IEEE Spectrum Weekly Robot Videos: A Goose, a Ball-Balancing Robot, and a Flour-Digging Excavator
IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday is a weekly roundup of notable robot videos. This week opens with Goose, a small home robot.
The video caption says life is better with a little goose. Goose is round and compact and positioned for home use. Its specific functions are not detailed in the clip, but its form suggests light-duty household service and companionship.
Next up is Skydio's F10, an asymmetric fixed-wing drone that uses a robotic arm for autonomous launch and recovery. The LED blink rate in the video suggests the launch and recovery process may have been sped up.
Another clip shows a group of small robots; the caption expresses a desire for a bunch of these little things, even without knowing what to do with them. Thirty years ago, a robot that could walk on its own was brand new. The first autonomously walking robot was Honda P2, which had motors and hydraulic systems in its hips, knees, and ankles and weighed more than 300 pounds.
A precision biomimetic dexterous hand is presented with a starting price of $6,500. Someone asks: what if training a drone to do acrobatics only required telling it whether the operator likes its flying style? And why build humanoid hands when robot hands can do this?
Boston Dynamics mechanical engineer Diane Heinle answers questions about Stretch durability testing: how her team simulates years of wear on robot parts in a short time in the lab, and why the robot has bird heads on it.
ULOHA brings demonstration learning to two underwater collaborative robot arms. The team developed custom leader-follower hardware and software, extending LeRobot to connect teleoperation, demonstration collection, and autonomous operation. The video shows the robots lifting objects together, passing objects between arms, opening containers, and catching a sponge rising through the water. The team also explores how bubbles and action timing affect learned behavior.
Usually ball-balancing robots rely on an internal pendulum; here is a different approach. From long-horizon manipulation to tactile-guided actions, the video shows selected collaborations from an Astribot robot. One task looks a bit boring but is actually very tricky and useful. A small excavator plays in flour, which is cute. A segment asks how to fit a humanoid robot into a box.
Finally, at the opening ceremony of WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 on September 22, 2026, 19 Unitree robots performed with 120 dancers. This was the world's largest full-size general-purpose humanoid robot performance, with more than 10,000 live spectators, and the fully AI-driven autonomous robot swarm performance was streamed live globally.