Video Friday is your weekly selection of amazing robotics videos collected by your friends ieee spectrum Robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your programs for inclusion.
ICRA 2026: 1-5 June 2026, Vienna
Enjoy today’s video!
Happy Halloween from UCL!
Happy Halloween from KimLab!
, Kinetic Intelligent Machine Lab ,
Happy Halloween from Dragon Lab!
, Dragon Lab, University of Tokyo ,
Thanks, Moju!
Happy Halloween from Agility Robotics!
, agility robotics ,
Happy Halloween from HEBI Robotics!
, HEBI ROBOTICS ,
Now you can pay 1X $500/month to collect data in your home.
And it’s about what you’d expect:
In our test warehouse, we recreate our customers’ inbound operations from dock configuration and conveyors to freight handling and beyond. Step inside our stretch testing facility to learn about the latest developments in warehouse automation and find out how we ensure strong, reliable performance in the real world.
, boston dynamics ,
Well, this is just mean talk. Important, but mean.
, Istituto Italiano di Technologia ,
SpikeATAC is a multimodal tactile finger that combines a conductive and highly sensitive dynamic response (PVDF) with a static transduction method (capacitive) for multimodal touch sensing. Named for its ‘spiky’ response, SpikeAttack’s MultiTaxel PVDF film provides fast, sensitive dynamic signals at the start and break of contact, providing the ability to stop quickly and delicately when capturing delicate, deformable objects.
, ROAM Lab, Columbia University ,
Effectively integrating diverse sensory representations is critical for robust robotic manipulation. However, the typical approach to feature combination is often sub-optimal: dominant modalities such as vision may overwhelm important signals such as touch in sparse but contact-rich tasks, and monolithic architectures cannot flexibly incorporate new or missing modalities without retraining. Our method decomposes the policy into a set of diffusion models, each specific to a single representation (for example, vision or touch), and employs a router network that learns consensus weights to adaptively combine their contributions, enabling the incremental integration of new representations.
, GitHub ,
Thanks Haonan!
General-purpose robots must have human-like dexterity and agility to perform tasks with the same versatility as us. The human-like form factor further enables the use of huge datasets of human-hand interactions. However, the primary barrier to efficient manipulation lies not only in the software, but arguably more so in the hardware. We present the open-source ORCA hand, a reliable and anthropomorphic 17-DoF tendon-driven robotic hand with integrated tactile sensors, fully assembled in less than eight hours and built for material costs less than 2,000 CHF.
, orca ,
University of Chicago computer scientist Sarah Sebo is programming robots to respond empathetically and execute non-verbal social signals like nodding to build better trust and rapport with humans. The goal is to develop robots that can improve performance in human-robot teams, such as enhancing learning outcomes for children.
DJI has a robot vacuum now, which is fine. As far as I can understand, we’ve reached the point where almost every robot vacuum (for better or worse) is just: OK.
, DJI ,
This ICRA 2025 keynote is from Angela Shoelig at the Technical University of Munich, with the topic “Empowering Robotics with AI.”
, ICRA 2025 ,
This seminar from Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute (CMU RI) is on “Bringing Dexterity to Robot Hands in the Real World” by Nancy Pollard.
Skillful manipulation is a major challenge of robotics, and fine manipulation skills are required for many of the robotics applications that we envision. In this overview talk, I will discuss my view of some of the key factors that contribute to dexterity and discuss how we can incorporate them into our robots and systems.
, cmu ri ,
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