Video Friday: Multitasking Robots Smoothly Do the Things Together

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

Enjoy this week’s videos!

Westwood Robotics is proud to announce a major update: THEMIS Gen2.5, the world’s first commercial full-size humanoid robot capable of manipulation on the move!

Now that you mention it, the bit at the end where the robot picks up a can while walking? I haven’t seen a lot of that.

[ Westwood Robotics ]

Last year, Helix showed that a single neural network could control a humanoid’s upper body from pixels. Today, Helix 02 extends that control to the entire robot—walking, manipulating, and balancing as one continuous system.

Why yes, I am a normal human and this is very similar to the default state of my kitchen.

[ Figure ]

Harry Goldstein, our Editor in Chief, went to meet Sprout from Fauna Robotics. He was skeptical at first, but Sprout won him over with its robotic charm.

[ Fauna Robotics ]

Kimberly Elenberg is showing how the data collected by robotic responders can save lives in mass casualty events.

[ Carnegie Mellon University ]

The educational robotics market is tough, but you’ve got to hand it to Sphero—going strong since 2011, which is pretty incredible.

[ Sphero ]

If you want to fly in crazy conditions, you have to flight test in those conditions. Here’s how and why we do it!

[ Zipline ]

I want to be impressed more by the idea of 3D printing skin and skeleton at the same time, but come on, animals have been doing that for literally hundreds of years without even trying.

[ JSK Lab, University of tokyo ]

If there is a market for small bipedal robots that can both ski and be dinosaurs, LimX has it covered.

[ LimX ]

How do you remotely control robots that change shape? We introduce a method for user-guided control of modular robots using reconfigurable joint-space joysticks (JoJo) and real-time optimization. We demonstrate this system on two different robots, Mori3 and Roombots. The video shows examples of these robots performing object manipulation, locomotion, human-assistance, and reconfiguration, controlled by our system.

[ EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab ] via [ Nature Communications ]

Quadrotor Biplane Tailsitter (QBiT) UAVs at four different sizes (4, 12, 25, and 50 lbs) developed at Texas A&M University. QBiT combines the mechanical simplicity of a quadrotor drone with the cruise efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft.

[ Texas A&M University ]

There’s a new DARPA challenge for “novel drone designs that can carry payloads more than four times their weight, which would revolutionize the way we use drones across all sectors.”