US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on September 30 the creation of a new four-star joint command, the Autonomous Warfare Command, to scale up autonomous and robotic combat capabilities. Its portfolio will include drones, artificial intelligence, and command-and-control systems.
IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday roundup features Goose, a small home robot, plus Skydio's F10 fixed-wing drone and a swarm of tiny robots. Other highlights include a $6,500 dexterous hand, Boston Dynamics' Stretch durability testing, underwater collaborative arms from ULOHA, Astribot demonstrations, and a record-breaking Unitree humanoid performance at WorldSkills Shanghai 2026.
China's 2026 undergraduate catalog adds interdisciplinary majors including embodied intelligence and low-altitude technology, shifting talent training toward national planning. Feisi Lab, under Zhuoyi Intelligent, offers an air-ground collaborative embodied intelligence lab solution for universities, combining simulation, hardware-in-loop verification, and real-machine deployment.
Evan Budz, a 15-year-old student, built BURT, a bionic underwater robot that copies a snapping turtle's flipper propulsion to avoid disturbing the water it studies. It won top awards, but its 96% coral-bleaching detection result comes from controlled pool tests, not real reefs.
WeiFen ZhiFei, a flying embodied intelligence startup founded by a post-90s Zhejiang University advisor, has completed a Series A2 funding of hundreds of millions of yuan. The company focuses on developing autonomous flying robots for complex environments, with products already in batch delivery.
JD Logistics announced plans to acquire 3 million robots, 1 million autonomous vehicles, and 100,000 drones over five years, advancing fully unmanned logistics and creating a global robot maintenance network.
This week's robot video roundup features the DARPA Lift Challenge, drone delivery to moving vehicles, and the adorable STEMbot that climbs plants. Other highlights include robots laying bricks, testing gecko adhesives in space, and a humanoid climbing stairs.
This week's Video Friday features the DARPA Lift Challenge, showcasing bizarre heavy-lift drones, along with NASA's Mars helicopter antenna, dexterous hands, and more. It also includes a roundup of upcoming robotics events.