Robot Videos: Atlas Humanoid, CES 2026 Bots , 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.

ICRA 2026: June 1-5, 2026, VIENNA

Enjoy today’s videos!

[ Boston Dynamics ]

[ Roborock ]

Wow, SwitchBot’s CES 2026 video shows almost as many robots in their fantasy house as in my real house.

[ SwitchBot ]

What is happening in robotics right now that I can get more satisfaction from watching robotic process automation than from watching another humanoid video?

[ ABB ]

Yes, this is definitely a robot I want close to my life.

[ Unitree ]

The video below shows a MenteeBot learning, through mentoring, how to replace a battery in another MenteeBot. No teleoperation is used.

[ Mentee Robotics ]

Personally, I think humanoid robots should be encouraged to fall a lot more often, just to see if they can get back up.

[ Agility Robotics ]

Achieving reliable, long-term manipulation of clothing in the real world remains one of the most challenging problems in robotics. This live test demonstrates a major step forward in embodied intelligence, vision-language-action systems, and real-world robotic autonomy.

[ HKU MMLab ]

Millions of people around the world need help to feed themselves. Robotic feeding systems offer the potential to improve the independence and quality of life of people with disabilities and reduce the workload of caregivers. However, their widespread adoption has been limited by technical challenges such as estimating bite timing, the appropriate time for the robot to transfer the food into a user’s mouth. In this work, we introduce WAFFLE: Wearable Approach For Feeding with LEarned Bite Timing, a system that accurately predicts bite timing by leveraging data from wearable sensors to be highly responsive to natural user cues such as head movements, chewing, and speech.

[ CMU RCHI ]

Humanoid robots are now available as platforms, which is a great way to avoid any practical questions.

[ PNDbotics ]

We introduce spatially enhanced recurrent units (SRUs), a simple but powerful modification that allows robots to create implicit spatial memories for navigation. Published in the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), this work demonstrates an improvement of up to +105% over baseline approaches, with robots successfully traveling over 70 meters in the real world using a single forward-facing camera.

[ ETHZ RSL ]

Looking forward to the DARPA Triage Challenge this fall!

[ DARPA ]

Here are some good interviews from the Humanoids Summit 2025.

[ Humanoids Summit ]