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.

Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

CoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN, TEXAS

Enjoy today’s videos!

Nvidia just paid US $12.9 billion for the company that acquired Pollen Robotics, and this must be why.

Meet Microduck. 🦆 The 25-centimeter, 780-gram robot that waddles, falls, gets back up, and learns new tricks.

Packed inside: 15 degrees of freedom, a front camera, an 8x8 lidar, two IMUs, mics, a speaker, NFC, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Out of the box, Microduck already walks, sits, crouches, roller skates, picks up objects with its articulated beak, and recovers from falls on its own. Drive it with a game controller, plug-in accessories, and NFC tagged objects, run autonomous behaviors, or gather several Microducks for races and football.

Software fully open source. Ready for whatever you throw at it.

On pre-order for an astonishingly low $399, and ships before Christmas.

[ Microduck ]

Thanks, Matthieu!

If you’ve chosen to ignore all the earlier DARPA Lift Challenge videos that we’ve posted, now you can get all caught up in about five minutes.

[ DARPA ]

You had me at “54-gram robot that out-jumps a kangaroo.”

[ IEEE Transactions on Robotics ]

Sometimes, you just need a video like this.

Most fish-inspired robots are built for one size and one job, so scaling them up or down usually means starting from scratch. A team of engineers says it has found a way to solve that problem. They’ve unveiled ScaFi, a robot modeled on fish like cod and mackerel.

[ New York University ]

Thanks, Leah!

Martin writes, “We’re a small robotics team in Czechia, Europe, building practical hardware around the Unitree G1. Here’s a short demo of our lightweight gripper picking up a strawberry; the gripper weighs under 200 grams and is designed for simple, sensitive manipulation without adding a complex multifinger hand.

[ Sentio Robotix ]

Thanks, Martin!

Hybrid visual markers that are useful for both cameras and lidar is a neat idea.

[ Hello Robot ]

Thanks, Binit!

EmoLo brings emotion-inspired expressive locomotion to Open Duck Mini V2, a low-cost, open-source bipedal robot inspired by Disney’s BDX droids. With a single reinforcement learning policy, the robot can generate distinct walking styles associated with different emotional expressions, showing how characterful and expressive whole-body motion can be achieved on an accessible robotic platform.

[ EmoLo ]

Thanks, Masato!

If it’s possible for a robot with a completely immobile face to look frustrated, this robot absolutely does, starting at three minutes into this video.

[ DLR RM ]

Noble Machines deployed its first general-purpose robots to a Fortune Global 500 industrial customer within 18 months of the company’s launch and met its first delivery milestone, made possible by its AI-driven whole-body control and industry-leading end-to-end autonomy.

[ Noble Machines ]

We’ve reduced the time it takes to go from physical prompt → robot behavior. The faster anyone can teach a robot to do something new, the easier it becomes to scale physical work.

[ Generalist ]

I know this video is mostly a gimmick, but I would totally rent a moderately heavy lift quadruped for a couple of days to help with a move.

[ DEEP Robotics ]

Is taking two minutes to excellently fold a shirt too long, or do we even care how long it takes, as long as it’s a robot doing it?

[ Tokyo Robotics ]

TRON 2 × Wuji Hand 2 handles TCM pharmacy work: picking, weighing, grinding, and packaging. The omnidirectional base frees the hands, while precise gripping and dual-arm force control enable midair operations.

[ LimX Dynamics ]

Person who genuinely knows things about robots, Christian Hubicki, explains everything about robots smashing into walls.

[ Christian Hubicki ]

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.

Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL

IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH

CoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN

Enjoy today’s videos!

This is very, very cool. But I’m trying to think of what the commercial use case will be, you know? I guess, high speed, incredibly dangerous package delivery to second-floor windows or something...?

[ Unitree ]

Humans have a remarkable ability to perform new physical skills from only one or a few examples. Our latest robot foundation model, GEN-1.5, exhibits the beginnings of that same ability: It can learn a new task in seconds, from a single example, without gradient updates or fine-tuning. It displays broad capabilities across one-shot and few-shots learning from demonstration, as well as zero-shot physical generalization. Although the tasks are simple and short-horizon, this is the first model we know for which one-shot and few-shots learning of physical skills have emerged at scale. We view these results as a significant step toward our mission of building general intelligence for the physical world.

I will make the cautionary point that for many of these “the model figured it out” tasks, the blog post can only say that there was no relevant pretraining data “to the best of our knowledge.”

[ Generalist ]

BeanBot is a robot inspired by Mexican jumping beans, and I need say no more.

[ IIT ]

As a professional bagpiper who definitely pays very close attention to whatever that annoying tapping noise is coming from the back of the band, I can attest to this group of robot drummers being absolutely top-notch.

[ AgileX Robotics ]

What does it take for an aerial robot to move through a sequence of arbitrary poses—fast, precisely, and continuously? Rather than teaching the robot a behavior from data, we asked how far a first-principles analytical model could take us. Through a collaboration between the AIMS Group at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and DRAGON Lab at the University of Tokyo, we developed the first sequential-convex-programming-based trajectory-optimization framework for generalized multirotors, covering both conventional and omnidirectional platforms.

[ DRAGON Lab ]

Thanks, Moju!

This is a nifty idea that adapts a kind of interface frequently used for robot training and uses it for human training instead.

[ MIT ]

Gravis Robotics brings robotic intelligence to heavy construction machines. Our retrofit kit, the Gravis Rack, turns off-the-shelf hydraulic machines into robots. Cameras, lidar, and onboard compute lets your machine see and understand its surroundings, and learning-based control lets it work close to its limits, moving more dirt with full, fast cycles.

[ Gravis Robotics ]

Robust brachiation requires precise hand movements to grasp and release bars together with highly coordinated whole-body motion. To address this challenge, we propose a learning-based framework centered on waypoint-guided reinforcement learning (WGRL). WGRL guides the end effector through waypoints while allowing RL to explore and generate dynamic whole-body behaviors. With this approach, the learned policy demonstrated robust brachiation across diverse courses with different bar heights, spacings, and orientations in sim-to-sim experiments. In the real world, our life-size dual-arm robot successfully traversed four consecutive bars.

[ EVARL ]

Thanks, Ayumu!

Well, here’s a different approach to welding in shipyards with robots.

[ Kawasaki ]

We should have a lot more robots in agriculture, if only they’d lettuce.

[ Flexiv ]

We’ve all had refs like these.

[ PHYBOT ]

I got stuck after the first 15 seconds of this video trying to imagine what any of these home humanoids would usefully do if they dropped a glass.

[ Zhejiang Humanoid ]

Shakey the Robot doesn’t get enough love.

[ SRI ]

This work introduces a novel approach to physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) by leveraging the joint torque sensors of standard collaborative robots. By mounting a passive, uninstrumented plexiglass touchpad to the robot’s flange, we transform the robot into a handwriting-based input interface.

[ TS-Robotics ]