Video Friday: Two Birotors Make a Quadrotor, Plus Robotics Highlights

IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday is a weekly roundup of notable robotics videos. The publication also maintains a calendar of upcoming robotics events, including the Humanoids Summit Seoul on 22–23 September 2026 in Seoul, IROS 2026 from 27 September to 1 October 2026 in Pittsburgh, and CoRL 2026 from 9 to 12 November 2026 in Austin.

The first featured clip from CLIMB Lab presents a quadrotor as essentially two birotors that cooperate closely.

A video from ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab draws attention for its final 30 seconds, which the roundup describes as especially striking.

Figure's demonstration raises a practical question: whether a robot is safe in a home and a realistic alternative to a human.

Agility's Digit 5 may not be considered attractive, but the video illustrates what serious humanoid safety looks like in operation.

NYU Tandon researchers built WorMa, an undulatory robot that pumps water between its head and tail to climb slopes, clear steps, and swim while keeping the same basic gait. On an incline, moving water toward the head increases force on the front contact points for more traction. Head-biased placement was the only configuration that carried WorMa up the steepest tested incline of 19.5 degrees; others slid back. It also cut the cost of transport by at least 33%.

Steps required a different strategy. Neither a fixed head-heavy nor tail-heavy robot could clear a step alone. WorMa approached with water in its head for traction, shifted water to the tail, raised its head and neck so the tail could push it closer, anchored its head on the step edge, moved water back to the head, and continued. That sequence allowed it to surmount steps as high as 15 centimeters.

Kubi 2.0 is a desktop telepresence AI robot that lets remote users look around and interact as if physically present. It is also a Physical AI device that enables AI agents to interact with people in the physical environment. Over the past decade in Japan, such telepresence solutions have helped hospitalized and homebound students attend classes, interact with friends, and join school events. The initiative is expanding globally through Kickstarter.

A wheeled quadruped from DEEP Robotics provides an unexpectedly impressive use case, according to the roundup.

Legged robots are versatile on land, but underwater use remains limited. Extending quadruped locomotion to water enables amphibious mobility for inspection, environmental monitoring, and disaster response. A paper presents the design, modeling, and experimental validation of a reproducible underwater quadruped. Custom waterproof motor housings are machined from polyoxymethylene plastic and use off-the-shelf O-rings and dynamic shaft seals. A simplified model captures how drag on spherical end effectors transmits torque to the floating base. A closed-loop attitude controller uses an error formulation on SO(3), and tests in simulation and a water tank show tracking of desired roll, pitch, and yaw setpoints.

Ugo Nova is a domestically produced semi-humanoid robot in Japan that aims to accelerate the social implementation of physical AI, from research and development to operation in industrial settings.

Daimon Robotics demonstrates how much manipulation a good two-finger gripper and a clever robot can achieve.

UBTECH says its benchmark humanoid robot smart factory now rolls one humanoid off the line every 10 minutes. The company scaled from 1,000 to 10,000 units in less than nine months. The milestone raises the question of what all those robots will do.

MIT engineers built a robotic optics lab that builds, runs, and dismantles an optics experiment on demand. A robotic arm arranges mirrors, lenses, and other components in custom QR-encoded housings with precise alignments to direct and focus a red laser. The autonomous system could speed testing of high-tech materials, from solar cells and sensors to video displays and quantum technologies. The video is sped up 2x.

Lunabotics features student-built rovers on lunar terrain in a high-stakes competition at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. University teams test robotic systems in a simulated lunar environment. Highlights from the previous competition preview what teams are preparing for Lunabotics 2027.

A CMU Robotics Institute seminar features Erol Şahin from METU discussing “Augmenting Bee Colonies with Robotics and AI Technologies for Ecosystem Support.” Earth's ecosystems face rapid biodiversity decline, with honeybees—keystone pollinators—among the most affected. The EU-funded RoboRoyale project integrates robotics and AI to augment the beehive, enabling observation at unprecedented resolution and scale. The system tracks the queen's behavior, colony efficiency, comb states, and long-term foraging while advancing micro-robotic intervention to support hive health. The talk covers development challenges, findings on complex social interactions, and the future of bio-hybrid research.