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 CoRL 2025: 27–30 September 2025, SEOUL IEEE Humanoids: 30 September–2 October 2025, SEOUL World Robot Summit: 10–12 October 2025, OSAKA, JAPAN IROS 2025: 19–25 October 2025, HANGZHOU, CHINA Enjoy today’s videos! Let’s step into a new era of Sci-Fi, join the fun together! Unitree will be livestreaming robot combat in about a month, stay tuned! [ Unitree ] A team of scientists and students from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands (TU Delft) has taken first place at the A2RL Drone Championship in Abu Dhabi - an international race that pushes the limits of physical artificial intelligence, challenging teams to fly fully autonomous drones using only a single camera. The TU Delft drone competed against 13 autonomous drones and even human drone racing champions, using innovative methods to train deep neural networks for high-performance control. [ TU Delft ] RAI’s Ultra Mobile Vehicle (UMV) is learning some new tricks! [ RAI Institute ] With 28 moving joints (20 QDD actuators + 8 servo motors), Cosmo can walk with its two feet with a speed of up to 1 m/s (0.5 m/s nominal) and balance itself even when pushed. Coordinated with the motion of its head, fingers, arms and legs, Cosmo has a loud and expressive voice for effective interaction with humans. Cosmo speaks in canned phrases from the 90’s cartoon he originates from and his speech can be fully localized in any language. [ RoMeLa ] We wrote about Parallel Systems back in January of 2022, and it’s good to see that their creative take on autonomous rail is still moving along. [ Parallel Systems ] RoboCake is ready. This edible robotic cake is the result of a collaboration between researchers from EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne), the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) and pastry chefs and food scientists from EHL in Lausanne. It takes the form of a robotic wedding cake, decorated with two gummy robotic bears and edible dark chocolate batteries that power the candles. [ EPFL ] ROBOTERA’s fully self-developed five-finger dexterous hand has upgraded its skills, transforming into an esports hand in the blink of an eye! The XHAND1 features 12 active degrees of freedom, pioneering an industry-first fully direct-drive joint design. It offers exceptional flexibility and sensitivity, effortlessly handling precision tasks like finger opposition, picking up soft objects, and grabbing cards. Additionally, it delivers powerful grip strength with a maximum payload of nearly 25 kilograms, making it adaptable to a wide range of complex application scenarios. [ ROBOTERA ] Witness the future of industrial automation as Extend Robotics trials their cutting-edge humanoid robot in Leyland factories. In this groundbreaking video, see how the robot skillfully connects a master service disconnect unit—a critical task in factory operations. Watch onsite workers seamlessly collaborate with the robot using an intuitive XR (extended reality) interface, blending human expertise with robotic precision. [ Extend Robotics ] I kind of like the idea of having a mobile robot that lives in my garage and manages the charging and cleaning of my car. [ Flexiv ] How can we ensure robots using foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs), won’t “hallucinate” when executing tasks in complex, previously unseen environments? Our Safe and Assured Foundation Robots for Open Environments (SAFRON) Advanced Research Concept (ARC) seeks ideas to make sure robots behave only as directed & intended. [ DARPA ] What if doing your chores were as easy as flipping a switch? In this talk and live demo, roboticist and founder of 1X Bernt Børnich introduces NEO, a humanoid robot designed to help you out around the house. Watch as NEO shows off its ability to vacuum, water plants and keep you company, while Børnich tells the story of its development — and shares a vision for robot helpers that could free up your time to focus on what truly matters. [ 1X ] via [ TED ] Rodney Brooks gave a keynote at the Stanford HAI spring conference on Robotics in a Human-Centered World. There are a bunch of excellent talks from this conference on YouTube at the link below, but I think this panel is especially good, as a discussion of going from from research to real-world impact. [ YouTube ] via [ Stanford HAI ] Wing CEO Adam Woodworth discusses consumer drone delivery with Peter Diamandis at Abundance 360. [ Wing ] This CMU RI Seminar is from Sangbae Kim, who was until very recently at MIT but is now the Robotics Architect at Meta’s Robotics Studio. [ CMU RI ]

