2025-09-13 01:04:10
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.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Fourier’s First Care-bot GR-3. This full-size “Care-bot” is designed for interactive companion. Its soft-touch outer shell and multimodal emotional interaction system bring the concept of “warm tech companionship” to life.
I like that it’s soft to the touch, although I’m not sure that encouraging touch is safe. Reminds me a little bit of Valkyrie, where NASA put a lot of thought into the soft aspects of the robot.
[ Fourier ]
TAKE MY MONEY
This 112 gram micro air vehicle (MAV) features foldable propeller arms that can lock into a compact rectangular profile comparable to the size of a smartphone. The vehicle can be launched by simply throwing it in the air, at which point the arms would unfold and autonomously stabilize to a hovering state. Multiple flight tests demonstrated the capability of the feedback controller to stabilize the MAV from different initial conditions including tumbling rates of up to 2500 deg/s.
[ AVFL ]
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in collaboration with NASA, is advancing space robotics by deploying reinforcement learning algorithms onto Astrobee, a free-flying robotic assistant on board the International space station. This video highlights how NRL researchers are leveraging artificial intelligence to enable robots to learn, adapt, and perform tasks autonomously. By integrating reinforcement learning, Astrobee can improve maneuverability and optimize energy use.
[ NRL ]
Every day I’m scuttlin’
Trust is built. Every part of our robot Proxie—from wheels to eyes—is designed with trust in mind. Cobot CEO Brad Porter explains the intent behind its design.
[ Cobot ]
Phase 1: Build lots of small quadruped robots. Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit!
[ DEEP Robotics ]
LAPP USA partnered with Corvus Robotics to solve a long-standing supply chain challenge: labor-intensive, error-prone inventory counting.
[ Corvus ]
I’m pretty sure that 95 percent of all science consists of moving small amounts of liquid from one container to another.
[ Flexiv ]
Raffaello D’Andrea, interviewed at ICRA 2025.
[ Verity ]
Tessa Lau, interviewed at ICRA 2025.
[ Dusty Robotics ]
Ever wanted to look inside the mind behind a cutting-edge humanoid robot? In this special episode, we have Dr.Aaron, our Product Manager at LimX Dynamics, for an exclusive deep dive into the LimX Oli.
[ LimX Dynamics ]
2025-09-12 03:55:38
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Taro and delivered to your inbox for free!
During my first two years working at Meta, I was an individual contributor (IC) engineer. Then, after an encouraging review, my manager asked if I’d start managing a team of my own. I had received strong performance ratings and earned trust among my colleagues and the leadership team, and the organization’s headcount was consistently increasing each year.
This is the standard origin story for engineers who transition to management. But the skills required to succeed as an engineer and the ones a manager has to have are significantly different. Strong engineers succeed through rigorous analytical ability and deep work. Strong managers (whose work is decidedly un-analytical!) motivate and grow people’s careers, while also being prepared to jump into issues at a moment’s notice.
The ideal motivation to become a manager is simple: You care about people. Management is inherently a people-oriented job, which means managers should grow their reports through positive and constructive feedback. A good manager cares about discovering each person’s zone of genius and then assigning work that best matches that engineer’s profile. The byproduct of this is the ability to scale impact, but that should not be the primary motive.
A common, yet misguided, reason to switch to management is to earn more money. At least within Big Tech companies, managers and ICs at the same level are paid the same amount. In fact, some companies deliberately pay their managers less, simply to discourage mercenary engineers who are optimizing for compensation rather than people.
However, there is nuance here that’s worth calling out. At more senior levels, managers are promoted at faster rates compared to ICs. A manager’s impact is largely derived from their influence in an org, which includes the number of people in their reporting chain. A director with 50 engineers in their org can effectively “claim credit” for the people on their team.
On the other hand, an individual contributor at the director level must produce output that has a similar scale of impact to what the 50 engineers shipped. As you can imagine, this is much harder. IC promotions at these levels require a level of technical brilliance that is difficult to reliably reproduce.
Managers often get promoted as they accumulate more people under them. This process can happen through re-orgs or employee departures, not necessarily through the unique contributions of the manager. The result is that managers who stick around long enough will naturally grow their careers. Empirically, this is obvious in the data. At a company like Meta or Google, there are far more VP-level managers than there are IC engineers of the equivalent level.
