Video Friday: When Two Robots Become One
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.CoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2026, AUSTINHumanoids 2026: 6–9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CAEnjoy today’s videos! When one robot loves another robot very much, and they’re connected by a wire, they can get together and make a brand new robot! SFW.[ JSK Lab ]What happens when Microducks meet? They start to sing together. Each Microduck syncs with its neighbors over Bluetooth, then they compose a song on the fly, in harmony and in perfect time. There’s no score and no conductor. Two, three, or four ducks are enough for a choir to break out.If Pollen isn’t selling Microducks in four packs for this exact reason, WHAT ARE THEY EVEN DOING!?[ Pollen ]In an internal test, Google DeepMind robotics researchers instructed Gemini 4 Argon to watch a video of a human playing cornhole. Using its video understanding and advanced reasoning capabilities, Gemini 4 built a virtual simulation in MuJoCo and accurately calculated the physics and whole-body control required for Apptronik’s Apollo 2 humanoid to sink seven consecutive shots in the real world. This Video-to-Sim-to-Real pipeline compresses weeks of manual modeling into a few hours, transforming ordinary videos into an infinite training ground for physical AI.[ Google DeepMind ]As of Oct. 11, 2026, NASA’s Perseverance rover has driven 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers), becoming the new off-world record-holder for total distance driven by any vehicle on the surface of another world. The previous record of 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers) was held by NASA’s Opportunity rover. Perseverance reached that mark on the 2,006th Martian day, or sol, of its mission, covering in five and a half years a distance that took Opportunity almost 15.[ JPL ]Let’s not argue about whether these are robots or not and just agree that they’re cool.[ OATs ]If one cute little robot can clean up one block, how many blocks can 40 cute little robots clean up? Science has the answers![ Paper ]Thanks, Keisuke!Before Rosalind Franklin can explore Mars, it has to get off its lander. Engineers are rehearsing that first journey on Earth, using a full-size rover model and Mars-like terrain. The test recreates some of the challenges Rosalind Franklin will face on the Red Planet, from reduced gravity and a 20-degree incline to uneven ground and obstacles beneath its ramps.[ European Space Agency ]From custom part to running robot, the Atlas shop floor is built on precision, rapid assembly, and real-time collaboration. By machining parts in-house and streamlining assembly and repair under one roof, we are driving the manufacturing velocity needed to turn complex designs into walking hardware at scale.[ Boston Dynamics ]What can a quadruped robot do beyond the lab? Deep in China’s Ailao Mountains, DEEP Robotics M20S joined a team of researchers on a biodiversity field expedition—navigating rugged terrain, scouting routes ahead, carrying research equipment, and capturing wildlife in areas that are difficult to access on foot.[ DEEP Robotics ]The Kamino simulation software is a GPU-accelerated physics solver designed for accurate simulation of complex mechanical systems with kinematic loops, such as parallel manipulators, planar and spatial linkages, and multi-limbed robots with coupled joints, without requiring simplified approximations.[ Disney Research ]The original Kawasaki UNIMATE robot as featured in (remember this show?) the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1992.[ Kawasaki Robotics ]WildOS enables autonomous robots to perform long-range, open-vocabulary object search in previously unmapped and unstructured outdoor environments by unifying geometric safety with semantic visual reasoning. Through a vision-scored navigation graph and beyond-horizon target localization, the system demonstrates more efficient and robust exploration than conventional geometric or purely vision-based approaches in extensive field experiments.[ ETH Zurich Robotics Systems Lab ]Who needs an AI-generated person when you can have an actual robot that looks exactly like an AI-generated person instead?[ UBTECH Robotics ]The recovery behaviors here are impressive, but the robot is far slower than a human would be, suggesting that the value it generates is primarily in novelty. Which is fine, for now, but novelty wears off, and then what?[ Sharpa ]Here are a couple of good panels from ICRA 2026 in Vienna, including one on “Impact and Return on Investment on Humanoid Robots” and a second on “Advancing Sustainability in Robotics.” [ ICRA 2026 ]]]>
Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org/video-friday-reconfigurable-robots
