Shortly after the Trump administration took office in the United States in late January, more than 8,000 pages across several government websites and databases were taken down, the New York Times found. Though many of these have now been restored, thousands of pages were purged of references to gender and diversity initiatives, for example, and others including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) website remain down. By 11 February, a federal judge ruled that the government agencies must restore public access to pages and datasets maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While many scientists fled to online archives in a panic, ironically, the Justice Department had argued that the physicians who brought the case were not harmed because the removed information was available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. In response, a federal judge wrote, “The Court is not persuaded,” noting that a user must know the original URL of an archived page in order to view it. The administration’s legal argument “was a bit of an interesting accolade,” says Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, who believes the judge’s ruling was “apropos.” Over the past few weeks, the Internet Archive and other archival sites have received attention for preserving government databases and websites. But these projects have been ongoing for years. The Internet Archive, for example, was founded as a nonprofit dedicated to providing universal access to knowledge nearly 30 years ago, and it now records more than a billion URLs every day, says Graham. Since 2008, Internet Archive has also hosted an accessible copy of the End of Term Web Archive, a collaboration that documents changes to federal government sites before and after administration changes. In the most recent collection, it has already archived more than 500 terabytes of material. Complementary Crawls The Internet Archive’s strength is scale, Graham says. “We can often [preserve] things quickly, at scale. But we don’t have deep experience in analysis.” Meanwhile, groups like the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative and the Association of Health Care Journalists provide help for activists and academics identifying and documenting changes. The Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School has also joined the efforts with its archive of data.gov, a 16 TB collection that includes more than 311,000 public datasets and is being updated daily with new data. The project began in late 2024, when the library realized that data sets are often missed in other web crawls, says Jack Cushman, a software engineer and director of the Library Innovation Lab. “You can miss anything where you have to interact with JavaScript or with a button or with a form.” —Jack Cushman, Library Innovation Lab A typical crawl has no trouble capturing basic HTML, PDF, or CSV files. But archiving interactive web services that are driven by databases poses a challenge. It would be impossible to archive a site like Amazon, for example, says Graham. The datasets the Library Innovation Lab (LIL) is working to archive are similarly tricky to capture. “If you’re doing a web crawl and just clicking from link to link, as the End of Term archive does, you can miss anything where you have to interact with JavaScript or with a button or with a form, where you have to ask for permission and then register or download something,” explains Cushman. “We wanted to do something that was complementary to existing web crawls, and the way we did that was to go into APIs,” he says. By going into the API’s, which bypass web pages to access data directly, the LIL’s program could fetch a complete catalog of the data sets—whether CSV, Excel, XML, or other file types—and pull the associated URLs to create an archive. In the case of data.gov, Cushman and his colleagues wrote a script to send the right 300 queries that would fetch 1,000 items per query, then go through the 300,000 total items to gather the data. “What we’re looking for is areas where some automation will unlock a lot of new data that wouldn’t otherwise be unlocked,” says Cushman. The other important factor for the LIL archive was to make sure the data was in a usable format. “You might get something in a web crawl where [the data] is there across 100,000 web pages, but it’s very hard to get it back out into a spreadsheet or something that you can analyze,” Cushman says. Making it usable, both in the data format and user interface, helps create a sustainable archive. Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe The key to preserving the internet’s data is a principle that goes by the acronym LOCKSS: Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. When the Internet Archive suffered a cyberattack last October, the Archive took down the site for a three-and-a-half week period to audit the entire site and implement security upgrades. “Libraries have traditionally always been under attack, so this is no different,” Graham says. As part of its defense, the Archive now has several copies of the materials in disparate physical locations, both inside and outside the U.S. “The US government is the world’s largest publisher,” Graham notes. It publishes material on a wide range of topics, and “much of it is beneficial to people, not only in this country, but throughout the world, whether that is about energy or health or agriculture or security.” And the fact that many individuals and organizations are contributing to preservation of the digital world is actually a good thing. “The goal is for those copies to be diverse across every metric that you can think of. They should be on different kinds of media. They should be controlled by different people, with different funding sources, in different formats,” says Cushman. “Every form of similarity between your backups creates a risk of loss.” The data.gov archive has its primary copy stored through a cloud service with others as backup. The archive also includes open source software to make it easy to replicate. In addition to maintaining copies, Cushman says it’s important to include cryptographic signatures and timestamps. Each time an archive is created, it’s signed with cryptographic proof of the creator’s email address and time, which can help verify the validity of an archive. An Ongoing Challenge Since President Trump took office, a lot of material has been removed from US federal websites—quantifiably more than previous new administrations, says Graham. On a global scale, however, this isn’t unprecedented, he adds. In the U.S., official government websites have been changed with each new administration since Bill Clinton’s, notes Jason Scott, a “free range archivist” at the Internet Archive and co-founder of digital preservation site Archive Team. “This one’s more chaotic,” Scott says. But “the web is a very high entropy entity ... Google is an archive like a supermarket is a food museum.” The job of digital archivists is a difficult one, especially with a backlog of sites that have existed across the evolution of internet standards. But these efforts are not new. “The ramping up will only be in terms of disk space and bandwidth resources, not the process that has been ongoing,” says Scott. For Cushman, working on this project has underscored the value of public data. “The government data that we have is like a GPS signal,” he says. “It doesn’t tell us where to go, but it tells us what’s around us, so that we can make decisions. Engaging with it for the first time this way has really helped me appreciate what a treasure we have.”

