Robotics Roundup: Society, Business, and Culture in October 2026

Robohub’s monthly series, reported by Emmet Cole, highlights robotics stories from society, business, research, and culture.

The roundup tracks the field’s shift from specialized industrial machines to a more visible social phenomenon.

People perceive robots approaching from behind as faster

A Toyohashi University of Technology team tested whether a robot’s approach direction changes perceived speed. In five experiments with a real mobile robot and virtual reality, 92% of participants showed the same bias: at equal physical speed, a robot approaching from behind seemed faster than one approaching from the front.

In the first experiment, participants learned reference speeds of 0.5 and 1.0 metres per second, then judged a robot moving between those speeds. Follow-up experiments suggested appearance and motor noise did not explain the effect; researchers link it to visual factors involved in turning to look at something behind.

The team says more work is needed to understand how the bias affects comfort, perceived safety, and actual avoidance behavior.

Monocular drone racer

Engineers at Delft University of Technology developed an AI system that lets a racing drone navigate demanding courses at extreme speed using only a single camera. The team says its MonoRace autonomous drone outperformed human drone champions.

The system generalizes to a competition environment without external motion tracking, relying only on a monocular rolling-shutter camera and an inertial measurement unit.

Researchers at ETH Zurich designed lab-grown mouse muscle tissue and its soft hydrogel scaffold together. Computer simulations helped find arrangements that turn muscle contractions into larger movements.

The resulting bioactuators, each about 1.5 centimeters long, powered small prototypes that could jump, swim, walk, and grasp. The team reports up to 11 times more range of motion than earlier systems using comparable amounts of muscle tissue.