Video Friday: Life’s Better With a Little Robot Goose

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. Life’s better with a little Goose. Skydio has introduced the F10, a charmingly lopsided fixed-wing drone, that uses a robot arm for 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. I want a bunch of these little guys. I don’t know what I’d do with them. But I want them. Walking robots are everywhere now…. But 30 years ago, they were brand new. The first ever robot that could walk by itself was the Honda P2. The P2 featured motors and hydraulics in the hips, knees, and ankles to walk around, and weighed over 300 pounds. Precision biomimetic dexterous hand, priced from US $6,500. 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 a humanoid hand when a robot hand can do stuff like this? Diane Heinle, a mechanical engineer at Boston 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 two robot arms working underwater. We developed custom leader–follower hardware and software extending LeRobot to connect teleoperation, 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. 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. 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? At the Opening Ceremony of WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 on 22 September, 19 Unitree humanoid robots performed 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. 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.