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Claire chatted to Rika Antonova from the University of Cambridge about using artificial intelligence to develop complimentary robot hardware and algorithms. Rika Antonova is an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include co-design, automated algorithm discovery, data-efficient reinforcement learning, exploration, active learning, and​ robotics. After completing a research Master’s degree at […]

Imagine you are driving toward an intersection. A truck parked on the corner blocks your view of a car speeding toward the intersection from the right. You can’t see it, but the car next to you can. What if that neighboring vehicle could simply tell your car, “Vehicle merging from the right, about 15 meters […]

By Wai-keung Fung, Cardiff Metropolitan University At the recent World Humanoid Robot Games 2026 in Beijing, robots sprinted, boxed, played football and tackled tasks inspired by factories, restaurants and emergency situations. The robot Tiangong Ultra even completed the 100 metres in 8.64 seconds, quicker than Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record. But if we really want […]

Claire chatted to Kushant Patel from Brookhaven National Laboratory about robots that work in scientific facilities, such as particle accelerators. Kushant Patel builds software that helps robots and instruments perceive, map, and move through the physical world. After completing a Master’s in Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo, he spent two years at the University […]

Last month, I went to York to build a robot. I came back with a robot, a tiny trophy-shaped sense of achievement, and somehow a few new friends. From 25th-27th August, I joined the UK RAS STEPS MicroMaze Robot Hackathon at the Institute for Safe Autonomy, University of York. The brief sounded simple: build a […]

By the University of Glasgow Giving robot companions animal-like or anime-style faces and voices could maximise their emotional appeal to users, according to new research which could help guide the growing field of social robotics. Social robots can provide companionship and comfort to their owners by mimicking human or petlike behaviours. Although the robots are […]

Claire chatted to Michelle Lu from Vsim Technology about using simulation and artificial intelligence to teach robots new skills. Michelle Lu is co-founder and CEO of Vsim Technology. She was previously a Director of Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, where she and her co-founder created the world’s first end-to-end GPU-accelerated reinforcement learning (RL) framework, Isaac Gym, […]

By Emmet Cole “Robotics and automation” is a pairing heard often around these parts. It puts the “RA” in IEEE RAS, after all. The familiar combination shows up in conference titles, funding calls, and program descriptions. But what is actually meant by the two words? Is robotics a subdomain of automation? Does the distinction matter? […]

The scalable robot ScaFi. 2026 CREATE Lab EPFL. CC BY SA-4.0. Propeller-powered underwater vehicles have long helped scientists explore and monitor aquatic environments. But they’re limited by their own mechanics: spinning blades can snag on vegetation, stir up sediment, and startle the wildlife they’re often sent to study, making them poorly suited to shallow creeks, […]

Claire chatted to Aaron Edsinger from Hello Robot about their Stretch robots that can help people with mobility issues live more independently. Aaron Edsinger is CEO and Co-Founder of Hello Robot, a robotics company dedicated to developing practical, safe, and accessible robots for people. With a passion for building robots and robot companies, Aaron has […]

Deborah Lupton / Pop Chips / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 Intrinsic (an AI robotics group at Google) announced that the company is making parts of its platform open source. Intrinsic Core™ is a set of ROS-compatible capabilities for building sophisticated robotic applications. The capabilities included in the open source package are as follow: Intrinsic Control. […]

The 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026) will be held from 27 September – 1 October in Pittsburgh, USA. The programme includes plenary and keynote talks, workshops, tutorials, forums, competitions, and a debate. Keynote talks The keynote talks will be held from 28 – 30 September: Elena De Momi – […]

China is targeting the next industrial revolution by doubling down on embodied AI and humanoid robotics, building directly on its vast manufacturing infrastructure. By Ellen H. Rumley and Allison Okamura Beyond the Robot Olympics Chinese robots have quickly entered global public consciousness in recent years, appearing as background robo-dancers in pop concerts and as humanoid […]

Each day in the control room of the Curiosity rover is jam-packed with important scientific decisions, as a NASA project scientist describes.

