Eight years is a long time in the world of patents. When we last published what we then called the Patent Power Scorecard, in 2017, it was a different technological and social landscape—Google had just filed a patent application on the transformer architecture, a momentous advance that spawned the generative AI revolution. China was just beginning to produce quality, affordable electric vehicles at scale. And the COVID pandemic wasn’t on anyone’s dance card. Eight years is also a long time in the world of magazines, where we regularly play around with formats for articles and infographics. We now have more readers online than we do in print, so our art team is leveraging advances in interactive design software to make complex datasets grokkable at a glance, whether you’re on your phone or flipping through the pages of the magazine. The scorecard’s return in this issue follows the return last month of The Data, which ran as our back page for several years; it’s curated by a different editor every month and edited by Editorial Director for Content Development Glenn Zorpette. As we set out to recast the scorecard for this decade, we sought to strike the right balance between comprehensiveness and clarity, especially on a mobile-phone screen. As our Digital Product Designer Erik Vrielink, Assistant Editor Gwendolyn Rak, and Community Manager Kohava Mendelsohn explained to me, they wanted something that would be eye-catching while avoiding information overload. The solution they arrived at—a dynamic sunburst visualization—lets readers grasp the essential takeaways at glance in print, while the digital version, allows readers to dive as deep as they want into the data. Working with sci-tech-focused data-mining company 1790 Analytics, which we partnered with on the original Patent Power Scorecard, the team prioritized three key metrics or characteristics: patent Pipeline Power (which goes beyond mere quantity to assess quality and impact), number of patents, and the country where companies are based. This last characteristic has become increasingly significant as geopolitical tensions reshape the global technology landscape. As 1790 Analytics cofounders Anthony Breitzman and Patrick Thomas note, the next few years could be particularly interesting as organizations adjust their patenting strategies in response to changing market access. Some trends leap out immediately. In consumer electronics, Apple dominates Pipeline Power despite having a patent portfolio one-third the size of Samsung’s—a testament to the Cupertino company’s focus on high-impact innovations. The aerospace sector has seen dramatic consolidation, with RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies) now encompassing multiple subsidiaries that appear separately on our scorecard. And in the university rankings, Harvard has seized the top spot from traditional tech powerhouses like MIT and Stanford, driven by patents that are more often cited as prior art in other recent patents. And then there are the subtle shifts that become apparent only when you dig deeper into the data. The rise of SEL (Semiconductor Energy Laboratory) over TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) in semiconductor design, despite having far fewer patents, suggests again that true innovation isn’t just about filing patents—it’s about creating technologies that others build upon. Looking ahead, the real test will be how these patent portfolios translate into actual products and services. Patents are promises of innovation; the scorecard helps us see what companies are making those promises and the R&D investments to realize them. As we enter an era when technological leadership increasingly determines economic and strategic power, understanding these patterns is more crucial than ever.

Sojourner sent back photos of the Martian surface during the summer of 1997. I was not alone. The servers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab slowed to a crawl when they got more than 47 million hits (a record number!) from people attempting to download those early images of the Red Planet. To be fair, it was the late 1990s, the Internet was still young, and most people were using dial-up modems. By the end of the 83-day mission, Sojourner had sent back 550 photos and performed more than 15 chemical analyses of Martian rocks and soil. Sojourner, of course, remains on Mars. Pictured here is Marie Curie, its twin. Functionally identical, either one of the rovers could have made the voyage to Mars, but one of them was bound to become the famous face of the mission, while the other was destined to be left behind in obscurity. Did I write this piece because I feel a little bad for Marie Curie? Maybe. But it also gave me a chance to revisit this pioneering