In the long term, therefore, managers do earn more money than individual contributors. This is not necessarily wrong, but you should reflect on your incentives and determine what will make you fulfilled beyond the money.
I ended up saying yes to the management opportunity I was offered, and I’m very glad I did. Like any job, there were parts that I loved and parts that I didn’t, and I ended up switching back to the IC ladder within a year.
—Rahul
The U.S. space agency is undergoing a large “reduction in force,” which includes about 4,000 employees who have taken offers to leave their positions through a “deferred resignation program.” Where will ex-NASA engineers go next, and what does it mean for future missions?
A Nigerian engineering student describes his experience as part of a pair of articles on engineering education in Africa, from the perspective of both a student and teacher. “They describe the challenges they face and what they see as the path forward for a continent brimming with aspiring engineers but woefully short on the resources necessary for a robust education,” IEEE Spectrum’s editor-in-chief Harry Goldstein writes in an accompanying note.
Taking innovative tech to market can be tricky for engineers coming from a research background. In this guest post, the founder and CEO of a quantum-dot nanotechnology company shares the lessons he’s learned, and why scientific merit alone won’t guarantee market success.
2025-09-12 02:00:05
Every year IEEE members around the globe come together on IEEE Day to celebrate a shared legacy of innovation, collaboration, and service. First celebrated in 2009, the day commemorates the initial gathering of IEEE members to share their technical ideas in 1884.
This year the event will be held on 7 October. It promises to be bigger, bolder, and more inspiring than ever.
IEEE Day is not just a celebration of the past; it’s a rallying point for the future. The day honors the power that technology has to improve lives, as well as the volunteers who work to make it happen.
From its humble beginnings as a grassroots initiative, IEEE Day has grown into a global celebration with thousands of events hosted by IEEE affinity groups, sections, society chapters, and student branches. The events include technical talks, hackathons, community outreach programs, networking mixers, and cultural showcases. Each one reflects the diversity and creativity of IEEE’s membership as well as the shared mission to advance technology for humanity.
“IEEE Day 2025 is a celebration of innovation, collaboration, and the incredible impact our members create worldwide,” says Abdul Salik, this year’s event chair. “I encourage everyone to join in, share their stories, and be part of this global movement.”
Whether you’re a longtime member, a volunteer, or have recently joined, there are many ways to participate.
Whether you’re planning an event, mentoring a student, or simply sharing your story, your participation can help amplify the spirit of IEEE and inspire the next generation of innovators. Visit the IEEE Day website and follow along on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn.
If you need more information, email the IEEE Day team
2025-09-11 21:00:00
Over the next several years, humanoid robots will change the nature of work. Or at least, that’s what humanoid robotics companies have been consistently promising, enabling them to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at valuations that run into the billions.
Delivering on these promises will require a lot of robots. Agility Robotics expects to ship “hundreds” of its Digit robots in 2025 and has a factory in Oregon capable of building over 10,000 robots per year. Tesla is planning to produce 5,000 of its Optimus robots in 2025, and at least 50,000 in 2026. Figure believes “there is a path to 100,000 robots” by 2029. And these are just three of the largest companies in an increasingly crowded space.
Amplifying this message are many financial analysts: Bank of America Global Research, for example, predicts that global humanoid robot shipments will reach 18,000 units in 2025. And Morgan Stanley Research estimates that by 2050 there could be over 1 billion humanoid robots, part of a US $5 trillion market.
But as of now, the market for humanoid robots is almost entirely hypothetical. Even the most successful companies in this space have deployed only a small handful of robots in carefully controlled pilot projects. And future projections seem to be based on an extraordinarily broad interpretation of jobs that a capable, efficient, and safe humanoid robot—which does not currently exist—might conceivably be able to do. Can the current reality connect with the promised scale?
Physically building tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of humanoid robots, is certainly possible in the near term. In 2023, on the order of 500,000 industrial robots were installed worldwide. Under the basic assumption that a humanoid robot is approximately equivalent to four industrial arms in terms of components, existing supply chains should be able to support even the most optimistic near-term projections for humanoid manufacturing.