By Celia Luterbacher Imagine a robot designed to install solar panels with much greater speed and precision than a human. The robot is made from expensive materials and powered by a heavy battery that must be recharged every few hours. If the costs of building and operating the robot outweigh the benefits of the clean […]

The 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) was held in Vienna from the 1 – 5 June. The event brought together researchers and industry professionals with expertise spanning many different aspects of robotics. IEEE have made the keynote and plenary talk recordings available to watch. You can also catch the panel discussions […]

Credit: Baumis Robots (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). By Emmet Cole In our new monthly series, we showcase a selection of robotics stories from society, business, research, and culture, as we track the field’s ongoing journey from specialized industrial machines to an increasingly visible social phenomenon. Reshoring reimagined? In early August, The Information published an article […]

From 25–27 August, UK RAS STEPS members came together at the University of York’s Institute for Safe Autonomy for a three-day Micromaze Robot Hackathon. Working in teams, participants were challenged to design, build and program autonomous robots capable of navigating a series of increasingly complex mazes. Each team used a custom Raspberry Pi Pico W […]

US robotics researchers and industry are looking for a cohesive national robotics strategy that will maintain basic research and innovation while improving domestic production and adoption of robots. By Ellen H. Rumley and Allison Okamura A leader in tech innovation Robots are a crowd-pleasing example of American innovation and global technological leadership. The latest press […]

By Maria Jose Galvez Trigo, Cardiff University and Paul Willis, Cardiff University New BBC sitcom Ann Droid imagines a near future in which robots provide care and companionship to older people at home. The series centres on Sue, a recent widow played by Sue Johnston, her hapless son Michael and Linda, an assistive care robot […]

By Wanjiku Chebet Kanjumba, University of Florida NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the Moon with a single instruction: Work out among yourselves how to explore a patch of ground. The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration mission, or CADRE, will land on the side of the Moon facing Earth as part of […]

A recent ICRA panel titled “Surviving the Paper Deluge” brought together leading robotics researchers who have grappled with the overwhelming number of robotics papers being published today. The discussion ranged from hard numbers on publication growth, through the promises and risks of large language models (LLMs), to radical proposals for reshaping peer review as we […]

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash. By Hasan Ayaz, Drexel University; Ewart J. de Visser, United States Air Force Academy; Frank Krueger, George Mason University, and Yigit Topoglu, United States Air Force Academy People become more suspicious of a humanoid robot that makes errors, especially when the robot is an expressive conversation partner. In our […]

Action from the 11 vs 11 humanoid match at RoboCup 2026. Photo credit: RoboCup Federation. RoboCup 2026 saw history made, as two teams of 11 humanoids took to the soccer field, the first time a full complement of robots has competed. The game saw B-Human (Bremen, Germany) take on HTWK Robots (Leipzig, Germany), with both […]

Deborah Lupton / Servers in a Landscape / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 By Emmet Cole Robots clean rivers and sort waste, monitor ecosystems, and inspect renewable-energy infrastructure. But even the greenest robot has an environmental footprint. If robotics is going to help build a more sustainable world, the robotics community has to answer some potentially […]

The MICROBS Lab’s microfliers. 2026 EPFL/MICROBS – CC-BY-SA 4.0. By Celia Luterbacher When you blow air across the neck of a bottle, you’re not just producing a pleasant tone: you’re also demonstrating a phenomenon called Helmholtz resonance. This occurs when airflow passing across an opening causes air trapped inside a cavity (like a glass bottle) […]

Florent Delgrange won the Best Blue Sky Paper Award at AAMAS 2026 for his work Foundation World Models for Agents that Learn, Verify, and Adapt Reliably Beyond Static Environments. We caught up with him to find out more about his vision for agent learning. What is the topic of your Blue Sky Ideas paper and […]

Robots have been a prolific theme in Japanese pop culture and media since the 1950s, which includes global icons like the Transformers, Astro Boy, and Doraemon (1). Perhaps not coincidentally, Japanese citizens have a positive outlook on robotic technologies and their use in the labor sector compared to many other nations (2); much to their […]

Image credits: Xiangxiao Liu, Francois A. Longchamp, and Louis GeverBiorobotics Laboratory, EPFL Improving energy performance can effectively extend the time a robot can operate and reduce battery load, enabling lighter, more flexible, and more durable robotic systems. Nature has evolved optimal energy-saving locomotion strategies through billions of years of natural selection, providing unparalleled blueprints for […]

By Umar Farooq That was one of the questions at the heart of my last week (20th-24th July) at the Imperial Robotics Summer School, hosted at Imperial College, London; a week that sharpened my thinking and pushed me to look at robotics problems from angles I don’t usually get to in my day-to-day work. The […]

What’s a robotics roadmap, and why should we care? Machines with pre-defined capabilities will soon be old-school. Future machines are expected to learn and adapt to unpredictability and to interact with the physical world with the ableness of our own bodies. Welcome to Industry 4.0 (1). The reliance of modern societies on robots, from manufacturing […]

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a tiny seed-sized robot that can navigate across soft and uneven surfaces to perform five surgical functions wirelessly, paving the way for developing robots to make surgeries and medical treatments more precise. The miniature robot, measuring just 4.4 mm in length and controlled by weak […]

A new system developed at MIT uses three agents to piece together the objects, walls, and overall look of a 3D scene. Its realistic recreations of indoor spaces help robots practice skills and try out different ways of doing tasks before they’re powered on. Image: Tim Malieckal/MIT CSAIL using assets from the researchers. By Alex […]

