By Emmet Cole With the explosion of robotics research, staying current in fields like Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a monumental challenge. Is AI the solution to the “paper deluge,” or is it part of the problem? Read the article preview below to learn more! Download the full paper: Surviving the Paper Deluge. Authors: Aude […]
Unlike autonomous driving or industrial robotics, healthcare robotics can’t rely on internet-scale data collection or unlimited real-world experimentation.... Unlike autonomous driving or industrial robotics, healthcare robotics can’t rely on internet-scale data collection or unlimited real-world experimentation. Every demonstration requires specialized equipment, clinical expertise, and access to patients or laboratory environments. This creates three fundamental challenges for developers. Firs…

Atop a lab bench, Cornell Tech postdoctoral researcher Yifan He positions the lens of an optical receiver almost a meter away from an LED emitting a beam of red light. The computer monitor attached to the receiver takes a beat to refresh, then displays an array of squares that resemble a QR code. When you hold your phone camera up to a QR code, light strikes the image sensor as only a first step to revealing the data hidden behind the black-and-white matrix. The receiver here is doing something …

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. Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL Enjoy today’s videos! In just six mon…
利兹大学与 UCSD 团队凭 1.8 毫米可磁导向、无内压生长并实时感知自身形状的软体机器人获 RoboSoft 最佳论文奖,面向微创医疗场景,可减少器械与组织的摩擦。AI summary
Imagine you want to teach a robot to push an object on a table. The standard recipe in robot learning is to collect hundreds of expert demonstrations on a real robot, train an imitation learning policy on that data, and then evaluate the policy by running it many times on the same real robot. Both […]
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. Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL Enjoy today’s videos! In this work, w…
There are many words that I would never, ever use to describe a drone. Stealthy. Subtle. Whatever the opposite of obnoxious is. Much of this is because of the giant angry bee sound that drones tend to make, but it’s also the way that they look in flight: With uncannily linear movements and an even less canny ability to hover perfectly still, they tend to draw the eye as affronts to nature. In a paper presented this week at Robotics Science and Systems 2026 in Sydney, roboticists from Northwester…
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. RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL Enj…
“In the future, the relationship between humans and robots will deepen, and the distinction between them will probably disappear.” This prediction, from one of the attendees at the recent Humanoids Summit in Tokyo, might have been unremarkable had it not come directly from an android that was first introduced to the world 20 years ago. Geminoid HI-6 is the sixth-generation of a robot originally designed in 2006. The mechanical twin of Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, Geminoid HI-6 is…
斯坦福教授 Allison Okamura 做客 Robot Talk 播客,介绍触觉交互机器人系统研究;她的方向涵盖触觉、遥操作、虚拟现实、医疗与软体机器人等。AI summary
By Syl Kacapyr Cornell engineers have developed a robotic collective that behaves less like a machine and more like a material that flows, reshapes and adapts to its environment without centralized control. The system, called the Cross-Link Collective, consists of dozens of small robots that have limited mobility individually, but together exhibit coordinated and sustained […]
Yen-Ling Kuo always wanted to understand how things worked. When she was growing up in Taiwan, reading the story of Michael Faraday in elementary school piqued her curiosity about the natural world. During that time, she was introduced to Logo, a computer program with a turtle cursor to help children learn basic coding through hands-on experimentation. It was Kuo’s introduction to programming logic. Yen-Ling Kuo Employer University of Virginia in Charlottesville Title Assistant professor of comp…
Claire chatted to Edward Mehr from Machina Labs about their RoboCraftsman that shapes complex metal parts for the aerospace, defence, and automotive industries. Edward Mehr is an entrepreneur and engineer specializing in advanced manufacturing, robotics, and artificial intelligence. As the Co-Founder and CEO of Machina Labs, he leads efforts to integrate AI-driven robotics into flexible, […]
The AAMAS 2026 best paper awards were presented at the 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, which took place from 25-29 May 2025 in Paphos, Cyprus. The winners and nominees in the three categories (best paper, best student paper, best blue sky paper) are as follows: Best Paper Award Winner Developing Guidelines […]
Deborah Lupton / Pop Chips / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0. Henrik I Christensen, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at University of California San Diego, has recently released a global robotics technology roadmap. This position paper focuses on Asia, Europe, and America and outlines the current state-of-the-art in robotics, and highlights the main opportunities. The […]
Image credit: HIMS / Nature Synthesis. In a paper published in Nature Synthesis, researchers led by Professor Timothy Noël of the University of Amsterdam’s Van ’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences present an advance in autonomous laboratory systems for synthesis optimisation. A versatile, modular design and the option for “human-in-the-loop” analytics, RoboChem Flex caters to […]
New MIT work advances the growing field of ionotronics, in which data are transferred through ions, potentially providing a bridge between electronics and biological tissue.
The assembly line task setup. Credit: 2026 LASA EPFL CC-BY-SA. By Celia Luterbacher In today’s manufacturing environments, upgrading a robot fleet often means starting from scratch – not only replacing hardware, but also reprogramming tasks. Even when two robots are built to perform similar jobs, different joint arrangements or movement limits mean that a task […]
Research papers point to the growing impact of Deep Think across fields
Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can try out Project Genie, an experimental research prototype that lets you create and explore worlds.
Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure. TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure st…
Our new paper analyzes the important ways AI systems organize the visual world differently from humans.
New experimental AI tool helps people explore the context and origin of images seen online.
What exactly does word2vec learn, and how? Answering this question amounts to understanding representation learning in a minimal yet interesting language modeling task. Despite the fact that word2vec is a well-known precursor to modern language models, for many years, researchers lacked a quantitative and predictive theory describing its learning process. In our new paper, we finally provide such a theory. We prove that there are realistic, practical regimes in which the learning problem reduces…