Robot Videos: Baseball Bots, UBTECH Walker, and More

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends on IEEE Spectrum robotics. We are also publishing a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

SOSV Robotics Matchup: December 1 to 5, 2025, ONLINE

ICRA 2026: June 1-5, 2026, VIENNA

Enjoy today’s videos!

Researchers at the RAI Institute have built a low-impedance platform to study the dynamic manipulation of robots. In this demo, robots play a game of catch and participate in batting practice, both with each other and with trained humans. Robots are capable of throwing 70 mph [112 kph]approaching the speed of a good high school pitcher. The robots can catch and strike at short distances (23 feet [7 m]) requiring quick reaction times to catch balls thrown up to 41 mph [66kph] and hit balls thrown up to 30 mph [48kph].

It’s a nice touch with the “RAI” custom baseball gloves, but what I really want to know is how long a pair of robots can entertain themselves.

[ RAI Institute ]

This week’s top bacronym winner is GIRAF: AnyMAL feature with significantly increased scope. And if this arm looks magical, that’s because it is, although if you carefully pause the video you’ll be able to see how it works.

[ Stanford BDML ]

DARPA concluded the second year of the DARPA Triage Challenge on October 4, awarding top marks to DART and MSAI in the Systems and Data competitions, respectively. The three-year competition aims to revolutionize medical triage during mass casualty incidents where medical resources are limited.

[ DARPA ]

We propose a robot-independent reward function that balances achieving a desired final pose with minimizing impact and protecting critical robot parts during reinforcement learning. To make the policy robust to a wide range of initial drop conditions and to allow the specification of an arbitrary and invisible final pose at inference time, we introduce a sampling strategy based on the simulation of initial and final poses. Through simulated and real-world experiments, our work demonstrates that even bipedal robots can perform gentle, controlled falls.

[ Moritz Baecher ]

Oh look, more humanoid acrobatics.

My prediction: Once humanoid companies run out of mocap dance moves, we’ll start seeing weird tricks that exploit the degrees of freedom that robots have that humans don’t. You heard it here for the first time, folks.

[ MagicLab ]

I challenge the next company that makes a “blackout” video to just cut to a completely black screen with a little “Successful Selections” counter in the corner going higher and higher.

[ Brightpick ]

Thank you Gilmarie!

The ground stuff is cool and all, but can we just talk about the trailer instead?

[ LimX Dynamics ]

German birblets, presumably very picky, receive personalized nest boxes made with exceedingly high precision by robots.

[ TUM ]

Turns out, not all of those UBTECH Walker S2 robots were fake.

[ UBTECH ]

This is more automation than what we actually consider robotics at this point, but I could still watch it all day.

[ Motoman ]

Brad Porter (Cobot) and Alfred Lin (Sequoia Capital) discuss the future of robotics, AI and automation at Human[X] Conference, moderated by Kate Rooney of CNBC. They explore why collaborative robots are accelerating today, how AI is transforming physical systems, the role of humanoids, labor market developments, and the investment trends that will shape the next decade of robotics.

[ Cobot ]

Humanoid robots have long captured our imagination. Interest has skyrocketed, alongside the perception that robots are increasingly capable of taking on a wide range of labor-intensive tasks. In this discussion, we reflect on what we have learned from observing factories and why we have become convinced that further generalization in manipulation (both material and behavioral) is not only interesting, but necessary. We will discuss the AI ​​research themes we are exploring at Boston Dynamics to advance this mission and highlight opportunities in which our field should collectively invest further to transform the humanoid vision and reinvention of manufacturing into a practical and economically viable product.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

On November 12, 2025, Tom Williams presented “Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice” as part of the Michigan Robotics Seminar Series.

[ Michigan Robotics ]

Ask the OSRF Board Anything! Or really, listen to others ask them anything.

[ ROSCon ]