IEEE Spectrum

Two years ago, Colin Angle stepped down as CEO of iRobot , the company that he co-founded and the most successful home robot company the world has ever seen. Angle almost immediately founded a stealthy new “physical AI” company called Familiar Machines & Magic (FM&M), which in short order managed to attract a combination of exceptionally talented robotics folks, including Morgan Pope from Disney …

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. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 1…

This article is brought to you by DAIMON Robotics . This April, Hong Kong-based DAIMON Robotics has released Daimon-Infinity , which it describes as the largest omni-modal robotic dataset for physical AI, featuring high resolution tactile sensing and spanning a wide range of tasks from folding laundry at home to manufacturing on factory assembly lines. The project is supported by collaborative ef…

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. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Enjoy today’s vi…

Tom Burick has always considered himself a builder. Over the years he’s designed robots, constructed a vintage teardrop trailer , and most recently, led a group of students in building a full-scale replica of a pivotal 1940s computer. Burick is a technology instructor at PS Academy in Gilbert, Ariz., a middle and high school for students with autism and other specialized learning needs. At the st…

The American Security Robotics Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in March by Senators Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), proposes to limit U.S. government use of Chinese ground robots including humanoids, dogs, and crawlers. The proposal came just a few days after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tightened its rules for new foreign…

When the robotics engineering field that Maja Matarić wanted to work in didn’t exist, she helped create it. In 2005 she helped define the new area of socially assistive robotics. As an associate professor of computer science, neuroscience, and pediatrics at the University of Southern California , in Los Angeles, she developed robots to provide personalized therapy and care through social interact…

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. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Enjoy today’s vi…

The amazing and frustrating thing about robots is that they can do almost anything you want them to do, as long as you know how to ask properly. In the not-so-distant past, asking properly meant writing code, and while we’ve thankfully moved beyond that brittle constraint, there’s still an irritatingly inverse correlation between ease of use and complexity of task. AI has promised to change that.…

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. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Enjoy today’s vi…

ZTASP is a mission-scale assurance and governance platform designed for autonomous systems operating in real-world environments. It integrates heterogeneous systems—including drones, robots, sensors, and human operators—into a unified zero-trust architecture. Through Secure Runtime Assurance (SRTA) and Secure Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (SSTR), ZTASP continuously verifies system integrity, enforces…

Building the next generation of robots for successful integration into our homes, offices, and factories is more than just solving the hardware and software problems—we also need to understand how they will be perceived and how they can work effectively with people in those spaces. aspect_ratio In summer 2025, RAI Institute set up a free pop-up robot experience in the CambridgeSide mall, designed…

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. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Enjoy today’s vi…

In 2012, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). The multiyear, multimillion-dollar competition for disaster robotics resulted in Boston Dynamics’ Atlas , some absolutely incredible moments from one of the very first generations of useful humanoid robots, and a blooper video that will live on forever. Gill Pratt , the architect of the compe…

Engineers have long tried to mimic life. They’ve built machine learning algorithms modeled after the human brain , designed machines that walk like dogs or fly like insects , and taught robots to adapt, however clumsily , to the world around them. Now they are skipping imitation altogether. Instead of taking inspiration from biology, they are building robots out of it: fashioning tiny, free-swimm…

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. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA RSS 2026 : 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Enjoy today’s vi…

When you hear the term humanoid robot , you may think of C-3PO , the human-cyborg-relations android from Star Wars . C-3PO was designed to assist humans in communicating with robots and alien species. The droid, which first appeared on screen in 1977, joined the characters on their adventures, walking, talking, and interacting with the environment like a human. It was ahead of its time. Before th…

WHEN KYIV-BORN ENGINEER Yaroslav Azhnyuk thinks about the future, his mind conjures up dystopian images. He talks about “swarms of autonomous drones carrying other autonomous drones to protect them against autonomous drones, which are trying to intercept them, controlled by AI agents overseen by a human general somewhere.” He also imagines flotillas of autonomous submarines, each carrying hundred…

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. ICRA 2026 : 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Enjoy today’s videos! Human athletes demonstrate ve…

A technical examination of the sensing, motion control, power, and thermal challenges facing humanoid robotics engineers — with component-level design strategies for real-world deployment. What Attendees will Learn Why motion control remains the hardest unsolved problem — Explore the modelling complexity, real-time feedback requirements, and sensor fusion demands of maintaining stable bipedal loc…