By Emmet Cole This new monthly series from IEEE RAS showcases a selection of robotics stories from society, business, research, and culture, as we track the field’s ongoing journey from specialized industrial machines to an increasingly visible social phenomenon. Technological isolationism or prudence? On July 28, the United States’ Federal Communications Commission blocked new foreign-made […]

Image credit: Olivier Porchet, Biorobotics Laboratory, EPFL When a fish holds its position against a current in a river, its brain must figure out how fast to swim and how to steer to offset the water flow. Most fish use vision to register the world sliding past, detect optic flow speed and direction, and their […]

Illustration of the versatile nanorobot. It is 150 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. (Illustration: Marina Bräm) By Angelika Jacobs Nanorobots sound like science fiction: tiny machines for medicine, the environment, or industry. In fact, nanorobotics has become a rapidly growing field of research. It is considered a promising approach, for example, […]

By Emmet Cole With the explosion of robotics research, staying current in fields like Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a monumental challenge. Is AI the solution to the “paper deluge,” or is it part of the problem? Read the article preview below to learn more! Download the full paper: Surviving the Paper Deluge. Authors: Aude […]

The soft robotic model of the human heart, developed at UNSW. Credit: UNSW/Richard Freeman. UNSW researchers have developed a soft robotic model of the human heart that can mimic disease and provide a realistic environment for testing the next generation of cardiac devices. Researchers at UNSW Sydney have developed a fully synthetic soft robotic heart […]

A miniature robot developed at the University of Basel could help prepare teeth for a crown. Photo: University of Basel, Catherine Weyer. By Angelika Jacobs A routine check-up at the dentist ends with bad news: tooth decay has left a large cavity, and the tooth needs a crown. The treatment requires several follow-up appointments. During […]

By Emmet Cole Researchers at the University of Leeds and collaborators from the University of California San Diego won the Best Paper Award at RoboSoft, the leading international conference focused on soft robotics research. Soft robotics is gaining attention in medical applications because compliant machines can interact more safely with delicate objects and complex anatomy. […]

Imagine you want to teach a robot to push an object on a table. The standard recipe in robot learning is to collect hundreds of expert demonstrations on a real robot, train an imitation learning policy on that data, and then evaluate the policy by running it many times on the same real robot. Both […]

Andrew James (from left), Neil Morrison, Natalia Kurz and Michael Neiss work on a prototype of their weed-killing robot ahead of The Farm Robotics Challenge, which they won on May 21. By Holly Hartigan A team of Cornell undergraduates beat 95 other teams to take the grand prize at The Farm Robotics Challenge with their […]

Image copyright: Raphael Zufferey. By Jennifer Chu Loons, gulls, puffins, and petrels are some of the 100 species of birds that can both fly and swim. These diving birds can plunge in water to swim after prey, and then leap back into the air to fly away. Now, inspired by these naturally aquatic aviators, engineers […]

By moving their hands and fingers, users can direct a robot to play piano or shoot a basketball, or they can manipulate objects in a virtual environment.

This year, RoboCup took place in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event saw teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. Take a look at what the participants got up to in our round up from social media. The wait is over! 🤖🎉 RoboCup 2026 officially begins today! Join us for […]

This weekend saw the finale of the league competitions at RoboCup 2026 in Incheon, South Korea, with the winners in the small, middle, and large humanoid divisions decided. Congratulations to the following teams, who finished in the top three positions in each size class: Small division Invic, Wuhan University, China Hamburg Bit-Bots, Universität Hamburg, Germany […]

The second day’s play at RoboCup 2026 has drawn to a close with another bumper set of matches. Teams have come from far and wide to take part in the humanoid soccer competition this year, with 17 different countries represented. China is the most represented country, boasting 15 teams across the three divisions. Other countries […]

From the 1st-5th June, the robots descended on Vienna. The 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) brought together the top minds in robotics for one short week to showcase the latest technologies, form new collaborations, and exchange ideas. Held at the Messe Wien, a stone’s throw from the bank of the Danube, […]

Image credit: RoboCup Federation. RoboCup 2026 kicked off today in Incheon, South Korea, with the league competitions running until 5 July. It’s an exciting time for RoboCup, as there have been some updates to the leagues and competition format. Most prominently, the soccer leagues will have a primary focus on humanoid robots. In a series […]

This year, RoboCup will be held in Incheon, South Korea, from 2-6 July. The event will see teams take part in competitions, training sessions, and a symposium. It’s an exciting time for RoboCup, as there have been some updates to the leagues and competition format. Most prominently, the soccer leagues will have a primary focus […]