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. RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANY German Robotics Conference: 13–15 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANY European Robotics Forum: 25–27 March 2025, STUTTGART, GERMANY 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 Enjoy today’s videos! There is an immense amount of potential for innovation and development in the field of human-robot collaboration — and we’re excited to release Meta PARTNR, a research framework that includes a large-scale benchmark, dataset and large planning model to jump start additional research in this exciting field. [ Meta PARTNR ] Humanoid is the first AI and robotics company in the UK, creating the world’s leading, commercially scalable, and safe humanoid robots. [ Humanoid ] To complement our review paper, “Grand Challenges for Burrowing Soft Robots,” we present a compilation of soft burrowers, both organic and robotic. Soft organisms use specialized mechanisms for burrowing in granular media, which have inspired the design of many soft robots. To improve the burrowing efficacy of soft robots, there are many grand challenges that must be addressed by roboticists. [ Faboratory Research ] at [ Yale University ] Three small lunar rovers were packed up at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the first leg of their multistage journey to the Moon. These suitcase-size rovers, along with a base station and camera system that will record their travels on the lunar surface, make up NASA’s CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) technology demonstration.] [ NASA ] MenteeBot V3.0 is a fully vertically integrated humanoid robot, with full-stack AI and proprietary hardware. [ Mentee Robotics ] What do assistance robots look like? From robotic arms attached to a wheelchair to autonomous robots that can pick up and carry objects on their own, assistive robots are making a real difference to the lives of people with limited motor control. [ Cybathlon ] Robots can not perform reactive manipulation and they mostly operate in open-loop while interacting with their environment. Consequently, the current manipulation algorithms either are very inefficient in performance or can only work in highly structured environments. In this paper, we present closed-loop control of a complex manipulation task where a robot uses a tool to interact with objects. [ Paper ] via [ Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories ] Thanks, Yuki! When the future becomes the present, anything is possible. In our latest campaign, “The New Normal,” we highlight the journey our riders experience from first seeing Waymo to relishing in the magic of their first ride. How did your first-ride feeling change the way you think about the possibilities of AVs? [ Waymo ] One of a humanoid robot’s unique advantages lies in its bipedal mobility, allowing it to navigate diverse terrains with efficiency and agility. This capability enables Moby to move freely through various environments and assist with high-risk tasks in critical industries like construction, mining, and energy. [ UCR ] Although robots are just tools to us, it’s still important to make them somewhat expressive so they can better integrate into our world. So, we created a small animation of the robot waking up—one that it executes all by itself! [ Pollen Robotics ] In this live demo, an OTTO AMR expert will walk through the key differences between AGVs and AMRs, highlighting how OTTO AMRs address challenges that AGVs cannot. [ OTTO ] by [ Rockwell Automation ] This Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute Seminar is from CMU’s Aaron Johnson, on “Uncertainty and Contact with the World.” As robots move out of the lab and factory and into more challenging environments, uncertainty in the robot’s state, dynamics, and contact conditions becomes a fact of life. In this talk, I’ll present some recent work in handling uncertainty in dynamics and contact conditions, in order to both reduce that uncertainty where we can but also generate strategies that do not require perfect knowledge of the world state. [ CMU RI ]

In theory, one of the main applications for robots should be operating in environments that (for whatever reason) are too dangerous for humans. I say “in theory” because in practice it’s difficult to get robots to do useful stuff in semi-structured or unstructured environments without direct human supervision. This is why there’s been some emphasis recently on teleoperation: Human software teaming up with robot hardware can be a very effective combination. For this combination to work, you need two things. First, an intuitive control system that lets the user embody themselves in the robot to pilot it effectively. And second, a robot that can deliver on the kind of embodiment that the human pilot needs. The second bit is the more challenging, because humans have very high standards for mobility, strength, and dexterity. But researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have a system that manages to check both boxes, thanks to its enormously powerful quadruped, which now sports a pair of massive arms on its head. “The primary goal of this project, conducted in collaboration with INAIL, is to extend human capabilities to the robot, allowing operators to perform complex tasks remotely in hazardous and unstructured environments to mitigate risks to their safety by exploiting the robot’s capabilities,” explains Claudio Semini, who leads the Robot Teleoperativo project at IIT. The project is based around the HyQReal hydraulic quadruped, the most recent addition to IIT’s quadruped family. Hydraulics have been very visibly falling out of favor in robotics, because they’re complicated and messy, and in general robots don’t need the absurd power density that comes with hydraulics. But there are still a