Video Friday: Robotic Motion Discovery Reveals Unusual Behaviors
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 FRANCISCOEnjoy today’s videos! We present MotionDisco, a framework that discovers contact-rich, long-horizon humanoid loco-manipulation motions from scratch, without relying on teleoperation or motion retargeting from human demonstrations.Some of the discovered behaviors are a little nutso: [ MotionDisco ]Not sure I’d say any of this is ‘effortless’ but those claws are pretty cute.[ Deep Robotics ]It turns out running a workout class is a decent way to stress-test whole-body range of motion. Coordinating fluid movement across every joint at once—timing, velocity, balance compensation—is one of the harder control problems in humanoid robotics.[ Agility ]Our very own Gwendolyn Rak made a robotic shoulder-friend at Computer Human Interaction in Barcelona.Here’s a bit more about it: [ MIT ]At AIRoA, we’re bringing robots into real homes. Check out our exclusive first video to see how they work in our development hub and real-life household settings! The project aims to develop home robots that can assist people with everyday tasks and become long-term companions in daily life. In this video, we demonstrate Toyota’s Human Support Robot (HSR) deployed in real homes, where it assists residents with everyday tasks such as tidying rooms and fetching objects.[ AI Robot Association ]Thanks, Naoaki!MIDAS Hand is a fully open-source, tactile-sensor-integrated dexterous robotic hand platform for manipulation, teleoperation, and robot learning research. MIDAS stands for Modular low-Impedance Direct-drive Anthropomorphic Sensing Hand.[ MIDAS Hand ]Thanks, Jun Kim!This video presents a novel flight maneuver for a flying bipedal robot. During forward flight, the robot performs aerial braking by swinging its legs to adjust the orientation of foot-mounted thrusters.[ Paper ]Seems like a really good application for autonomy, to be honest.[ Built Robotics ]In this time-lapse, controllers on the ground are repositioning Dextre, our robotic handyman currently installed at the end of the Canadarm2. They used Dextre to unload equipment from the unpressurised Dragon trunk. Such a beautiful choreography to watch with Earth in the background![ European Space Agency ]This video demonstrates how AI Sapiens learns and performs humanoid motions from video-based motion capture using only a smartphone camera, without professional motion capture equipment. ROBOTIS plans to release an open-source motion generation and learning pipeline for AI Sapiens, enabling users to generate humanoid motions from video and bring them to the real robot.[ ROBOTIS ]NAO LIVES![ Maxtronics ]Tumblenauts are a swarm of minimalist, bacteria-inspired robots designed for collaborative inspection of pressurized microgravity habitats such as the International Space Station. Unlike current intra-vehicular robots that rely on complex actuator-dense mechanisms for precise motion, the Tumblenauts use a stochastic run-and-tumble locomotion and collective cooperation inspired by bacterial colonies.[ Self-Organizing Swarms and Robotics Lab ]LUMOS Robotics Founder and CEO Yu Chao officially introduces Project EDGE—inviting global builders, universities, robotics labs, and creative technologists to explore the future of humanoid robotics together. To supercharge the global developer community, we are providing 100 complimentary LUMOS NIX robots to selected global partners.[ Lumos Robotics ]How do you progress from early childhood computational thinking to advanced high school robotics? Sphero’s product offerings are intentionally scaffolded to scale for students by building critical skills and concepts at every grade level.[ Sphero ]]]>
Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org/video-friday-humanoid-loco-manipulation
