Video Friday: Biorobotics Turns Lobster Tails Into Gripper
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, VIENNAEnjoy today’s videos! EPFL scientists have integrated discarded crustacean shells into…
MIT’s AI Robotics Lab Director Is Building People-Centered Robots
Daniela Rus has spent her career breaking barriers—scientific, social, and material—in her quest to build machines that amplify rather than replace human capability. She made robotics her life’s work, she says, because she understood it was a way to expand the possibilities of computing while enhancing human capabilities.“I like to think of robotics as a…
Video Friday: Disney’s Robotic Olaf Makes His Debut
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.SOSV Robotics Matchup: 1–5 December 2025, ONLINEICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNAEnjoy today’s videos! Step behind…
Communication-Aware Hierarchical Map Compression of Time-Varying Environments for Mobile Robots
In this letter, we develop a systematic framework for the time-sequential compression of dynamic probabilistic occupancy grids. Our approach leverages ideas from signal compression theory to formulate an optimization problem that searches for a multi-resolution hierarchical encoder that balances the quality of the compressed map (distortion) with its description size, the latter of which relates…
Video Friday: Drone Easily Lands on Speeding Vehicle
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.World Robot Summit: 10–12 October 2025, OSAKA, JAPANIROS 2025: 19–25 October 2025, HANGZHOU, CHINAEnjoy today’s videos!…
Why the World Needs a Flying Robot Baby
One of the robotics projects that I’ve been most excited about for years now is iRonCub, from Daniele Pucci’s Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence Lab at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, Italy. Since 2017, Pucci has been developing a jet-propulsion system that will enable an iCub robot (originally designed in 2004 to be…
Modular Acoustic Graph SLAM for Underwater Monitoring With Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
This work was developed under the need for an acoustic localization system to monitor marine protected areas (MPAs) with the help of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Although the use of acoustic signals for underwater localization has been previously studied, most of the solutions rely on filter-based optimization, which is prone to linearization problems in long-term…
Practical Finite-Time Contraction of Impulsive Systems With Application to Design of Impulsive Control for PFTC
This paper investigates practical finite-time contraction (PFTC) for impulsive systems with application to design of impulsive control for PFTC. The PFTC notions including practical finite-time incremental stability (PFTIS) and practical finite-time stability (PFTS) are defined. By using the variation method, the equivalence of PFTC and PFTIS is established for an impulsive system via PFTS of…
Video Friday: Gemini Robotics Improves Motor Skills
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.CoRL 2025: 27–30 September 2025, SEOULIEEE Humanoids: 30 September–2 October 2025, SEOULWorld Robot Summit: 10–12 October…
Vision-Based Autonomous Robotic Arc Welding: State-of-the-Art Review and Perspectives
Robotic welding is an essential technology in industrial production. Various sensors are integrated into robotic welding systems to enhance welding efficiency and quality. Due to their advantages of non-contact measurement, high information capacity, and high accuracy, vision sensors play an increasingly important role in robotic autonomous welding. Therefore, the latest vision-based autonomous robotic arc welding…