Video Friday: Multitasking Robots Smoothly Do the Things Together
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 Enjoy this week’s videos! Westwood Robotics is proud to announce a major update: THEMIS Gen2.5, the world’s first commercial full-size humanoid robot capable of manipulation on the move! Now that you mention it, the bit at the end where the robot picks up a can while walking? I haven’t seen a lot of that. [ Westwood Robotics ] Last year, Helix showed that a single neural network could control a humanoid’s upper body from pixels. Today, Helix 02 extends that control to the entire robot—walking, manipulating, and balancing as one continuous system. Why, yes, I am a normal human, and this is very similar to the default state of my kitchen. [ Figure ] Harry Goldstein, our editor in chief, went to meet Sprout from Fauna Robotics. He was skeptical at first, but Sprout won him over with its robotic charm. [ Fauna Robotics ] Kimberly Elenberg is showing how the data collected by robotic responders can save lives in mass casualty events. [ Carnegie Mellon University ] The educational robotics market is tough, but you’ve got to hand it to Sphero—going strong since 2011, which is pretty incredible. [ Sphero ] If you want to fly in crazy conditions, you have to flight test in those conditions. Here’s how and why we do it! [ Zipline ] I want to be impressed more by the idea of 3D-printing skin and skeleton at the same time, but come on, animals have been doing that for literally hundreds of years without even trying. [ JSK Lab, University of Tokyo ] If there is a market for small bipedal robots that can both ski and be dinosaurs, LimX has it covered. [ LimX ] How do you remotely control robots that change shape? We introduce a method for user-guided control of modular robots using reconfigurable joint-space joysticks (JoJo) and real-time optimization. We demonstrate this system on two different robots, Mori3 and Roombots. The video shows examples of these robots performing object manipulation, locomotion, human-assistance, and reconfiguration, controlled by our system. [ EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab ] via [ Nature Communications ] Quadrotor Biplane Tailsitter (QBiT) UAVs at four different sizes (4, 12, 25, and 50 lbs) developed at Texas A&M University. QBiT combines the mechanical simplicity of a quadrotor drone with the cruise efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft. [ Texas A&M University ] There’s a new DARPA challenge for “novel drone designs that can carry payloads more than four times their weight, which would revolutionize the way we use drones across all sectors.” [ DARPA ] Here are a couple of plenary and keynote talks from IROS 2025, from Marco Hutter and Karinne Ramirez Amaro. [ IROS 2025 ]
