Video Friday: NASA PROMISEs a New Moon Rover
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 2026: 6–9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CAEnjoy today’s videos! NASA will send a nuclear-powered rover called PROMISE (Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration, depicted in the rendering) to the Moon’s South Pole as a foundational mission in the Moon Base Program. It will be constructed largely from existing hardware—test-bed and flight-spare components—developed for NASA’s ongoing Mars rover missions, Curiosity and Perseverance.[ NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory ]What happens when you put wheels on a humanoid and let a learned controller drive it? We swapped the feet on our Atlas robot to find out; it let us push our actuators, and our models of them, hard.[ Boston Dynamics ]The Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D) program has achieved the first ever demonstration of automated in-space assembly. A California Institute of Technology (Caltech) payload operating in orbit built a truss structure from individual components. A relatively simple gantry robot (able to move along three linear axes) connected composite truss members using custom-designed joints while simultaneously deploying a thin reflective mesh; a proof-of-concept for future space-based antennas.[ DARPA ]Well, it looks like Amazon’s idea for using mobile robots as security systems is not as dead as we thought it was back in 2020. [ Amazon Ring ]There are many excellent applications for robots that have a market size of very close to zero, and this is one of them.[ DEEP Robotics ]I don’t know about you, but my philosophy in life is that more tentacles is always better.[ Paper ]Well I’m impressed.[ UZH Robotics and Perception Group ]How Corvus One drones count boxes and read every UPC in case reserve and the singles area at ASICS America’s distribution center. Corvus One flies both areas at the ASICS distribution center in Byhalia, Mississippi, with no localization infrastructure anywhere in the building. No stickers, no beacons, no markers.[ Corvus Robotics ]Thanks, Joan!How do you solve a math problem that might have quadrillions of computations? It’s increasingly a problem for robot fleets in manufacturing and warehouse facilities. Lots of robots, lots of tasks, lots of traffic. Brute force, even with a supercomputer, could take years to find answers. That’s where Toyota Research Institute steps in with a bespoke solver program to elegantly tackle the problem of multi-agent optimal planning. In just one minute, Andrew Best, a scientist at TRI, explains how the company approaches this complex robotics deployment problem.[ Toyota Research Institute ]Rumor has it that printers built by robots never have PC LOAD LETTER errors.[ Flexiv ]Dancing robots are getting even better! Hooray...?[ LimX Dynamics ]It’s season two of AI in Motion, and we’re on a road trip to talk with more of America’s experts in physical AI. We’re rolling into Austin to talk with Jeff Cardenas, who co-founded Apptronik to build robots for humans in very familiar forms. [ Waymo ]]]>
Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org/video-friday-moon-rover-promise