But simply building the robots is arguably the easiest part of scaling humanoids, says Melonee Wise, who served as chief product officer at Agility Robotics until this month. “The bigger problem is demand—I don’t think anyone has found an application for humanoids that would require several thousand robots per facility.” Large deployments, Wise explains, are the most realistic way for a robotics company to scale its business, since onboarding any new client can take weeks or months. An alternative approach to deploying several thousand robots to do a single job is to deploy several hundred robots that can each do 10 jobs, which seems to be what most of the humanoid industry is betting on in the medium to long term.
While there’s a belief across much of the humanoid robotics industry that rapid progress in AI must somehow translate into rapid progress toward multipurpose robots, it’s not clear how, when, or if that will happen. “I think what a lot of people are hoping for is they’re going to AI their way out of this,” says Wise. “But the reality of the situation is that currently AI is not robust enough to meet the requirements of the market.”
Market requirements for humanoid robots include a slew of extremely dull, extremely critical things like battery life, reliability, and safety. Of these, battery life is the most straightforward—for a robot to usefully do a job, it can’t spend most of its time charging. The next version of Agility’s Digit robot, which can handle payloads of up to 16 kilograms, includes a bulky “backpack” containing a battery with a charging ratio of 10 to 1: The robot can run for 90 minutes, and fully recharge in 9 minutes. Slimmer humanoid robots from other companies must necessarily be making compromises to maintain their svelte form factors.
In operation, Digit will probably spend a few minutes charging after running for 30 minutes. That’s because 60 minutes of Digit’s runtime is essentially a reserve in case something happens in its workspace that requires it to temporarily pause, a not-infrequent occurrence in the logistics and manufacturing environments that Agility is targeting. Without a 60-minute reserve, the robot would be much more likely to run out of power mid-task and need to be manually recharged. Consider what that might look like with even a modest deployment of several hundred robots weighing over a hundred kilograms each. “No one wants to deal with that,” comments Wise.
Potential customers for humanoid robots are very concerned with downtime. Over the course of a month, a factory operating at 99 percent reliability will see approximately 5 hours of downtime. Wise says that any downtime that stops something like a production line can cost tens of thousands of dollars per minute, which is why many industrial customers expect a couple more 9s of reliability: 99.99 percent. Wise says that Agility has demonstrated this level of reliability in some specific applications, but not in the context of multipurpose or general-purpose functionality.
A humanoid robot in an industrial environment must meet general safety requirements for industrial machines. In the past, robotic systems like autonomous vehicles and drones have benefited from immature regulatory environments to scale quickly. But Wise says that approach can’t work for humanoids, because the industry is already heavily regulated—the robot is simply considered another piece of machinery.
There are also more specific safety standards currently under development for humanoid robots, explains Matt Powers, associate director of autonomy R&D at Boston Dynamics. He notes that his company is helping develop an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) safety standard for dynamically balancing legged robots. “We’re very happy that the top players in the field, like Agility and Figure, are joining us in developing a way to explain why we believe that the systems that we’re deploying are safe,” Powers says.
These standards are necessary because the traditional safety approach of cutting power may not be a good option for a dynamically balancing system. Doing so will cause a humanoid robot to fall over, potentially making the situation even worse. There is no simple solution to this problem, and the initial approach that Boston Dynamics expects to take with its Atlas robot is to keep the robot out of situations where simply powering it off might not be the best option. “We’re going to start with relatively low-risk deployments, and then expand as we build confidence in our safety systems,” Powers says. “I think a methodical approach is really going to be the winner here.”
In practice, low risk means keeping humanoid robots away from people. But humanoids that are restricted by what jobs they can safely do and where they can safely move are going to have more trouble finding tasks that provide value.
The issues of demand, battery life, reliability, and safety all need to be solved before humanoid robots can scale. But a more fundamental question to ask is whether a bipedal robot is actually worth the trouble.
Dynamic balancing with legs would theoretically enable these robots to navigate complex environments like a human. Yet demo videos show these humanoid robots as either mostly stationary or repetitively moving short distances over flat floors. The promise is that what we’re seeing now is just the first step toward humanlike mobility. But in the short to medium term, there are much more reliable, efficient, and cost-effective platforms that can take over in these situations: robots with arms, but with wheels instead of legs.
Safe and reliable humanoid robots have the potential to revolutionize the labor market at some point in the future. But potential is just that, and despite the humanoid enthusiasm, we have to be realistic about what it will take to turn potential into reality.
