Video Friday: Digit Redecorates
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, SEOULIROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGHCoRL 2026: 9–12 November…
Video Friday: Meet Microduck
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, SEOULIROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGHCoRL 2026: 9–12 November…
Video Friday: Do We Need Superhuman Humanoid Robots?
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, SEOULIROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGHCoRL 2026: 9–12 November…
CoIN: Interactive Navigation With Counterfactual Reasoning via Vision–Language Models
Interactive navigation requires robots to actively modify cluttered environments to create traversable paths, going beyond passive obstacle avoidance. However, existing methods either depend on global maps and lack the reasoning capabilities to make interaction decisions from local observations, or are restricted to interactions with simple geometric objects, limiting their applicability in partially observable, unstructured environments.…
Event-Triggered Adaptive Optimal Control of Switched Nonlinear Systems With Arbitrary Assigned-Time Performance Constraints
This paper investigates the event-triggered adaptive optimal control problem for switched nonlinear systems with arbitrary assigned-time performance constraints. An identifier-critic-actor-based reinforcement learning framework approximates the solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation online without requiring precise knowledge of system dynamics. A mode-dependent event-triggered control strategy is developed to reduce communication load and handle the mismatch between the…
RobotDancing: Residual-Action Reinforcement Learning Enables Robust Long-Horizon Humanoid Motion Tracking
Long-horizon, high-dynamic motion tracking on humanoids remains brittle: retargeted reference motions are typically kinematically plausible but dynamically inconsistent with the robot, so small tracking errors accumulate and eventually destabilize control.We present RobotDancing, a practical single-stage reinforcement learning recipe that tracks retargeted motions by predicting reference-conditioned residual joint targets. By parameterizing actions as residual corrections on…
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Agent-Specific Preference
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a powerful framework for solving complex collaborative tasks, but it relies heavily on well-defined global reward functions. Designing such rewards is challenging, especially in systems with heterogeneous agents, where a single scalar objective may fail to capture diverse behaviors. In this paper, we introduce Multi-AGent Preference-Integrated lEarning (MAGPIE), which addresses…
Resilient Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Automatic Generation Control Under Adversarial Perturbations
An efficient method is proposed to improve the cyber-physical resilience of multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG)-based automatic generation control (AGC) against malicious adversarial perturbations in the agents’ observation space. We first provide a sensitivity analysis demonstrating that the Jacobian of deep neural network (DNN) policies can amplify small perturbations into large and suboptimal control…
Out-of-Distribution Modular Hospital Fit-Out Scheduling via Memory-Augmented Deep Reinforcement Learning
Efficient resource scheduling for modular hospital fit-out accelerates the deployment of medical facilities, ultimately determining the project inauguration timeline. However, fit-out scheduling faces the real-time coordination of multiple rooms and workers, complex matching relationships between multi-skilled workers and diverse operations, and the dynamic accumulation of worker fatigue. These factors lead to varying evolutions of worker…
Video Friday: An Italian Humanoid Comes to Life
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.Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUEActuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCOIROS…