IEEE Spectrum

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. Microspines are one of many ways to enable robots to latch onto surfaces like walls and ceilings . Now roboticists in Canada are using the mini spikes to get drones to land on a more challenging, remote surface: icebergs. Like a spider, the Ice Dart can land on and latch onto steep, slippery surfaces …

Humanoids desperately need to stop making YouTube videos and get a job already, and Persona AI is one of the few humanoid companies which seems to be entirely focused on making that happen. Persona’s approach has been to carefully select a job that is economically viable for robots right now, and they’ve found one that was also the job of one of the very first industrial robots ever sold : weldin…

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. Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL E…

Objects constructed by robots are ubiquitous. If you’ve used a car, household appliance, or smartphone today, you’ve used an object constructed at least in part by robots. The more products that manufacturers want to produce (and consumers want to consume) at lower costs, the more industrial robots will be needed. There are over 4 million industrial robots in use worldwide, according to the Inter…

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. Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL E…

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “Covered List,” originally published in 2021, identifies communications equipment and services that it says pose a threat to national security. On 28 July, the FCC added mobile, communicating robots weighing more than 2 kilograms and power inverters commonly used in solar panels to the list, meaning that new products from any foreign country in the…

For a while there, it seemed as though robotics as a whole was stuck in a mad rush towards building humanoid robots mostly because it was very possible (and very lucrative) to do so, even without a near-term end goal that was necessarily realistic. Some of the magic of those first couple of years of the humanoid explosion has stuck around, but there’s also been an industry-wide sobering leading t…

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. Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL E…

Imagine running your fingertip over the surface of a U.S. penny. You would feel the ridges of the raised letters and numbers, Abe Lincoln’s bearded side profile, and, if it’s tails, the fluted columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Getting a robot to sense the same things is an imposing task, often requiring gathering data on pressure and force at many spatial locations at once. But that’s just what a …

Atop a lab bench, Cornell Tech postdoctoral researcher Yifan He positions the lens of an optical receiver almost a meter away from an LED emitting a beam of red light. The computer monitor attached to the receiver takes a beat to refresh, then displays an array of squares that resemble a QR code. When you hold your phone camera up to a QR code, light strikes the image sensor as only a first step …

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos 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. Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN F…

Like many engineers, Sarah Downs says she knew she wanted to pursue a STEM career from a young age. As a teenager, she discovered robotics through her Tulsa, Okla., middle school’s First Lego League team, and she fell in love with the field, she says. Downs participated in the international robotics program from 2014 to 2016. Watching PBS specials on NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity , and …

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. Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 20…

There are many words that I would never, ever use to describe a drone. Stealthy. Subtle. Whatever the opposite of obnoxious is. Much of this is because of the giant angry bee sound that drones tend to make, but it’s also the way that they look in flight: With uncannily linear movements and an even less canny ability to hover perfectly still, they tend to draw the eye as affronts to nature. In a p…

This article is brought to you by X Square Robot . Large language models gave artificial intelligence a working recipe. Pretrain a large model on broad data, and general capability follows. Robotics has no such recipe. Robotics systems have long been assembled from separate perception, planning, and control parts that rarely add up to intelligence a robot can carry from one task to another, or on…

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, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO I…

Borys Drozhak has a vision: a frontline almost free of humans, patrolled by flying drones and ground robots, and continuously monitored by AI-controlled sensor networks. And it’s not a pipe dream. Ukrainian roboticists have made major strides in that direction over the past four years. Remotely controlled ground vehicles fitted with machine guns and grenade launchers now patrol the no-man’s land …

Toshio Fukuda has been blazing trails for most of his career. He is considered to be one of the most prolific scholars in robotics , writing more than 2,000 research papers and authoring several books on the field. He’s an influential figure thanks to his pioneering work developing biomedical robotic systems, industrial robots, micro-nano robotics, mechatronics, and AI-driven automation. Fukuda l…

“In the future, the relationship between humans and robots will deepen, and the distinction between them will probably disappear.” This prediction, from one of the attendees at the recent Humanoids Summit in Tokyo , might have been unremarkable had it not come directly from an android that was first introduced to the world 20 years ago. Geminoid HI-6 is the sixth-generation of a robot originally …

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, SYDNEY Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems : 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUE Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO IR…