ALT: Corl: Would Be Easier With Three Hands

A curated schedule of 8 papers on Lea

Emergency and critical care physician Keith Corl on why tele-critical care fails the sickest ICU patients when a video screen replaces the bedside doctor.

ALT: Corl Horl Reacts to 'That's A Lot Of Text'

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. CoRL 2026 : 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN Humanoids 2026 : 6–9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CA Enjoy today’s videos! Some top-notch whole-body manipulation here from RAI, although it’s a little hard to tell whether there’s direct torso involvement, which is something that humans do with heavy or awkward stuff all the time. “Anything that shows up as a blob in a depth image can be taken for the tire, whether a person walking past or a stray object on the floor. In a few runs the robot left the tire and went after something else.” That “something else” seems suspiciously vague, doesn’t it? [ Robotics and AI Institute ] We present a contact-centric learning framework for versatile humanoid mobility in complex and unstructured environments. Our approach bridges motion imitation and reinforcement learning by leveraging human motion data as a training prior while enabling autonomous adaptation to previously unseen terrains. [ ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab ] You’ve literally heard me say it literally a thousand times: the only things that could possibly make Reachy Mini better would be some wheels and a whole bunch of fancy hats. But of course the only way I could possibly recommend the wheels is if Reachy Mini can totally wreck Microduck in a race. [ Pollen Robotics ] Luxonis is launching OAK 4 FFC, a 70 x 53 mm vision computer that lets humanoid and drone builders put up to five cameras wherever the robot needs them. The board runs sync, stereo depth and AI itself, and calibrates from the scene instead of a checkerboard. [ Luxonis ] Thanks, Carson! Coming soon: Mini Pupper 4! [ MangDang ] HX Friends explores different robotic hand designs powered by DYNAMIXEL, ranging from a single articulated finger and a gripper to three-, four-, and five-finger hands. The video includes motion demonstrations across the lineup and VR teleoperation of the multi-finger hands. [ Robotis ] Thanks, Hyunwoo! Developed by bluZenit, monkeyBot 2.0 is an innovative robotic platform designed to navigate complex industrial piping systems. Inspired by nature, monkeyBot 2.0 uses a unique gripping and climbing mechanism to move along vertical and horizontal pipes, navigate bends, and access challenging locations within industrial facilities. [ Bluezenit ] Thanks, Trevor! I understand that you need some kind of repeatable baseline or whatever for training robots to do stuff, but I would be so much more impressed with any cleaning robot at all if it would clean stuff that was actually dirty for once. [ Generalist ] Calling this a ‘robot’ hand at this point might be a little bit premature, but this is the kind of technology we’re going to need for deployable robots that are compliant and safe. [ BruBotics Human Robotics Research Center ] Robotiq really is the OG of industrial manipulation, aren’t they? And they’ve got a new tactile sensing gripper, too. [ Robotiq ] Introducing ANYmal X, which is the least likely to explode quadruped currently available for purchase. [ ANYbotics ] For those of us who prefer to play tennis alone. [ LimX Dynamics ] At Yulong River Scenic Area in Guangxi, China, DEEPRobotics’ Lite3 quadruped robot and LYNX M20 wheeled-legged robot are working together across a range of real-world tourism scenarios. [ DEEP Robotics ] In April 2025, the MAVLab team from TU Delft competed in the A2RL Drone Racing Championship in Abu Dhabi. Their AI algorithm MonoRace won the AI Grand Challenge and then beat three human FPV world champions. The drone uses only a single onboard camera and an IMU for state estimation. An onboard neural network maps the estimated state directly to motor commands. [ MonoRace via Science Robotics ] This video from Starship is worth watching mostly for the b-roll of their early prototypes. [ Starship ] Meet SAWbot, a bio-inspired amphibious robot that swims using a continuous wave-like motion powered by a single motor. SAWbot is among the most energy-efficient swimming robots reported to date. It can swim, crawl on land, and transition between water and land while generating minimal disturbance to aquatic life. [ Paper via IEEE Robotics and Automation ] If you missed IROS this year, a bunch of the talks are now online, and here are a couple of good ones. [ IROS 2026 ]

ALT: Corl: What's Up Cool Kids?