few robots in active development that use hydraulics specifically because of all that power. If your robot needs to be highly dynamic or lift really heavy things, hydraulics are, at least for now, where it’s at. IIT’s HyQReal quadruped is one of those robots. If you need something that can carry a big payload, like a pair of massive arms, this is your robot. Back in 2019, we saw HyQReal pulling a three-tonne airplane. HyQReal itself weighs 140 kilograms, and its knee joints can output up to 300 newton-meters of torque. The hydraulic system is powered by onboard batteries and can provide up to 4 kilowatts of power. It also uses some of Moog’s lovely integrated smart actuators, which sadly don’t seem to be in development anymore. Beyond just lifting heavy things, HyQReal’s mass and power make it a very stable platform, and its aluminum roll cage and Kevlar skin ensure robustness. The HyQReal hydraulic quadruped is tethered for power during experiments at IIT, but it can also run on battery power.IIT The arms that HyQReal is carrying are IIT-INAIL arms, which weigh 10 kg each and have a payload of 5 kg per arm. To put that in perspective, the maximum payload of a Boston Dynamics Spot robot is only 14 kg. The head-mounted configuration of the arms means they can reach the ground, and they also have an overlapping workspace to enable bimanual manipulation, which is enhanced by HyQReal’s ability to move its body to assist the arms with their reach. “The development of core actuation technologies with high power, low weight, and advanced control has been a key enabler in our efforts,” says Nikos Tsagarakis, head of the HHCM Lab at IIT. “These technologies have allowed us to realize a low-weight bimanual manipulation system with high payload capacity and large workspace, suitable for integration with HyQReal.” Maximizing reachable space is important, because the robot will be under the remote control of a human, who probably has no particular interest in or care for mechanical or power constraints—they just want to get the job done. To get the job done, IIT has developed a teleoperation system, which is weird-looking because it features a very large workspace that allows the user to leverage more of the robot’s full range of motion. Having tried a bunch of different robotic telepresence systems, I can vouch for how important this is: It’s super annoying to be doing some task through telepresence, and then hit a joint limit on the robot and have to pause to reset your arm position. “That is why it is important to study operators’ quality of experience. It allows us to design the haptic and teleoperation systems appropriately because it provides insights into the levels of delight or frustration associated with immersive visualization, haptic feedback, robot control, and task performance,” confirms Ioannis Sarakoglou, who is responsible for the development of the haptic teleoperation technologies in the HHCM Lab. The whole thing takes place in a fully immersive VR environment, of course, with some clever bandwidth optimization inspired by the way humans see that transmits higher-resolution images only where the user is looking. HyQReal’s telepresence control system offers haptic feedback and a large workspace.IIT Telepresence Robots for the Real World The system is designed to be used in hazardous environments where you wouldn’t want to send a human. That’s why IIT’s partner on this project is INAIL, Italy’s National Institute for Insurance Against Accidents at Work, which is understandably quite interested in finding ways in which robots can be used to keep humans out of harm’s way. In tests with Italian firefighters in 2022 (using an earlier version of the robot with a single arm), operators were able to use the system to extinguish a simulated tunnel fire. It’s a good first step, but Semini has plans to push the system to handle “more complex, heavy, and demanding tasks, which will better show its potential for real-world applications.” As always with robots and real-world applications, there’s still a lot of work to be done, Semini says. “The reliability and durability of the systems in extreme environments have to be improved,” he says. “For instance, the robot must endure intense heat and prolonged flame exposure in firefighting without compromising its operational performance or structural integrity.” There’s also managing the robot’s energy consumption (which is not small) to give it a useful operating time, and managing the amount of information presented to the operator to boost situational awareness while still keeping things streamlined and efficient. “Overloading operators with too much information increases cognitive burden, while too little can lead to errors and reduce situational awareness,” says Yonas Tefera, who lead the development of the immersive interface. “Advances in immersive mixed-reality interfaces and multimodal controls, such as voice commands and eye tracking, are expected to improve efficiency and reduce fatigue in the future.” There’s a lot of crossover here with the goals of the DARPA Robotics Challenge for humanoid robots, except IIT’s system is arguably much more realistically deployable than any of those humanoids are, at least in the near term. While we’re just starting to see the potential of humanoids in carefully controlled environment, quadrupeds are already out there in the world, proving how reliable their four-legged mobility is. Manipulation is the obvious next step, but it has to be more than just opening doors. We need it to use tools, lift debris, and all that other DARPA Robotics Challenge stuff that will keep humans safe. That’s what Robot Teleoperativo is trying to make real. You can find more detail about the Robot Teleoperativo project in this paper, presented in November at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Telepresence, in Pasadena, Calif.