This year, Bell Labs celebrates its hundredth birthday. In a centennial celebration held last week at the Murray Hill, New Jersey campus, the lab’s impressive technological history was celebrated with talks, panels, demos, and over a half dozen gracefully aging Nobel laureates. During its impressive 100 year tenure, Bell Labs scientists invented the transistor, laid down the theoretical grounding for the digital age, discovered radio astronomy which led to the first evidence in favor of the big bang theory, contributed to the invention of the laser, developed the Unix operating system, invented the charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, and many more scientific and technological contributions that have earned Bell Labs ten Noble prizes and five Turing awards. “I normally tell people, this is the ‘Bell Labs invented everything’ tour,” said Nokia Bell Labs archivist Ed Eckert as he led a tour through the lab’s history exhibit. The lab is smaller than it once was. The main campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey appears like a bit of a ghost town, with empty cubicles and offices lining the halls. Now, it’s planning a move to a smaller facility in New Brunswick, New Jersey sometime in 2027. In its heyday, Bell Labs boasted around 6,000 workers at the Murray Hill location. Although that number has now dwindled to about 1,000, more work at other locations around the world The Many Accomplishments of Bell Labs Despite its somewhat diminished size, Bell Labs, now owned by Nokia, is alive and kicking. “As Nokia Bell Labs, we have a dual mission,” says Bell Labs president Peter Vetter. “On the one hand, we need to support the longevity of the core business. That is networks, mobile networks, optical networks, the networking at large, security, device research, ASICs, optical components that support that network system. And then we also have the second part of the mission, which is help the company grow into new areas.” Some of the new areas for growth were represented in live demonstrations at the centennial. A team at Bell Labs is working on establishing the first cellular network on the moon. In February, Intuitive Machines sent their second lunar mission, Athena, with Bell Labs’ technology on board. The team fit two full cellular networks into a briefcase-sized box, the most compact networking system ever made. This cell network was self-deploying: Nobody on Earth needs to tell it what to do. The lunar lander tipped on its side upon landing and quickly went offline due to lack of solar power, Bell Labs’ networking module had enough time to power up and transmit data back to Earth. Another Bell Labs group is focused on monitoring the world’s vast network of undersea fiber-optic cables. Undersea cables are subject to interruptions, be it from adversarial sabotage, undersea weather events like earthquakes or tsunamis, or fishing nets and ship anchors. The team wants to turn these cables into a sensor network, capable of monitoring the environment around a cable for possible damage. The team has developed a real-time technique for monitoring mild changes in cable length, so sensitive that the lab-based demo was able to pick up tiny vibrations from the presenter’s speaking voice. This technique can pin changes down to a 10 kilometer interval of cable, greatly simplifying the search for affected regions. Nokia is taking the path less travelled when it comes to quantum computing, pursuing so-called topological quantum bits. These qubits, if made, would be much more robust to noise than other approaches, and are more readily amenable to scaling. However, building even a single qubit of this kind has been elusive. Nokia Bell Labs’ Robert Willett has been at it since his graduate work in 1988, and the team expect to demonstrate the first NOT gate with this architecture later this year. Beam-steering antennas for point-to-point fixed wireless are normally made on printed circuit boards. But as the world goes to higher frequencies, toward 6G, conventional printed circuit board materials are no longer cutting it—the signal loss makes them economically unviable. That’s why a team at Nokia Bell Labs has developed a way to print circuit boards on glass instead. The result is a small glass chip that has 64 integrated circuits on one side and the antenna array on the other. A 100 gigahertz link using the tech was deployed at the Paris Olympics in 2024, and a commercial product is on the roadmap for 2027. Mining, particularly autonomous mining that avoids putting humans in harm’s way, relies heavily on networking. That’s why Nokia has entered the mining business, developing smart digital twin technology that models the mine and the autonomous trucks that work on it. Their robo-truck system features two cellular modems, three Wifi cards, and twelve ethernet ports. The system collects different types of sensor data and correlates them on a virtual map of the mine (the digital twin). Then, it uses AI to suggest necessary maintenance and to optimize scheduling. The lab is also dipping into AI. One team is working on integrating large language models with robots for industrial applications. These robots have access to a digital twin model of the space they are in and have a semantic representation of certain objects in their surroundings. In a demo, a robot was verbally asked to identify missing boxes in a rack, and it successfully pointed out which box wasn’t found in its intended place, and when prompted travelled to the storage area and identified the replacement. The key is to build robots that can “reason about the physical world,” says Matthew Andrews, a researcher in the AI lab. A test system will be deployed in a warehouse in the United Arab Emirates in the next six months. Despite impressive scientific demonstrations, there was an air of apprehension about the event. In a panel discussion about the future of innovation, Princeton engineering dean Andrea Goldsmith said, “I’ve never been more worried about the innovation ecosystem in the US.” Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a keynote that “The current administration seems to be trying to destroy university R&D.” Nevertheless, Schmidt and others expressed optimism about the future of innovation at Bell Labs and the US more generally. “We will win, because we are right and R&D is the foundation of economic growth,” he said.

For more than a century, women and racial minorities have fought for access to education and employment opportunities once reserved exclusively for white men. The life of Yvonne Young “Y.Y.” Clark is a testament to the power of perseverance in that fight. As a smart Black woman who shattered the barriers imposed by race and gender, she made history multiple times during her career in academia and industry. She probably is best known as the first woman to serve as a faculty member in the engineering college at Tennessee State University, in Nashville. Her pioneering spirit extended far beyond the classroom, however, as she continuously staked out new territory for women and Black professionals in engineering. She accomplished a lot before she died on 27 January 2019 at her home in Nashville at the age of 89. Clark is the subject of the latest biography in IEEE-USA’s Famous Women Engineers in History series. “Don’t Give Up” was her mantra. An early passion for technology Born on 13 April 1929 in Houston, Clark moved with her family to Louisville, Ky., as a baby. She was raised in an academically driven household. Her father, Dr. Coleman M. Young Jr., was a surgeon. Her mother, Hortense H. Young, was a library scientist and journalist. Her mother’s “Tense Topics” column, published by the Louisville Defender newspaper, tackled segregation, housing discrimination, and civil rights issues, instilling awareness of social justice in Y.Y. Clark’s passion for technology became evident at a young age. As a child, she secretly repaired her family’s malfunctioning toaster, surprising her parents. It was a defining moment, signaling to her family that she was destined for a career in engineering—not in education like her older sister, a high school math teacher. “Y.Y.’s family didn’t create her passion or her talents. Those were her own,” said Carol Sutton Lewis, co-host and producer for the third season of the “Lost Women of Science” podcast, on which Clark was profiled. “What her family did do, and what they would continue to do, was make her interests viable in a world that wasn’t fair.” Clark’s interest in studying engineering was precipitated by her passion for aeronautics. She said all the pilots she spoke with had studied engineering, so she was determined to do so. She joined the Civil Air Patrol and took simulated flying lessons. She then learned to fly an airplane with the help of a family friend. Despite her academic excellence, though, racial barriers stood in her way. She graduated at age 16 from Louisville’s Central High School in 1945. Her parents, concerned that she was too young to attend college, sent her to Boston for two additional years at the Girls’ Latin School and Roxbury Memorial High School. She then applied to the University of Louisville, where she was initially accepted and offered a full scholarship. When university administrators realized she was Black, however, they rescinded the scholarship and the admission, Clark said on the “Lost Women of Science” podcast, which included clips from when her daughter interviewed her in 2007. As Clark explained in the interview, the state of Kentucky offered to pay her tuition to attend Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., rather than integrate its publicly funded university. Breaking barriers in higher education Although Howard provided an opportunity, it was not free of discrimination. Clark faced gender-based barriers, according to the IEEE-USA biography. She was the only woman among 300 mechanical engineering students, many of whom were World War II veterans. “Y.Y.’s family didn’t create her passion or her talents. Those were her own. What her family did do, and what they would continue to do, was make her interests viable in a world that wasn’t fair.” —Carol Sutton Lewis Despite the challenges, she persevered and in 1951 became the first woman to earn a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the university. The school downplayed her historic achievement, however. In fact, she was not allowed to march with her