Mars mission, which established that robots could effectively explore the surface of planets and captivate the public imagination. Sojourner’s sojourn on Mars On 4 July 1997, the Mars Pathfinder parachuted through the Martian atmosphere and bounced about 15 times on glorified airbags before finally coming to a rest. The lander, renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, carried precious cargo stowed inside. The next day, after the airbags retracted, the solar-powered Sojourner eased its way down the ramp, the first human-made vehicle to roll around on the surface of another planet. (It wasn’t the first extraterrestrial body, though. The Soviet Lunokhod rovers conducted two successful missions on the moon in 1970 and 1973. The Soviets had also landed a rover on Mars back in 1971, but communication was lost before the PROP-M ever deployed.) This giant sandbox at JPL provided Marie Curie with an approximation of Martian terrain. Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images Sojourner was equipped with three low-resolution cameras (two on the front for black-and-white images and a color camera on the rear), a laser hazard–avoidance system, an alpha-proton X-ray spectrometer, experiments for testing wheel abrasion and material adherence, and several accelerometers. The robot also demonstrated the value of the six-wheeled “rocker-bogie” suspension system that became NASA’s go-to design for all later Mars rovers. Sojourner never roamed more than about 12 meters from the lander due to the limited range of its radio. Pathfinder had landed in Ares Vallis, an assumed ancient floodplain chosen because of the wide variety of rocks present. Scientists hoped to confirm the past existence of water on the surface of Mars. Sojourner did discover rounded pebbles that suggested running water, and later missions confirmed it. A highlight of Sojourner’s 83-day mission on Mars was its encounter with a rock nicknamed Barnacle Bill [to the rover’s left]. JPL/NASA Sojourner rolled forward 36 centimeters and encountered a rock, dubbed Barnacle Bill due to its rough surface. The rover spent about 10 hours analyzing the rock, using its spectrometer to determine the elemental composition. Over the next few weeks, while the lander collected atmospheric information and took photos, the rover studied rocks in detail and tested the Martian soil. Marie Curie’s sojourn…in a JPL sandbox Meanwhile back on Earth, engineers at JPL used Marie Curie to mimic Sojourner’s movements in a Mars-like setting. During the original design and testing of the rovers, the team had set up giant sandboxes, each holding thousands of kilograms of playground sand, in the Space Flight Operations Facility at JPL. They exhaustively practiced the remote operation of Sojourner, including an 11-minute delay in communications between Mars and Earth. (The actual delay can vary from 7 to 20 minutes.) Even after Sojourner landed, Marie Curie continued to help them strategize. Initially, Sojourner was remotely operated from Earth, which was tricky given the lengthy communication delay. Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images Sojourner was maneuvered by an Earth-based operator wearing 3D goggles and using a funky input device called a Spaceball 2003. Images pieced together from both the lander and the rover guided the operator. It was like a very, very slow video game—the rover sometimes moved only a few centimeters a day. NASA then turned on Sojourner’s hazard-avoidance system, which allowed the rover some autonomy to explore its world. A human would suggest a path for that day’s exploration, and then the rover had to autonomously avoid any obstacles in its way, such as a big rock, a cliff, or a steep slope. Sojourner to operate for a week. But the little rover that could kept chugging along for 83 Martian days before NASA finally lost contact, on 7 October 1997. The lander had conked out on 27 September. In all, the mission collected 1.2 gigabytes of data (which at the time was a lot) and sent back 10,000 images of the planet’s surface. Marie Curie with the hopes of sending it on another mission to Mars. For a while, it was slated to be part of the Mars 2001 set of missions, but that didn’t happen. In 2015, JPL transferred the rover to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. When NASA Embraced Faster, Better, Cheaper The Pathfinder mission was the second one in NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin’s Discovery Program, which embodied his “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy of making NASA more nimble and efficient. (The first Discovery mission was to the asteroid Eros.) In the financial climate of the early 1990s, the space agency couldn’t risk a billion-dollar loss if a major