GoKawiilVideo 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
Enjoy today’s videos!
All legged robots deployed “in the wild” to date were given a body plan that was predefined by human designers and could not be redefined in situ. The manual and permanent nature of this process has resulted in very few species of agile terrestrial robots beyond familiar four-limbed forms. Here, we introduce highly athletic modular building blocks and show how they enable the automatic design and rapid assembly of novel agile robots that can “hit the ground running” in unstructured outdoor environments.
[ Northwestern UniversityCenter for Robotics and Biosystems ] [ Paper ] via [ Gizmodo ]
If you were going to develop the ideal urban delivery robot more or less from scratch, it would be this.
[ RIVR ]
Don’t get me wrong, there are some clever things going on here, but I’m still having a lot of trouble seeing where the unique, sustainable value is for a humanoid robot performing these sorts of tasks.
[ Figure ]
One of those things that you don’t really think about as a human, but is actually pretty important.
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