classmates at graduation. Instead, she received her diploma during a private ceremony in the university president’s office. A career defined by firsts Determined to forge a career in engineering, Clark repeatedly encountered racial and gender discrimination. In a 2007 Society of Women Engineers (SWE) StoryCorps interview, she recalled that when she applied for an engineering position with the U.S. Navy, the interviewer bluntly told her, “I don’t think I can hire you.” When she asked why not, he replied, “You’re female, and all engineers go out on a shakedown cruise,” the trip during which the performance of a ship is tested before it enters service or after it undergoes major changes such as an overhaul. She said the interviewer told her, “The omen is: ‘No females on the shakedown cruise.’” Clark eventually landed a job with the U.S. Army’s Frankford Arsenal gauge laboratories in Philadelphia, becoming the first Black woman hired there. She designed gauges and finalized product drawings for the small-arms ammunition and range-finding instruments manufactured there. Tensions arose, however, when some of her colleagues resented that she earned more money due to overtime pay, according to the IEEE-USA biography. To ease workplace tensions, the Army reduced her hours, prompting her to seek other opportunities. Her future husband, Bill Clark, saw the difficulty she was having securing interviews, and suggested she use the gender-neutral name Y.Y. on her résumé. The tactic worked. She became the first Black woman hired by RCA in 1955. She worked for the company’s electronic tube division in Camden, N.J. Although she excelled at designing factory equipment, she encountered more workplace hostility. “Sadly,” the IEEE-USA biography says, she “felt animosity from her colleagues and resentment for her success.” When Bill, who had taken a faculty position as a biochemistry instructor at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, proposed marriage, she eagerly accepted. They married in December 1955, and she moved to Nashville. In 1956 Clark applied for a full-time position at Ford Motor Co.’s Nashville glass plant, where she had interned during the summers while she was a Howard student. Despite her qualifications, she was denied the job due to her race and gender, she said. She decided to pursue a career in academia, becoming in 1956 the first woman to teach mechanical engineering at Tennessee State University. In 1965 she became the first woman to chair TSU’s mechanical engineering department. While teaching at TSU, she pursued further education, earning a master’s degree in engineering management from Nashville’s Vanderbilt University in 1972—another step in her lifelong commitment to professional growth. After 55 years with the university, where she was also a freshman student advisor for much of that time, Clark retired in 2011 and was named professor emeritus. A legacy of leadership and advocacy Clark’s influence extended far beyond TSU. She was active in the Society of Women Engineers after becoming its first Black member in 1951. Racism, however, followed her even within professional circles. At the 1957 SWE conference in Houston, the event’s hotel initially refused her entry due to segregation policies, according to a 2022 profile of Clark. Under pressure from the society’s leadership, the hotel compromised; Clark could attend sessions but had to be escorted by a white woman at all times and was not allowed to stay in the hotel despite having paid for a room. She was reimbursed and instead stayed with relatives. As a result of that incident, the SWE vowed never again to hold a conference in a segregated city. Over the decades, Clark remained a champion for women in STEM. In one SWE interview, she advised future generations: “Prepare yourself. Do your work. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and benefit by meeting with other women. Whatever you like, learn about it and pursue it. “The environment is what you make it. Sometimes the environment is hostile, but don’t worry about it. Be aware of it so you aren’t blindsided.” Her contributions earned her numerous accolades including the 1998 SWE Distinguished Engineering Educator Award and the 2001 Tennessee Society of Professional Engineers Distinguished Service Award. A lasting impression Clark’s legacy was not confined to engineering; she was deeply involved in Nashville community service. She served on the board of the 18th Avenue Family Enrichment Center and participated in the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. She was active in the Hendersonville Area chapter of The Links, a volunteer service organization for Black women, and the Nashville alumnae chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She also mentored members of the Boy Scouts, many of whom went on to pursue engineering careers. Clark spent her life knocking down barriers that tried to impede her. She didn’t just break the glass ceiling—she engineered a way through it for people who came after her.