mission failed. Goldin opted for smaller projects; the Pathfinder mission’s overall budget, including flight and operations, was capped at US $300 million. RELATED: How NASA Built Its Mars Rovers In his 2014 book Curiosity: An Inside Look at the Mars Rover Mission and the People Who Made It Happen (Prometheus), science writer Rod Pyle interviews Rob Manning, chief engineer for the Pathfinder mission and subsequent Mars rovers. Manning recalled that one of the best things about the mission was its relatively minimal requirements. The team was responsible for landing on Mars, delivering the rover, and transmitting images—technically challenging, to be sure, but beyond that the team had no constraints. Sojourner was succeeded by the rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. Shown here are four mission spares, including Marie Curie [foreground]. JPL-Caltech/NASA Sojourner’s electronics warm enough to operate were leftover spares from the Galileo mission to Jupiter, so they were “free.” Pathfinder mission successful but it captured the hearts of Americans and reinvigorated an interest in exploring Mars. In the process, it set the foundation for the future missions that allowed the rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity (which, incredibly, is still operating nearly 13 years after it landed) to explore even more of the Red Planet. How the rovers Sojourner and Marie Curie got their names To name its first Mars rovers, NASA launched a student contest in March 1994, with the specific guidance of choosing a “heroine.” Entry essays were judged on their quality and creativity, the appropriateness of the name for a rover, and the student’s knowledge of the woman to be honored as well as the mission’s goals. Students from all over the world entered. Sojourner Truth, while 18-year-old Deepti Rohatgi of Rockville, Md., came in second for hers on Marie Curie. Truth was a Black woman born into slavery at the end of the 18th century. She escaped with her infant daughter and two years later won freedom for her son through legal action. She became a vocal advocate for civil rights, women’s rights, and alcohol temperance. Curie was a Polish-French physicist and chemist famous for her studies of radioactivity, a term she coined. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, as well as the first person to win a second Nobel. Nancy Grace Roman, the space agency’s first chief of astronomy. In May 2020, NASA announced it would name the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope after Roman; the space telescope is set to launch as early as October 2026, although the Trump administration has repeatedly said it wants to cancel the project. A Trillion Rogue Planets and Not One Sun to Shine on Them its naming policy in December 2022 after allegations came to light that James Webb, for whom the James Webb Space Telescope is named, had fired LGBTQ+ employees at NASA and, before that, the State Department. A NASA investigation couldn’t substantiate the allegations, and so the telescope retained Webb’s name. But the bar is now much higher for NASA projects to memorialize anyone, deserving or otherwise. (The agency did allow the hopping lunar robot IM-2 Micro Nova Hopper, built by Intuitive Machines, to be named for computer-software pioneer Grace Hopper.) Marie Curie and Sojourner will remain part of a rarefied clique. Sojourner, inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2003, will always be the celebrity of the pair. And Marie Curie will always remain on the sidelines. But think about it this way: Marie Curie is now on exhibit at one of the most popular museums in the world, where millions of visitors can see the rover up close. That’s not too shabby a legacy either. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the June 2025 print issue. References Curator Matthew Shindell of the National Air and Space Museum first suggested I feature Marie Curie. I found additional information from the museum’s collections website, an article by David Kindy in Smithsonian magazine, and the book After Sputnik: 50 Years of the Space Age (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007) by Smithsonian curator Martin Collins. NASA has numerous resources documenting the Mars Pathfinder mission, such as the mission website, fact sheet, and many lovely photos (including some of Barnacle Bill and a composite of Marie Curie during a prelaunch test). Curiosity: An Inside Look at the Mars Rover Mission and the People Who Made It Happen (Prometheus, 2014) by Rod Pyle and Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet (Hyperion, 2005) by planetary scientist Steve Squyres are both about later Mars missions and their rovers, but they include foundational information about Sojourner.

