Humanoid Applications — Robots, Apps, Software & Reviews
The Definitive Humanoid Robot Directory
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Image credit: RoboCup Federation. RoboCup 2026 kicked off today in Incheon, South Korea, with the league competitions running until 5 July. It’s an exciting time for RoboCup, as there have been some updates to the leagues and competition format. Most prominently, the soccer leagues will have a primary focus on humanoid robots. In a series […]
T-Mobile wants Broadcom to keep supporting its VMware perpetual licenses.
The autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money’s flowing back, and it’s the people who lived through that first […]
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: the autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money’s flowing back, and it’s the people who lived through that first wave […]
A new AI-powered framework could transform how astronomers measure the expansion of the Universe. By analyzing images of Type Ia supernovae and modeling their environments in unprecedented detail, researchers can estimate cosmic distances with near-spectroscopic accuracy. The technique is designed for the flood of data expected from the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory and may greatly improve our understanding of dark energy.
The startup, Proception, is taking a unique approach to collecting training data to tackle one of the hardest problems in robotics: hands.
This year, RoboCup will be held in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event will see teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. It’s an exciting time for RoboCup, as there have been some updates to the leagues and competition format. Most prominently, the soccer leagues will have a primary focus […]
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.RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEYSummer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUEActuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCOIROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGHEnjoy today’s videos! The best way of introducing a new robot hand is to have a disembodied one crawling across a table.[ Tangent Robotics ]MIT CSAIL’s Improbable AI Lab Director Pulkit Agrawal explains his “SoftMimic” approach to making robots safer around humans.[ SoftMimic ]I now have absolutely no interest in a humanoid robot for my home unless it can do this.[ PNDbotics ]The DARPA Lift Challenge is open to the public Aug. 6-9, 2026, at the National Museum of the US Air Force.[ DARPA ]Getting Digit to step and shuffle around an obstacle on the floor is a real test of reactive footstep planning. Digit has to spot something small and moving, recalculate where to place each foot, and keep working—all without breaking stride or losing balance. That’s the same dynamic footwork Digit uses to navigate clutter and foot traffic on a real warehouse floor.[ Agility Robotics ]This is the most aggressive firefighting robot I’ve ever seen.[ DEEP Robotics ]Wait a sec, Dusty can print things on floors besides construction layouts? How is this not in every city, making sidewalks exciting and fun everywhere?![ Dusty ]I am the first to admit that for US$4,900, the performance of the Unitree R1 is very impressive. But what is it going to do out in the world such that it will give you some sort of return on that investment?[ Unitree R1 ]Event cameras are extraordinarily powerful because they can see motion, but what if everything is moving because your camera is moving? Oh no![ University of Zurich Robotics & Perception Group ]Can we understand whale behavior and language? Harvard SEAS Professor Stephanie Gil explains the possibility of understanding animal language and behavior using AI-driven robots and machine learning. With ongoing whale research and advancements in artificial intelligence, the potential for animal communication with whales could become a tangible reality.[ Harvard SEAS ]Rodney Brooks, founder and chief technology officer of Robust.AI, sits down with Forbes Assistant Managing Editor Kerry Dolan to discuss how he came up with the idea of the Roomba vacuum cleaner and the future of robotics.[ LinkedIn ]Here are a couple of interesting presentations from UIST 2025, including everyday objects that move around your home with a mind of their own and a project featuring teamwork between helium balloons and ground robots called Buoyancé. [ UIST 2025 ]
Since the first robot-assisted surgery was performed, over 40 years ago, major advances in robotics, computer vision and artificial intelligence have fundamentally changed medicine and healthcare. Innovative new technologies are already aiding skilled medical professionals in diagnosis, surgery, rehabilitation and beyond. But many questions remain: What ethical issues arise as medical tools become increasingly autonomous? […]
Image credit: By Jeff Dahl – Own work by uploader, Based on the public domain document: [1], CC BY-SA 3.0, Link By Stephanie Parker This research from the NeuroAI Lab of Martin Schrimpf, part of EPFL’s Schools of Computer and Communication Sciences and Life Sciences, uses AI models to predict exactly where to stimulate the […]
