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.
Humanoids Summit Seoul: 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL
IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH
CoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN, TEXAS
Enjoy today’s videos!
Nvidia just paid US $12.9 billion for the company that acquired Pollen Robotics, and this must be why.
Meet Microduck. 🦆 The 25-centimeter, 780-gram robot that waddles, falls, gets back up, and learns new tricks.
Packed inside: 15 degrees of freedom, a front camera, an 8×8 lidar, two IMUs, mics, a speaker, NFC, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.
Out of the box, Microduck already walks, sits, crouches, roller skates, picks up objects with its articulated beak, and recovers from falls on its own. Drive it with a game controller, plug-in accessories, and NFC tagged objects, run autonomous behaviors, or gather several Microducks for races and football.
Software fully open source. Ready for whatever you throw at it.
On pre-order for an astonishingly low $399, and ships before Christmas.
[ Microduck ]
Thanks, Matthieu!
If you’ve chosen to ignore all the earlier DARPA Lift Challenge videos that we’ve posted, now you can get all caught up in about five minutes.
[ DARPA ]
You had me at “54-gram robot that out-jumps a kangaroo.”
[ IEEE Transactions on Robotics ]
Sometimes, you just need a video like this.
Most fish-inspired robots are built for one size and one job, so scaling them up or down usually means starting from scratch. A team of engineers says it has found a way to solve that problem. They’ve unveiled ScaFi, a robot modeled on fish like cod and mackerel.
Thanks, Leah!
Martin writes, “We’re a small robotics team in Czechia, Europe, building practical hardware around the Unitree G1. Here’s a short demo of our lightweight gripper picking up a strawberry; the gripper weighs under 200 grams and is designed for simple, sensitive manipulation without adding a complex multifinger hand.
[ Sentio Robotix ]
Thanks, Martin!
Hybrid visual markers that are useful for both cameras and lidar is a neat idea.
[ Hello Robot ]
Thanks, Binit!
EmoLo brings emotion-inspired expressive locomotion to Open Duck Mini V2, a low-cost, open-source bipedal robot inspired by Disney’s BDX droids. With a single reinforcement learning policy, the robot can generate distinct walking styles associated with different emotional expressions, showing how characterful and expressive whole-body motion can be achieved on an accessible robotic platform.
[ EmoLo ]
Thanks, Masato!
If it’s possible for a robot with a completely immobile face to look frustrated, this robot absolutely does, starting at three minutes into this video.
[ DLR RM ]
Noble Machines deployed its first general-purpose robots to a Fortune Global 500 industrial customer within 18 months of the company’s launch and met its first delivery milestone, made possible by its AI-driven whole-body control and industry-leading end-to-end autonomy.
[ Noble Machines ]
We’ve reduced the time it takes to go from physical prompt → robot behavior. The faster anyone can teach a robot to do something new, the easier it becomes to scale physical work.
[ Generalist ]
I know this video is mostly a gimmick, but I would totally rent a moderately heavy lift quadruped for a couple of days to help with a move.
[ DEEP Robotics ]
Is taking two minutes to excellently fold a shirt too long, or do we even care how long it takes, as long as it’s a robot doing it?
[ Tokyo Robotics ]
TRON 2 × Wuji Hand 2 handles TCM pharmacy work: picking, weighing, grinding, and packaging. The omnidirectional base frees the hands, while precise gripping and dual-arm force control enable midair operations.
[ LimX Dynamics ]
Person who genuinely knows things about robots, Christian Hubicki, explains everything about robots smashing into walls.
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