Humans are messy. We spill drinks, smudge screens, and bring our electronic devices into countless sticky situations. As anyone who has accidentally dropped their phone into a toilet or pool knows, moisture poses a particular problem. And it’s not a new one: From early telephones to modern cellphones, everyday liquids have frequently conflicted with devices that must stay dry. Consumers often take the blame when leaks and spills inevitably occur. Rachel Plotnick, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University Bloomington, studies the relationship between technology and society. Last year, she spoke to IEEE Spectrum about her research on how people interact with buttons and tactile controls. In her new book, License to Spill: Where Dry Devices Meet Liquid Lives (The MIT Press, 2025), Plotnick explores the dynamic between everyday wetness and media devices through historical and contemporary examples, including cameras, vinyl records, and laptops. This adapted excerpt looks back at analog telephones of the 1910s through 1930s, the common practices that interrupted service, and the “trouble men” who were sent to repair phones and reform messy users. Boston Daily Globe in 1908 recounted, for instance, how a mother only learned her lesson about her baby’s cord chewing when the baby received a shock—or “got stung”—and the phone service went out. These youthful oral fixations rarely caused harm to the chewer, but were “injurious” to the telephone cord. License to Spill is Rachel Plotnick’s second book. Her first, Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing (The MIT Press, 2018), explores the history and politics of push buttons. The MIT Press Telephony. Painters washed ceilings, which dripped; telephones sat near windows during storms; phone cords came in contact with moist radiators. A telephone chief operator who handled service complaints recounted that “a frequent combination in interior decoration is the canary bird and desk telephone occupying the same table. The canary bird includes the telephone in his morning bath,” thus leading to out-of-order service calls. housewife” who damaged wiring by scrubbing her telephone with water or cleaning fluid, and men in offices who dangerously propped their wet umbrellas against the wire. Wetness lurked everywhere in people’s spaces and habits; phone companies argued that one could hardly expect proper service under such circumstances—especially if users didn’t learn to accommodate the phone’s need for dryness. This differing appraisal of liquids caused problems when telephone customers expected service that would not falter and directed outrage at their provider when outages did occur. Consumers even sometimes admitted to swearing at the telephone receiver and haranguing operators. Telephone company employees, meanwhile, faced intense scrutiny and pressure to tend to telephone infrastructures. “Trouble” took two forms, then, in dealing with customers’ frustration over outages and in dealing with the damage from the wetness itself. The Original Troubleshooters Telephone breakdowns required determinations about the outage’s source. “Trouble men” and “trouble departments” hunted down the probable cause of the damage, which meant sussing out babies, sponges, damp locations, spills, and open windows. If customers wanted to lay blame at workers’ feet in these moments, then repairers labeled customers as abusers of the phone cord. One author attributed at least 50 percent of telephone trouble to cases where “someone has been careless or neglectful.” Trouble men employed medical metaphors to describe their work, as in “he is a physician, and he makes the ills that the telephone is heir to his life study.” Serge Bloch Even if a consumer knew the cord had gotten wet, they didn’t necessarily blame it as the cause of the outage. The repairer often used this as an opportunity to properly socialize the user about wetness and inappropriate telephone treatment. These conversations didn’t always go well: A 1918 article in Popular Science Monthly described an explosive argument between an infuriated woman and a phone company employee over a baby’s cord habits. The permissive mother and teething child had become emblematic of misuse, a photograph of them appearing in Bell Telephone News in 1917 as evidence of common trouble that a telephone (and its repairer) might encounter. However, no one blamed the baby; telephone workers unfailingly held mothers responsible as “bad” users. Teething babies and the mothers that let them play with phone cords were often blamed for telephone troubles. The Telephone Review/License to Spill Armed with such a tool, repairers glorified their own expertise. One wire chief was celebrated as the “original ‘find-out artist’” who could determine a telephone’s underlying troubles even in tricky cases. Telephone company employees leveraged themselves as experts who could attribute wetness’s causes to—in their estimation—uneducated (and even dimwitted) customers, who were often female. Women were often the earliest and most engaged phone users, adopting the device as a key mechanism for social relations, and so they became an easy target. Cost of Wet Phone Cord Repairs Though the phone industry and repairers were often framed as heroes, troubleshooting took its toll on overextended phone workers, and companies suffered a financial burden from repairs. One estimate by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company found that each time a company “clear[ed] wet cord trouble,” it cost a dollar. Phone companies portrayed the telephone as a fragile device that could be easily damaged by everyday life, aiming to make the subscriber a proactively “dry” and compliant user. Everyday sources of wetness, including mops and mustard, could cause hours of phone interruption. Telephony/License to Spill Moisture-Proofing Telephone Cords Although telephone companies put significant effort into reforming their subscribers, the increasing pervasiveness of telephony began to conflict with these abstinent aims. Thus, a new technological solution emerged that put the burden on moisture-proofing the wire. The Stromberg-Carlson Telephone Manufacturing Co. of Rochester, N.Y., began producing copper wire that featured an insulating enamel, two layers of silk, the company’s moisture-proof compound, and a layer of cotton. Called Duratex, the cord withstood a test in which the manufacturer submerged it in water for 48 hours. In its advertising, Stromberg-Carlson warned that many traditional cords—even if they seemed to dry out after wetting—had sustained interior damage so “gradual that it is seldom noticed until the subscriber complains of service.” Serge Bloch The Pickwick Papers, with his many layers of clothing. The product’s hardiness would allow the desk telephone to “withstand any climate,” even one hostile to communication technology. This subtle change meant that the burden to adapt fell to the device rather than the user. As telephone wires began to “penetrate everywhere,” they were imagined as fostering constant and unimpeded connectivity that not even saliva or a spilled drink could interrupt. The move to cord protection was not accompanied by a great deal of fanfare, however. As part of telephone infrastructure, cords faded into the background of conversations. Excerpted from License to Spill by Rachel Plotnick. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2025.

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. 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! Today I learned that “hippotherapy” is not quite what I wanted it to be. The integration of KUKA robots into robotic physiotherapy equipment offers numerous advantages, such as precise motion planning and control of robot-assisted therapy, individualized training, reduced therapist workload and patient progress monitoring. As a result, these robotic therapies can be superior to many conventional physical therapies in restabilizing patients’ limbs. [ Kuka ] MIT engineers are getting in on the robotic ping pong game with a powerful, lightweight design that returns shots with high-speed precision. The new table tennis bot comprises a multijointed robotic arm that is fixed to one end of a ping pong table and wields a standard ping pong paddle. Aided by several high-speed cameras and a high-bandwidth predictive control system, the robot quickly estimates the speed and trajectory of an incoming ball and executes one of several swing types — loop, drive, or chop — to precisely hit the ball to a desired location on the table with various types of spin. [ MIT News ] Pan flipping involves dynamically flipping various objects, such as eggs, burger buns, and meat patties. This demonstrates precision, agility, and the ability to adapt to different challenges in motion control. Our framework enables robots to learn highly dynamic movements. [ GitHub ] via [ Human Centered Autonomy Lab ] Thanks, Haonan! An edible robot made by EPFL scientists leverages a combination of biodegradable fuel and surface tension to zip around the water’s surface, creating a safe – and nutritious – alternative to environmental monitoring devices made from artificial polymers and electronics. [ EPFL ] Traditional quadcopters excel in flight agility and maneuverability, but often face limitations in hovering efficiency and horizontal field of view. Nature-inspired rotary wings, while offering a broader perspective and enhanced hovering efficiency, are hampered by substantial angular momentum restrictions. In this study, we introduce QuadRotary, a novel vehicle that integrates the strengths of both flight characteristics through a reconfigurable design. [ Paper ] via [ Singapore University of Technology and Design ] I like the idea of a humanoid that uses jumping as a primary locomotion mode not because it has to, but because it’s fun. [ PAL Robotics ] I had not realized how much nuance there is to digging stuff up with a shovel. [ Intelligent Motion Laboratory ] A new 10,000 gallon water tank at the University of Michigan will help researchers design, build, and test a variety of autonomous underwater systems that could help robots map lakes and oceans and conduct inspections of ships and bridges. The tank, funded by the Office of Naval Research, allows roboticists to further test projects on robot control and behavior, marine sensing and perception, and multi-vehicle coordination. “The lore is that this helps to jumpstart research, as each testing tank is a living reservoir for all of the knowledge gained from within it,” said Jason Bundoff, Lead Engineer in Research at U-M’s Friedman Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory. “You mix the waters from other tanks to imbue the newly founded tank with all of that living knowledge from the other tanks, which helps to keep the knowledge from being lost.” [ Michigan Robotics ] If you have a humanoid robot and you’re wondering how it should communicate, here’s the answer. [ Pollen ] Whose side are you on, Dusty? Even construction robots should be mindful about siding with the Empire, though- there can be consequences! - YouTube [ Dusty Robotics ] This Michigan Robotics Seminar is by Danfei Xu from Georgia Tech, on “Generative Task and Motion Planning.” Long-horizon planning is fundamental to our ability to solve complex physical problems, from using tools to cooking dinners. Despite recent progress in commonsense-rich foundation models, the ability to do the same is still lacking in robots, particularly with learning-based approaches. In this talk, I will present a body of work that aims to transform Task and Motion Planning—one of the most powerful computational frameworks in robot planning—into a fully generative model framework, enabling compositional generalization in a largely data-driven approach. [ Michigan Robotics ]