Nov 9 – Nov 13, 2026 · JW Marriott & Hilton, Austin, TX, USA · Schedule, papers, and attendees on Lea

ALT: Corl Horl Reacts to 'That's A Lot Of Text'

ALT: Corl Horl: It's Pretty Big! It's Huge!

ALT: Corl and Corlhorl Play Leap Frog Game

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. CoRL 2026 : 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN Humanoids 2026 : 6–9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CA Enjoy today’s videos! A quadruped robot autonomously solves a giant Rubik’s Cube using only its feet. [ ETH Zurich Robotics Systems Lab ] Humans effortlessly react to the world; they adeptly return a tennis shot, catch a falling cup, step aside from a passing cart, or pass a box tossed during truck unloading. These everyday actions require anticipating a moving target and reflexively responding with the whole body within about a second. Such visual reactive whole-body control remains challenging for humanoids. We present Reflex, a three-stage framework that learns these capabilities stage by stage while connecting them through a compact representation of object dynamics. [ Reflex ] Thanks, Weikai! I have long advocated for exactly this in the context of robotic laundry folding , or more broadly, other robot recognition and manipulation tasks. Why not make it easy when we can make it easy? [ ACM SIGCHI ] We first wrote about Parallel Systems in 2022 , nice to see them still rolling. [ Parallel Systems ] I’ll be honest with you the end of this video is freaking me out a little bit for some reason. This video showcases the whole-body loco-manipulation capabilities of KAIST Humanoid v0.9, developed at the DRCD Lab in collaboration with RAILAB, which developed the robot’s arms. Using onboard visual feedback, the humanoid demonstrates pushing objects weighing up to 35 kg and lifting objects up to 20 kg to arrange the letters “KAIST.” [ KAIST DRCD Lab ] When you don’t spend any money on sensors for your robots, you can afford much bigger wheels. [ RaiLab Kaist ] Those robots with wires have gotten somewhat weirder. [ JSK Robotics Laboratory ] The AthenaZero has two, three-fingered robot hands driven by tendons. This design allows the fingers to interdigitate to hold objects of different sizes, such as an egg or a hammer. Each finger is powered by a motor located in the robot’s torso to keep the hand light, transmitting force through flexible cables. This hand is both fast (closing in about 80 milliseconds) and strong. With the addition of highly accurate barometric pressure sensors, it can also be gentle. [ Robotics and AI Institute ] via [ Science Robotics ] A biohybrid robot combines living tissue with engineered materials—here, lab-grown skeletal muscle paired with a soft, 3D-printed scaffold that turns the muscle’s contraction into movement. What if you designed the living muscle and the soft scaffold together, instead of growing the muscle and then building a skeleton around it? In this work from the Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich, we adapted a soft-body simulation framework to co-optimize both at once—and the resulting centimeter-scale bioactuators achieve up to 11x more range of motion than previous systems of comparable tissue volume. Strong enough to jump, swim, walk, and grasp. [ ETH Zurich Soft Robotics Lab ] Oh yes, this is definitely the use case that will scale humanoid robots. [ Unitree ] Here are a couple more teasers from the upcoming ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST): [ ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology ] In 3 hours on a single GPU, SuperMimic surpasses the return of a state-of-the-art motion tracker baseline trained for 7 days on 128 GPUs. It reduces GPU-hours by more than 1000× and fails on only 25 of 129,514 benchmark motions, versus 179 failures for the baseline. After 9.8 hours on two GPUs, SuperMimic achieves zero failures. [ Hybrid Robotics ] This is getting out of hand! Now there are two of them! Introducing the Grain Weevil dual robot attachment. Two robots linked into one larger machine, run by a single operator, doing the work of up to three robots. [ Grain Weevil ] Today [21 October 2026] at CES Unveiled Milan, Generative Bionics announced its plan to build Europe’s largest Physical AI Data Factory, with AMD as its AI infrastructure partner. [ Generative Bionics ] From robotic rovers exploring the rugged lunar landscape to lunar terrain vehicles carrying Artemis astronauts across the surface, mobility will play a crucial role in establishing an enduring human presence on the Moon. During the early phases of Moon Base development, these vehicles will help NASA investigate the lunar South Pole region, conduct scientific research, test new technologies, and gather the information that will inform future missions. In this Moon Base update, get a closer look at some of the lunar terrain vehicles and robotic rovers helping pave the way for humanity’s first lunar outpost. [ NASA ] I appreciate the designer of this single motor drone crediting previous research, which included some cool drones from UPenn that we wrote about in 2014. [ Joshua Bird ] Why choose a bipedal, human-form robot over specialized wheels, gantry arms, or quadruped platforms? Speaking at the Humanoids Summit Seoul 2026, Michael Perry from Persona AI tackles the single most debated question in the industry and delivers the definitive business and engineering justification for the humanoid form factor. [ Humanoids Summit ]