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. RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANY German Robotics Conference: 13–15 March 2025, NUREMBERG, GERMANY European Robotics Forum: 25–27 March 2025, STUTTGART, GERMANY 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 IAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY ICRES 2025: 3–4 July 2025, PORTO, PORTUGAL Enjoy today’s videos! Humanoid robots hold the potential for unparalleled versatility for performing human-like, whole-body skills. ASAP enables highly agile motions that were previously difficult to achieve, demonstrating the potential of delta action learning in bridging simulation and real-world dynamics. These results suggest a promising sim-to-real direction for developing more expressive and agile humanoids. ASAP ] from [ Carnegie Mellon University ] and [ Nvidia ] Big News: Swiss-Mile is now RIVR! We’re thrilled to unveil our new identity as RIVR, reflecting our evolution from a university spin-off to a global leader in Physical AI and robotics. In 2025, we’ll be deploying our groundbreaking wheeled-legged robots with major logistics carriers for last-mile delivery to set new standards for efficiency and sustainability. RIVR ] Robotics is one of the best ways to reduce worker exposure to safety risks. However, one of the biggest barriers to adopting robots in these industries is the challenge of navigating the rugged terrain found in these environments. UCR’s robots navigate difficult terrain, debris-strewn floors, and confined spaces without requiring facility modifications, disrupting existing workflows, or compromising schedules, significantly improving efficiency while keeping workers safe. UCR ] This paper introduces a safety filter to ensure collision avoidance for multirotor aerial robots. The proposed method allows computational scalability against thousands of constraints and, thus, complex scenes with numerous obstacles. We experimentally demonstrate its ability to guarantee the safety of a quadrotor with an onboard LiDAR, operating in both indoor and outdoor cluttered environments against both naive and adversarial nominal policies. Autonomous Robots Lab ] Brightpick Giraffe is an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) capable of reaching heights of 20 feet (6 m), resulting in three times the warehouse storage density compared to manual operations. Giraffe ] via [ TechCrunch ] IROS 2025, coming this fall in Hangzhou, China. IROS 2025 ] This cute lil guy is from a “Weak Robots Exhibition” in Japan. RobotStart ] I see no problem with cheating via infrastructure to make autonomous vehicles more reliable. Oak Ridge National Laboratory ] I am not okay with how this coffee cup is handled. Neither is my editor. Qb Robotics ] Non-prehensile pushing to move and re-orient objects to a goal is a versatile loco-manipulation skill. In this paper, we develop a learning-based controller for a mobile manipulator to move an unknown object to a desired position and yaw orientation through a sequence of pushing actions. Through our extensive hardware experiments, we show that the approach demonstrates high robustness against unknown objects of different masses, materials, sizes, and shapes. Paper ] from [ ETH Zurich and Instituto Italiano de Technologia ] Verity, On, and Maersk have collaborated to bridge the gap between the physical and digital supply chain—piloting RFID-powered autonomous inventory tracking at a Maersk facility in California. Through RFID integration, Verity pushes inventory visibility to unprecedented levels. Verity ] For some reason, KUKA is reaffirming its commitment to environmental responsibility and diversity. KUKA ] Here’s a panel from the recent Humanoids Summit on generative AI for robotics, which includes panelists from OpenAI and Agility Robotics. Just don’t mind the moderator, he’s a bit of a dork. Humanoids Summit ]