Video Friday: DARPA Challenge Focuses on Heavy Lift Drones
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!
Current multirotor drones provide simplicity, affordability, and ease of operation; however, their primary limitation is their low payload-to-weight ratio, which typically falls at 1:1 or less. The DARPA Lift Challenge aims to shatter the heavy lift bottleneck, seeking novel drone designs that can carry payloads more than four times their weight, which would revolutionize the way we use drones across all sectors.
[ DARPA ]
Huge milestone achieved! World's first mass delivery of humanoid robots has completed! Hundreds of UBTECH Walker S2 have been delivered to our partners.
I really hope that's not how they're actually shipping their robots.
[ UBTECH ]
There is absolutely no reason to give robots hands if you can just teach them to lasso stuff instead.
[ ArcLab ]
Saddle Creek deployed Carter in its order fulfillment operation for a beauty client. It helps to automate and optimize tote delivery operations between multiple processing and labeling lines and more than 20 designated drop-off points. In this capacity, Carter functions as a flexible, non-integrated virtual conveyor" that streamlines material flow without requiring fixed infrastructure.
[ Robust.ai ]
This is our latest work on an aerial-ground robot team, the first time a language-vision hierarchy achieves long-horizon navigation and manipulation on the real UAV + quadruped using only 2D cameras. The article is published open-access in Advanced Intelligent Systems.
[ DRAGON Lab ]
Thanks, Moju!
I am pretty sure that you should not use a quadrupedal robot to transport your child. But only pretty sure, not totally certain.
[ DEEP Robotics ]
Building Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) for humanoid robots has the potential to unify diverse control tasks under a single, promptable generalist policy. However, existing approaches are either exclusively deployed on simulated humanoid characters, or specialized to specific tasks such as tracking. We propose BFM-Zero, a framework that learns an effective shared latent representation that embeds motions, goals, and rewards into a common space, enabling a single policy to be prompted for multiple downstream tasks without retraining.
[ BFM-Zero ]
Welcome to the very, very near future of manual labor.
[ AgileX ]
MOMO (Mobile Object Manipulation Operator) has been one of KIMLAB's key robots since its development about two years ago and has featured as a main actor in several of our videos. The design and functionalities of MOMO were recently published in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.
We are excited about our new addition to our robot fleet! As a shared resource for our faculty members, this robot will facilitate multiple research activities within our institute that target significant future funding. Our initial focus for this robot will be on an agricultural application but we have big plans for the robot in human-robot interaction projects.
[ Ingenuity Labs ]
The nice thing about robots that pick grapes in vineyards is that they don't just eat the grapes, like I do.
[ Extend Robotics ]
How mobile of a mobile manipulator do you need?
Robotics professor, Dr. Christian Hubicki, talks about the NEO humanoid announcement on October 29th, 2025. While explaining the technical elements and product readiness, he refuses to show any emotion whatsoever.