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! MIT engineers developed an insect-sized jumping robot that can traverse challenging terrains while using far less energy than an aerial robot of comparable size. This tiny, hopping robot can leap over tall obstacles and jump across slanted or uneven surfaces carrying about 10 times more payload than a similar-sized aerial robot, opening the door to many new applications. [ MIT ] CubiX is a wire-driven robot that connects to the environment through wires, with drones used to establish these connections. By integrating with various tools and a robot, it performs tasks beyond the limitations of its physical structure. [ JSK Lab ] Thanks, Shintaro! It’s a game a lot of us played as children—and maybe even later in life: unspooling measuring tape to see how far it would extend before bending. But to engineers at the University of California San Diego, this game was an inspiration, suggesting that measuring tape could become a great material for a robotic gripper. [ University of California San Diego ] I enjoyed the Murderbot books, and the trailer for the TV show actually looks not terrible. [ Murderbot ] For service robots, being able to operate an unmodified elevator is much more difficult (and much more important) than you might think. [ Pudu Robotics ] There’s a lot of buzz around impressive robotics demos — but taking Physical AI from demo to real-world deployment is a journey that demands serious engineering muscle. Hammering out the edge cases and getting to scale is 500x the effort of getting to the first demo. See our process for building this out for the singulation and induction Physical AI solution trusted by some of the world’s leading parcel carriers. Here’s to the teams likewise committed to the grind toward reliability and scale. [ Dexterity Robotics ] I am utterly charmed by the design of this little robot. [ RoMeLa ] This video shows a shortened version of Issey Miyake’s Fly With Me runway show from 2025 Paris Men’s Fashion Week. My collaborators and I brought two industrial robots to life to be the central feature of the minimalist scenography for the Japanese brand. Each ABB IRB 6640 robot held a two meter square piece of fabric, and moved synchronously in flowing motions to match the emotional timing of the runway show. With only three-weeks development time and three days on-site, I built custom live coding tools that opened up the industrial robots to more improvisational workflows. This level of reliable, real-time control unlocked the flexibility needed by the Issey Miyake team to make the necessary last-minute creative decisions for the show. [ Atonaton ] Meet Clone’s first musculoskeletal android: Protoclone, the most anatomically accurate robot in the world. Based on a natural human skeleton, Protoclone is actuated with over 1,000 Myofibers, Clone’s proprietary artificial muscle technology. [ Clone Robotics ] There are a lot of heavily produced humanoid robot videos from the companies selling them, but now that these platforms are entering the research space, we should start getting a more realistic sense of their capabilities. [ University College London ] Here’s a bit more footage from RIVR on their home delivery robot. [ RIVR ] And now, this. [ EngineAI ] Robots are at the heart of sci-fi, visions of the future, but what if that future is now? And what if those robots, helping us at work and at home, are simply an extension of the tools we’ve used for millions of years? That’s what artist and engineer Catie Cuan thinks, and it’s part of the reason she teaches robots to dance. In this episode we meet the people at the frontiers of the future of robotics and Astro Teller introduces two groundbreaking projects, Everyday Robots and Intrinsic, that have advanced how robots could work not just for us but with us. [ Moonshot Podcast ]