Artificial Muscles, Boston Dynamics, and More Videos

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.

ICRA 2026: June 1-5, 2026, VIENNA

Enjoy today’s videos!

Functional replication and actuation of complex structures inspired by nature has been a long-standing goal for humanity. Creating such complex structures combining soft and rigid elements and operating them with artificial muscles would allow us to better understand natural kinematic structures. We printed a biomimetic hand in a single printing process consisting of a rigid skeleton, soft joint capsules, tendons, and printed tactile sensors.

[ Paper ] via [ SRL ]

Two Boston Dynamics product managers talk about their favorite classic comic book robots, and then I talk about mine.

And this is LittleDog from Boston Dynamics, who was researching leg locomotion about 16 years ago in what I’m pretty sure is Katie Byl’s lab at UCSB.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

This is our latest work on path planning method for floating articulated robots, enabling global path finding in complex and cluttered environments.

[ DRAGON Lab ]

Thanks Moju!

OmniPlanner is a unified solution for planning exploration and inspection trajectories (as well as target ranges) for aerial, terrestrial and underwater robots. This has been verified through extensive simulations and a multitude of field tests, including in underground mines, ballast water tanks, forests, university buildings and underwater bunkers.

[ NTNU ]

Thanks Kostas!

As part of the ARISE project, the FZI Research Center for Information Technology and its international partners ETH Zurich, University of Zurich, University of Bern and University of Basel have taken a major step towards future lunar missions by testing cooperative and autonomous multi-robot teams in outdoor conditions.

[ FZI ]

Welcome to the future, where there are no other humans.

[ Zhejiang Humanoid ]

This is our latest work on robotic fish, and it is also DRAGON Lab’s first underwater robot.

[ DRAGON Lab ]

Thanks Moju!

Check out this simple tip to make humanoid robots cheaper and safer!

[ Zhejiang Humanoid ]

Gugusse et l’Automate’ is an 1897 French film by Georges Méliès featuring a humanoid robot in a manner almost as realistic as some of the humanoid promotional videos we’ve seen recently.

[ Library of Congress ] via [ Gizmodo ]

At Agility, we create automated solutions for the toughest jobs. We’re incredibly proud of how far we’ve come and can’t wait to show you what’s next.

[ Agility ]

[ Humanoids Summit ]

Anca Dragan is no stranger to Waymo. She worked with us for six years, also at UC Berkeley and now at Google DeepMind. Its desire to make AI safer helped Waymo during its commercial launch. In this final episode of our season, Anca describes how her work enables AI agents to work fluently with people, based on human goals and values.

[ Waymo Podcast ]

This UPenn GRASP SFI seminar is led by Junyao Shi, on “Unlocking General Purpose Robots with Human Data and Foundation Models”.

Building general-purpose robots remains fundamentally limited by data scarcity and labor-intensive engineering. Unlike vision and language, robotics lacks large and diverse datasets spanning tasks, environments, and embodiments, limiting both scalability and generalization. This talk explores how human data and basic models trained at scale can help overcome these bottlenecks.

[ UPenn ]