New evidence that confirms so much of what I have been saying

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. RoboSoft 2025: 23–26 April 2025, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ICUAS 2025: 14–17 May 2025, CHARLOTTE, NC ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA, GA London Humanoids Summit: 29–30 May 2025, LONDON IEEE RCAR 2025: 1–6 June 2025, TOYAMA, JAPAN 2025 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: 16–18 June 2025, HOUSTON, TX RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELES ETH Robotics Summer School: 21–27 June 2025, GENEVA IAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY ICRES 2025: 3–4 July 2025, PORTO, PORTUGAL IEEE World Haptics: 8–11 July 2025, SUWON, KOREA IFAC Symposium on Robotics: 15–18 July 2025, PARIS RoboCup 2025: 15–21 July 2025, BAHIA, BRAZIL RO-MAN 2025: 25–29 August 2025, EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS CLAWAR 2025: 5–7 September 2025, SHENZHEN World Robot Summit: 10–12 October 2025, OSAKA, JAPAN IROS 2025: 19–25 October 2025, HANGZHOU, CHINA IEEE Humanoids: 30 September–2 October 2025, SEOUL CoRL 2025: 27–30 September 2025, SEOUL Enjoy today’s videos! I love the platform and I love the use case, but this particular delivery method is... Odd? [ RIVR ] This is just the beginning of what people and physical AI can accomplish together. To recognize business value from collaborative robotics, you have to understand what people do well, what robots do well—and how they best come together to create productivity. DHL and Robust.AI are partnering to define the future of human-robot collaboration. [ Robust AI ] Teleoperated robotic characters can perform expressive interactions with humans, relying on the operators’ experience and social intuition. In this work, we propose to create autonomous interactive robots, by training a model to imitate operator data. Our model is trained on a dataset of human-robot interactions, where an expert operator is asked to vary the interactions and mood of the robot, while the operator commands as well as the pose of the human and robot are recorded. [ Disney Research Studios ] Introducing THEMIS V2, our all-new full-size humanoid robot. Standing at 1.6m with 40 DoF, THEMIS V2 now features enhanced 6 DoF arms and advanced 7 DoF end-effectors, along with an additional body-mounted stereo camera and up to 200 TOPS of onboard AI computing power. These upgrades deliver exceptional capabilities in manipulation, perception, and navigation, pushing humanoid robotics to new heights. [ Westwood ] BMW x Figure Update: This isn’t a test environment—it’s real production operations. Real-world robots are advancing our Helix AI and strengthening our end-to-end autonomy to deploy millions of robots. [ Figure ] On March 13, at WorldMinds 2025, in the Kaufleuten Theater of Zurich, our team demonstrated for the first time two autonomous vision-based racing drones. It was an epic journey to prepare for this event, given the poor lighting conditions and the safety constraints of a theater filled with more than 500 people! The background screen visualizes in real-time the observations of the AI algorithm of each drone. No map, no IMU, no SLAM! [ University of Zurich (UZH) ] Unitree releases Dex5 dexterous hand. Single hand with 20 degrees of freedom (16 active+4 passive). Enable smooth backdrivability (direct force control). Equipped with 94 highly sensitive touch points (optional). [ Unitree ] You can say “real world manipulation” all you want, but until it’s actually in the real world, I’m not buying it. [ 1X ] Developed by Pudu X-Lab, FlashBot Arm elevates the capabilities of our flagship FlashBot by blending advanced humanoid manipulation and intelligent delivery capabilities, powered by cutting-edge embodied AI. This powerful combination allows the robot to autonomously perform a wide range of tasks across diverse settings, including hotels, office buildings, restaurants, retail spaces, and healthcare facilities. [ Pudu Robotics ] If you ever wanted to manipulate a trilby with 25 robots, a solution now exists. [ Paper ] via [ EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab ] published by [ IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters ] We’ve been sharing videos from the Suzumori Endo Robotics Lab at the Institute of Science Tokyo for many years, and Professor Suzumori is now retiring. Best wishes to Professor Suzumori! [ Suzumori Endo Lab ] No matter the vehicle, traditional control systems struggle when unexpected challenges—like damage, unforeseen environments, or new missions—push them beyond their design limits. Our Learning Introspective Control (LINC) program aims to fundamentally improve the safety of mechanical systems, such as ground vehicles, ships, and robotics, using various machine learning methods that require minimal computing power. [ DARPA ] NASA’s Perseverance rover captured new images of multiple dust devils while exploring the rim of Jezero Crater on Mars. The largest dust devil was approximately 210 feet wide (65 meters). In this Mars Report, atmospheric scientist Priya Patel explains what dust devils can teach us about weather conditions on the Red Planet. [ NASA ]

A new Anthropic paper reports that reasoning model chain of thought (CoT) is often unfaithful. They test on Claude Sonnet 3.7 and r1, I’d love to see someone try this on o3 as well.

April 4, 2025.

Machine learning for software engineers 4-4-25