Video Friday: A Robot Hand With Artificial Muscles and Tendons
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, VIENNAEnjoy today's videos!
The functional replication and actuation of complex structures inspired by nature is a longstanding goal for humanity. Creating such complex structures combining soft and rigid features and actuating them with artificial muscles would further our understanding of natural kinematic structures. We printed a biomimetic hand in a single print process composed of a rigid skeleton, soft joint capsules, tendons, and printed touch sensors.
Two Boston Dynamics product managers talk about their favorite classic BD robots, and then I talk about mine.
And this is Boston Dynamics' LittleDog, doing legged locomotion research 16 or so years ago in what I'm pretty sure is Katie Byl's lab at UCSB.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
This is our latest work on the trajectory planning method for floating-based articulated robots, enabling the global path for searching in complex and cluttered environments.
[ DRAGON Lab ]
Thanks, Moju!
OmniPlanner is a unified solution for exploration and inspection-path planning (as well as target reach) across aerial, ground, and underwater robots. It has been verified through extensive simulations and a multitude of field tests, including in underground mines, ballast water tanks, forests, university buildings, and submarine bunkers.
[ NTNU ]
Thanks, Kostas!
In the ARISE project, the FZI Research Center for Information Technology and its international partners ETH Zurich, University of Zurich, University of Bern, and University of Basel took a major step toward future lunar missions by testing cooperative autonomous multirobot teams under outdoor conditions.
[ FZI ]
Welcome to the future, where there are no other humans.
This is our latest work on robotic fish, and it's also the first underwater robot from DRAGON Lab.
[ DRAGON Lab ]
Thanks, Moju!
Watch this one simple trick to make humanoid robots cheaper and safer!
Gugusse and the Automaton is a 1897 French film by Georges Melies featuring a humanoid robot in a depiction that's nearly as realistic as some of the humanoid promo videos we've seen lately.
[ Library of Congress ] via [ Gizmodo ]
At Agility, we create automated solutions for the hardest work. We're incredibly proud of how far we've come, and can't wait to show you what's next.
[ Agility ]
Kamel Saidi, robotics program manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), on how performance standards can pave the way for humanoid adoption.
[ Humanoids Summit ]
Anca Dragan is no stranger to Waymo. She worked with us for six years while also at UC Berkeley and now at Google DeepMind. Her focus on making AI safer helped Waymo as it launched commercially. In this final episode of our season, Anca describes how her work enables AI agents to work fluently with people, based on human goals and values.
[ Waymo Podcast ]
This UPenn GRASP SFI Seminar is by Junyao Shi: Unlocking Generalist Robots with Human Data and Foundation Models."
Building general-purpose robots remains fundamentally constrained by data scarcity and labor-intensive engineering. Unlike vision and language, robotics lacks large, diverse datasets that span tasks, environments, and embodiments, thus limiting both scalability and generalization. This talk explores how human data and foundation models trained at scale can help overcome these bottlenecks.
[ UPenn ]