New York State Senate 50th District candidates Chris Ryan and James Corl discuss regional growth, housing stock, and infrastructure development.

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. CoRL 2026 : 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN Humanoids 2026 : 6–9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CA Enjoy today’s videos! When one robot loves another robot very much, and they’re connected by a wire, they can get together and make a brand new robot! SFW. [ JSK Lab ] What happens when Microducks meet? They start to sing together. Each Microduck syncs with its neighbors over Bluetooth, then they compose a song on the fly, in harmony and in perfect time. There’s no score and no conductor. Two, three, or four ducks are enough for a choir to break out. If Pollen isn’t selling Microducks in four packs for this exact reason, WHAT ARE THEY EVEN DOING!? [ Pollen ] In an internal test, Google DeepMind robotics researchers instructed Gemini 4 Argon to watch a video of a human playing cornhole. Using its video understanding and advanced reasoning capabilities, Gemini 4 built a virtual simulation in MuJoCo and accurately calculated the physics and whole-body control required for Apptronik’s Apollo 2 humanoid to sink seven consecutive shots in the real world. This Video-to-Sim-to-Real pipeline compresses weeks of manual modeling into a few hours, transforming ordinary videos into an infinite training ground for physical AI. [ Google DeepMind ] As of Oct. 11, 2026, NASA’s Perseverance rover has driven 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers), becoming the new off-world record-holder for total distance driven by any vehicle on the surface of another world. The previous record of 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers) was held by NASA’s Opportunity rover. Perseverance reached that mark on the 2,006th Martian day, or sol, of its mission, covering in five and a half years a distance that took Opportunity almost 15. [ JPL ] Let’s not argue about whether these are robots or not and just agree that they’re cool. [ OATs ] If one cute little robot can clean up one block, how many blocks can 40 cute little robots clean up? Science has the answers! [ Paper ] Thanks, Keisuke! Before Rosalind Franklin can explore Mars, it has to get off its lander. Engineers are rehearsing that first journey on Earth, using a full-size rover model and Mars-like terrain. The test recreates some of the challenges Rosalind Franklin will face on the Red Planet, from reduced gravity and a 20-degree incline to uneven ground and obstacles beneath its ramps. [ European Space Agency ] From custom part to running robot, the Atlas shop floor is built on precision, rapid assembly, and real-time collaboration. By machining parts in-house and streamlining assembly and repair under one roof, we are driving the manufacturing velocity needed to turn complex designs into walking hardware at scale. [ Boston Dynamics ] What can a quadruped robot do beyond the lab? Deep in China’s Ailao Mountains, DEEP Robotics M20S joined a team of researchers on a biodiversity field expedition—navigating rugged terrain, scouting routes ahead, carrying research equipment, and capturing wildlife in areas that are difficult to access on foot. [ DEEP Robotics ] The Kamino simulation software is a GPU-accelerated physics solver designed for accurate simulation of complex mechanical systems with kinematic loops, such as parallel manipulators, planar and spatial linkages, and multi-limbed robots with coupled joints, without requiring simplified approximations. [ Disney Research ] The original Kawasaki UNIMATE robot as featured in (remember this show?) the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1992. [ Kawasaki Robotics ] WildOS enables autonomous robots to perform long-range, open-vocabulary object search in previously unmapped and unstructured outdoor environments by unifying geometric safety with semantic visual reasoning. Through a vision-scored navigation graph and beyond-horizon target localization, the system demonstrates more efficient and robust exploration than conventional geometric or purely vision-based approaches in extensive field experiments. [ ETH Zurich Robotics Systems Lab ] Who needs an AI-generated person when you can have an actual robot that looks exactly like an AI-generated person instead? [ UBTECH Robotics ] The recovery behaviors here are impressive, but the robot is far slower than a human would be, suggesting that the value it generates is primarily in novelty. Which is fine, for now, but novelty wears off, and then what? [ Sharpa ] Here are a couple of good panels from ICRA 2026 in Vienna, including one on “Impact and Return on Investment on Humanoid Robots” and a second on “Advancing Sustainability in Robotics.” [ ICRA 2026 ]

Syracuse, N.Y. – State Sen. Chris Ryan and James Corl III agree on at least one point in their battle for the 50th Senate District seat in Central New York: Experience is one of the defining issues of...

Syracuse, N.Y. – State Sen. Chris Ryan and James Corl III agree on at least one point in their battle for the 50th Senate District seat in Central New York: Experience is one of the defining issues of...

ALT: Corl: What's Up Cool Kids?

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. CoRL 2026: 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN Humanoids 2026: 6–9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CA Enjoy today’s videos! It’s possible that I wasn’t the only one who thought that Figure’s recent stunt was somewhat ridiculous.

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. CoRL 2026 : 9–12 November 2026, AUSTIN Humanoids 2026 : 6–9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CA Enjoy today’s videos! It’s possible that I wasn’t the only one who thought that Figure’s recent stunt was somewhat ridiculous. Devanthro is in fact selling these plastic balls for $1000 each, and they’ll arrive in time for Christmas. [ Devanthro ] Not that anyone uses ringtones anymore, but if we did, this would be absolutely everywhere and I’d be loving it. [ Pollen ] Let’s not get too excited, but this thread-like linear motor is pretty sweet. [ Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne LMTS ] What is this robot for? It’s for doing exactly what you see here, that’s what it’s for. [ RAI Institute ] Humanoid robots still struggle to plan contact-rich whole-body manipulation from egocentric RGB and proprioception. Workhorse learns such manipulation from robot-free human demonstrations. On a real Unitree G1, Workhorse sorts boxes with its hands and a kick, catches a thrown box, and topples and climbs a suitcase. Yeah that happens to me too when I have a communication failure. [ Hybrid Robotics ] A car wash that models your vehicle then cleans it with robot arms? Interesting idea. The recent reviews from this location suggest that the robots aren’t quite up to snuff yet, but really seems like there’s potential here. [ KUKA ] So this is not the worst idea I’ve ever seen for what to do with humanoid robots. [ DEEP Robotics ] Some lovely manipulation with a deceptively simple gripper. [ Generalist ] I am genuinely embarrassed to say that this robot dances better than I do. [ General Robotics Lab ] MIT researchers developed SANDO, a new navigation system that helps robots safely navigate unfamiliar environments while avoiding moving obstacles. The system can rapidly plan and adjust a collision-free path using onboard sensors and computing, with safety backed by mathematical guarantees. [ MIT News ] Can you spot the part of this video that I’m side eyeing? Yep, it’s where the middle clip starts after the hand already has a good grip on that peelable strip. [ Sanctuary AI ] Inspired by feather stars, the NC State researchers report a soft underwater swimming robot capable of achieving three distinct swimming modes—jellyfish-like vertical swimming, fish-like directional steering, and rotor-like 3D reorientation—using only two pneumatic inputs. [ NC State University ] Here’s a series of mini-keynotes from ICRA earlier this year, on manipulation, humaonids, and embodied design. [ ICRA 2026 ]

ALT: Corl Horl: Silly Silly Person