martin wants to get into the Mars Sample Return game for a mere US$3 billion.
[ Lockheed Martin ]
This is pretty gross and exactly what you want a robot to be doing: dealing with municipal solid waste.
[ ZenRobotics ]
Drag your mouse or move your phone to explore this 360-degree panorama provided by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. This view shows some of the rover’s first looks at a region that has only been viewed from space until now, and where the surface is crisscrossed with spiderweblike patterns.
[ NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory ]
In case you were wondering, iRobot is still around.
[ iRobot ]
In the first installment of our Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive video interview series, X’s Captain of Moonshots Astro Teller sits down with Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of the Moonshot Factory, for a conversation about the history of Waymo and Google X, the ethics of innovation, the future of AI, and more.
[ Google X, The Moonshot Factory ]
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