This article appears in the October 2025 print issue as “Why Humanoid Robots Aren’t Scaling.”
2025-09-11 20:00:03
Natcast, the non-profit organization created to run the U.S. CHIPS & Science Act’s National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) told the majority of its staff they would be laid off this week, IEEE Spectrum has learned. A small core team will continue on to shut Natcast down over the next few weeks, a person familiar with the matter said.
The organization was founded in 2023 to run NSTC, which the law established to conduct “research and prototyping of advanced semiconductor technology and grow the domestic semiconductor workforce to strengthen the economic competitiveness and security of the domestic supply chain.”
However, on 25 August Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stated that the department would not deliver the US $7.4 billion in funds under its contract with the government. In an accusatory letter to Natcast CEO Deirdre Hanford and a press release, Lutnick claimed the nonprofit was not created legally, and said that the National Institute of Standards and Technology would be taking over NSTC operations.
The Commerce Department has been suppressing Natcast’s operations for many months, IEEE Spectrum has learned. According to multiple sources, the organization’s research agenda was completed in April and should have been accepted and processed by Commerce in a matter of weeks. But it never happened. A memo selecting awardees for research into reducing the impact of perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from semiconductor manufacturing was submitted to Commerce but never approved. Three groups won parts of a $30 million grant to transform the design of RF chips using machine learning, but at least one awardee has gotten no word on when or whether the funding will flow.
“This is a sad end,” said one person who requested anonymity and was involved in early debate about the NSTC.
Lutnick’s characterization of Natcast’s creation as cronyism “is pretty frustrating,” this person continued. The idea that NSTC would be operated by an independent public-private partnership, which is written into the law, came from deep consultation with industry and was intended to insulate its work from politics. The organization needed such protection to make good technical decisions, because in selecting who gets funds “there are always more losers than winners,” this person said.
Over the past week, Natcast has been defending itself and its staff against Lutnick’s accusations. On 4 September, in a letter to its 200 members, Hanford countered Lutnick’s assertions that the organization was packed with Biden administration cronies and that it was run as a “slush fund.” Hanford pointed to the multiple layers of government and industry oversight Natcast operates under and the experienced semiconductor industry staff it has brought on. She added that the nonprofit had stuck to its agreements with the government, submitting 119 “milestones and deliverables” to Commerce.
On 8 September, Natcast published a detailed overview of what it has done so far. Accomplishments included creating an industry-driven R&D agenda, the development of multiple workforce programs, and the signing on of some 200 members. These members included cutting-edge logic and memory companies (such as Intel, Nvidia, SK Hynix, and TSMC), small companies like Atomera, EnCharge AI, and Polar Semiconductor, and multiple universities and makers of semiconductor tools and equipment.
Members had the right to use facilities and other infrastructure that Natcast was standing up (for a fee) and participate in research. One goal for the infrastructure was to reduce the time from concept to prototype by 30 percent. Access to the tools and processes NSTC would provide is out of reach for even some of the country’s top researchers, IEEE Spectrum’s source said. Without that access, startups and researchers won’t be able to afford to do relevant work using 300-millimeter wafers and advanced chip-technology nodes. Despite the fact that not all of its facilities were complete, Natcast had plans to proceed with research by chaining together existing infrastructure around the country.
In addition, the document from 8 September detailed the expert in-house team at Natcast, and said that expertise allowed it to evaluate R&D awards at twice the rate of federal agencies while requiring considerably less overhead than government, universities, and non-profit research organizations like Imec. (It forecast a 10 percent overhead on expenses over 10 years.)
“Natcast was supposed to do what industry couldn’t solve by itself,” said a source familiar with the situation. Its R&D program was aimed at solving big problems, such as collapsing the time and energy required to move data between memory and computing, in a way that the whole industry could benefit from.
2025-09-11 18:00:02
The future of robotics is being shaped by powerful technologies like AI, edge computing, and high-speed connectivity, driving smarter, more responsive machines across industries. Robots are no longer confined to static environments—they are evolving to interact dynamically with humans and their surroundings.
This eBook explores the impact of robotics in diverse fields, from home automation and medical technology to automotive, data centers, and industrial applications. It highlights challenges like power efficiency, miniaturization, and ruggedization, while showcasing Molex’s innovative solutions tailored for each domain.
Additionally, the eBook covers: