Video Friday: Life’s Better With a Little Robot Goose
Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos
Evan Ackerman1h
3 min read
Evan Ackerman is IEEE Spectrum’s robotics editor.
Who doesn't want a little honking helper at home?
The Robot Works
Video Fridayis your weekly selection of awesomeroboticsvideos, collected by your friends atIEEE Spectrumrobotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Pleasesend us your eventsfor inclusion.
IROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH
CoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN
Humanoids 2026: 6–9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CA
Enjoy today’s videos!
Life’s better with a little Goose.
Thanks, Dave!
Skydiohas introduced the F10, a charmingly lopsidedfixed-wing drone, that uses arobot armfor autonomous launch and capture.
Unfortunately, based on the frequency of that flashing LED on the drone, this video appears to have sped up the capture (and likely the launch) by a substantial amount.
[Skydio]
I want a bunch of these little guys. I don’t know what I’d do with them. But I want them.
Walking robotsare everywhere now… But 30 years ago, they were brand new. The first ever robot that could walk by itself was theHonda P2. The P2 featured motors andhydraulicsin the hips, knees, and ankles to walk around, and weighed over 300 pounds.
Precision biomimetic dexterous hand, priced from US $6,500.
[Unitree]
What if all it took to train a drone to do acrobatics was to tell it whether you like the way it flies?
[UZH Robotics and Perception Group]
Why build ahumanoid handwhen arobot handcan do stuff like this?
Diane Heinle, a mechanical engineer atBoston Dynamics, answers questions about endurance testing for Stretch, how her team simulates years of wear on robot parts over a brief time in the lab, and why there are bird heads on them.
ULOHA brings learning from demonstrations to tworobot armsworking underwater. We developed custom leader–follower hardware and software extending LeRobot to connectteleoperation, demonstration collection, and autonomous manipulation. The video shows the robots lifting objects together, passing objects between arms, opening a container, and catching a sponge as it rises through the water. We also explore how bubbles and action-execution timing affect learned behaviors.
[ULOHA]
Thanks, Masato!
Usually, ballbots rely on an internal pendulum, but here’s a different approach.
From long-horizon manipulation to tactile-guided actions, this video highlights selected collaborations that explore what Astribot robots can do.
[Astribot]
This is one of those tasks that looks a little boring but is actually both very tricky and very useful.
That tiny little excavator playing in flour is adorbs.
[ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab]
How do you fit a humanoid robot into a box?
And now, this.
At the Opening Ceremony of WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 on 22 September, 19Unitreehumanoid robotsperformed alongside 120 dancers, presenting the world’s largest-scale performance featuring full-size general-purpose humanoid robots before an audience of more than 10,000 people, with a fully AI-driven autonomous robot cluster performance live-streamed worldwide in real time.
[Unitree]
A microwave box creates a surprisingly tricky vision system challenge: there’s a picture of a microwave on the side of the box, and that microwave has a window. From the camera’s perspective, it’s a box inside a box inside a box.
What exactly is Physical AI? Personally I think it’s just what robotics has always been, more or less, except that everything has to have “AI” in it now so here we are.
As the evolution of the UR Series, the g‑Series is designed to accelerate how robots are integrated into complete automation systems. It connects more directly with cameras, higher power EOATs, and control systems, eliminating external cabling and hardware to streamline integration. This enables cleaner and faster deployment of advanced automation.
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Video Fridayrobot videoshousehold robotsfixed wing dronesself-reconfigurablehumanoid robotsEvan AckermanEvan Ackermanis a senior editor atIEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.
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