One of only four teams remaining from more than 130 competitors worldwide, our team AURA Foresight is developing autonomous technology to stop wildfires before they grow out of control. AURA Foresight has been selected as a finalist in the prestigious XPRIZE Wildfire Autonomous Wildfire Response competition, emerging as one of just four teams remaining from […]
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.RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEYSummer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUEActuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCOIROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGHEnjoy today’s videos! Eno is our first agentic robot: an AI agent and a general-purpose robot working as one system. It reasons, plans, and acts in the real world. Human in capability, not in form. Every detail with a purpose, reduced to what matters. Designed not to resemble us, but to extend us. Eno is built end to end at Genesis.[ Genesis ]Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are field-testing advanced capabilities for potential future Moon and Mars rovers. In the Colorado Desert near Plaster City, California, teams used a prototype rover called ERNEST (Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain) to test software for a potential future long-range lunar mission. The software enables the rover, developed at JPL, to operate autonomously and travel extreme distances with minimal intervention from human operators. ERNEST is a lot more capable than it may look; here’s some recent research showing the kinds of terrain it can handle: [ NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab ]Table tennis can produce moments that are difficult even for experienced players to anticipate… like when the ball clips the net and suddenly changes direction. For the Ace research project at Sony AI, these events were a key test of the system’s ability to operate reliably in unpredictable real-world conditions. Ace addresses this uncertainty by simulating counterfactual ball trajectories in real time. In the video, the green overlays show these alternative paths the system considers while planning its response.And check out some of these rallies that the robot has with Miyuu Khiara. [ Sony AI ]This video of an ANYmal deployment in a concrete plant is worth watching because it makes explicit how quadrupeds make money in inspection contexts: Among other things, “a cracked crusher foundation [was] caught before a week-long shutdown, avoiding roughly $630,000 in lost production.” That pays for a lot of robots.[ ANYbotics ]A lot of interesting footage here from GITAI’s prep for a robotic satellite servicing demo mission. The thruster test firing isn’t a robot, exactly, but it may be the coolest part.[ GITAI ]Anyone who’s tried to take a half decent photo underwater knows that it’s basically impossible, so let’s try and teach robots to cope.[ Bi-AQUA ]Thanks, Masato!Handling delicate, irregular or unpredictable objects is one of the hardest problems left in automation, and one of the most important. It’s what’s holding back the next wave of robots from doing more in the real world. That’s why we’re working with PSYONIC on a new approach. Their Ability Hand, worn by hundreds of people every day, captures real-world data on touch, pressure and grip. Our GoFa cobot brings the industrial-grade accuracy and repeatability to turn that human data into reliable robotic performance.[ ABB Robotics ]Sanctuary AI has achieved world-class performance on a complex wire plugging production task with a global Tier 1 automotive supplier. In this demonstration, Sanctuary AI’s Physical AI successfully performs a high-speed wire plug insertion task, achieving a validated task success rate of over 99.5% with a cycle time of just 2.54 seconds, meeting live production benchmarks established by the customer.WHY IS THIS STRESSING ME OUT SO MUCH?[ Sanctuary ]This video is quite obviously fake, but I suppose maybe there’s a market for extra beefy quadrupeds? Maybe?[ Kepler ]I cannot overstate how much I do not want any robot to look at what I’m wearing and then attempt to sell me things based on what it thinks it can guess about my personality or interests.[ MagicLab ]I am here for fed up robots learning how to move boxes by just kicking them.[ ATARI Lab ]Ah yes, very useful and very important robots that make me very uncomfortable.[ Paper ]I built GrowBot ( a ~6”, two-servo bipedal robot) that runs entirely on a $15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, ~$100 in parts. An LLM drives it directly: it reads the raw IMU stream with no translation layer and narrates its own motion (“rocked side to side like a baby”), riding on a 50 Hz reinforcement-learning walk policy trained in sim and transferred to the real body.The idea here is to build an open course around this project, Brit says, “so everyone can experience physical AI right now in a low risk way.”[ GrowBot ]Thanks, Brit!