Videos: Multitasking Robots, Skiing Bipedal Bots, 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 this week’s videos!

Westwood Robotics is proud to announce a major update: THEMIS Gen2.5, the world’s first full-size commercial humanoid robot capable of moving manipulation!

Now that you mention it, the part at the end where the robot picks up a can while walking? I haven’t seen many.

[ Westwood Robotics ]

Last year, Helix showed that a single neural network could control a humanoid’s upper body from pixels. Today, Helix 02 extends this control to the entire robot: walking, handling and balancing as one continuous system.

Well yes, I’m a normal human and this looks a lot like the default state of my kitchen.

[ Figure ]

Harry Goldstein, our editor-in-chief, went to meet Sprout from Fauna Robotics. He was skeptical at first, but Sprout won him over with her robotic charm.

[ Fauna Robotics ]

Kimberly Elenberg shows how data collected by robotic responders can save lives during mass casualty events.

[ Carnegie Mellon University ]

The educational robotics market is tough, but you have to hand it to Sphero, which has been growing rapidly since 2011, which is pretty incredible.

[ Sphero ]

If you want to fly in crazy conditions, you need to do a flight test in those conditions. Here’s how and why we do it!

[ Zipline ]

I wish I was more impressed by the idea of ​​3D printing skin and skeleton at the same time, but come on, animals have been doing this for literally hundreds of years without even trying.

[ JSK Lab, University of tokyo ]

If there’s a market for small bipedal robots that can both ski and be dinosaurs, LimX has it covered.

[ LimX ]

How to remotely control shape-changing robots? We introduce a method for user-guided control of modular robots using reconfigurable common-space joysticks (JoJo) and real-time optimization. We demonstrate this system on two different robots, Mori3 and Roombots. The video shows examples of these robots performing object manipulation, movement, human assistance and reconfiguration, controlled by our system.

[ EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab ] via [ Nature Communications ]

Quadrotor Biplane Tailsitter (QBiT) drones in four different sizes (4, 12, 25 and 50 lb) developed at Texas A&M University. QBiT combines the mechanical simplicity of a quadcopter drone with the cruising efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft.

[ Texas A&M University ]

There is a new challenge for DARPA regarding “new drone designs capable of carrying payloads more than four times their weight, which would revolutionize the way we use drones across all industries.”

[ DARPA ]

Here are some plenary and main conferences from IROS 2025, by Marco Hutter and Karinne Ramirez Amaro.

[ IROS 2025 ]