2025-12-13 01:00:02
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!
Suzumori Endo Lab, Science Tokyo has developed a dog musculoskeletal robot using thin McKibben muscles. This robot mimics the flexible “hammock-like” shoulder structure to investigate the biomechanical functions of dog musculoskeletal systems.
[ Suzimori Endo Robotics Laboratory ]
HOLEY SNAILBOT!!!
We present a system that transforms speech into physical objects using 3D generative AI and discrete robotic assembly. By leveraging natural language, the system makes design and manufacturing more accessible to people without expertise in 3D modeling or robotic programming.
[ MIT ]
Meet the next generation of edge AI. A fully self-contained vision system built for robotics, automation, and real-world intelligence. Watch how OAK 4 brings compute, sensing, and 3D perception together in one device.
[ Luxonis ]
Thanks, Max!
Inspired by vines’ twisty tenacity, engineers at MIT and Stanford University have developed a robotic gripper that can snake around and lift a variety of objects, including a glass vase and a watermelon, offering a gentler approach compared to conventional gripper designs. A larger version of the robo-tendrils can also safely lift a human out of bed.
[ MIT ]
The paper introduces an automatic limb attachment system using soft actuated straps and a magnet-hook latch for wearable robots. It enables fast, secure, and comfortable self-donning across various arm sizes, supporting clinical-level loads and precise pressure control.
[ Paper ]
Thanks, Bram!
Autonomous driving is the ultimate challenge for AI in the physical world. At Waymo, we’re solving it by prioritizing demonstrably safe AI, where safety is central to how we engineer our models and AI ecosystem from the ground up.
[ Waymo ]
Built by Texas A&M engineering students, this AI-powered robotic dog is reimagining how robots operate in disaster zones. Designed to climb through rubble, avoid hazards and make autonomous decisions in real time, the robot uses a custom multimodal large language model (MLLM) combined with visual memory and voice commands to see, remember and plan its next move like a first responder.
[ Texas A&M ]
So far, aerial microrobots have only been able to fly slowly along smooth trajectories, far from the swift, agile flight of real insects — until now. MIT researchers have demonstrated aerial microrobots that can fly with speed and agility that is comparable to their biological counterparts. A collaborative team designed a new AI-based controller for the robotic bug that enabled it to follow gymnastic flight paths, such as executing continuous body flips.
[ MIT ]
In this audio clip generated by data from the SuperCam microphone aboard NASA’s Perseverance, the sound of an electrical discharge can be heard as a Martian dust devil flies over the Mars rover. The recording was collected on Oct. 12, 2024, the 1,296th Martian day, or sol, of Perseverance’s mission on the Red Planet.
[ NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory ]
In this episode, we open the archives on host Hannah Fry’s visit to our California robotics lab. Filmed earlier this year, Hannah interacts with a new set of robots—those that don’t just see, but think, plan, and do. Watch as the team goes behind the scenes to test the limits of generalization, challenging robots to handle unseen objects autonomously.
[ Google DeepMind ]
This GRASP on Robotics Seminar is by Parastoo Abtahi from Princeton University, on “When Robots Disappear – From Haptic Illusions in VR to Object-Oriented Interactions in AR”.
Advances in audiovisual rendering have led to the commercialization of virtual reality (VR); however, haptic technology has not kept up with these advances. While a variety of robotic systems aim to address this gap by simulating the sensation of touch, many hardware limitations make realistic touch interactions in VR challenging. In my research, I explore how, by understanding human perception through the lens of sensorimotor control theory, we can design interactions that not only overcome the current limitations of robotic hardware for VR but also extend our abilities beyond what is possible in the physical world.
In the first part of this talk, I will present my work on redirection illusions that leverage the limits of human perception to improve the perceived performance of encountered-type haptic devices in VR, such as the position accuracy of drones and the resolution of shape displays. In the second part, I will share how we apply these illusory interactions to physical spaces and use augmented reality (AR) to facilitate situated and bidirectional human-robot communication, bridging users’ mental models and robotic representations.
2025-12-12 23:50:07
Join Stephen Cass, Dina Genkina, and Kohava Mendelsohn as they discuss whether AI spells the end of distinct programming languages as we know it. IEEE Spectrum publishes a respected annual ranking of the year’s Top Programming Languages—but could this year be our last? This recording of the live webinar covers how AI is rapidly changing the landscape of programming languages, why knowing the best languages might not be necessary in your career, and what skills you’ll need instead.
- YouTube
2025-12-12 23:01:32
This is a sponsored article brought to you by The University of Sheffield.
Across global electricity networks, the shift to renewable energy has fundamentally changed the behavior of power systems. Decades of engineering assumptions, predictable inertia, dispatchable baseload generation, and slow, well-characterized system dynamics, are now eroding as wind and solar become dominant sources of electricity. Grid operators face increasingly steep ramp events, larger frequency excursions, faster transients, and prolonged periods where fossil generation is minimal or absent.
In this environment, battery energy storage systems (BESS) have emerged as essential tools for maintaining stability. They can respond in milliseconds, deliver precise power control, and operate flexibly across a range of services. But unlike conventional generation, batteries are sensitive to operational history, thermal environment, state of charge window, system architecture, and degradation mechanisms. Their long-term behavior cannot be described by a single model or simple efficiency curve, it is the product of complex electrochemical, thermal, and control interactions.
Most laboratory tests and simulations attempt to capture these effects, but they rarely reproduce the operational irregularities of the grid. Batteries in real markets are exposed to rapid fluctuations in power demand, partial state of charge cycling, fast recovery intervals, high-rate events, and unpredictable disturbances. As Professor Dan Gladwin, who leads Sheffield’s research into grid-connected energy storage, puts it, “you only understand how storage behaves when you expose it to the conditions it actually sees on the grid.”
This disconnect creates a fundamental challenge for the industry: How can we trust degradation models, lifetime predictions, and operational strategies if they have never been validated against genuine grid behavior?
Few research institutions have access to the infrastructure needed to answer that question. The University of Sheffield is one of them.
Sheffield’s Centre for Research into Electrical Energy Storage and Applications (CREESA) operates one of the UK’s only research-led, grid-connected, multi-megawatt battery energy storage testbeds. The University of Sheffield
The Centre for Research into Electrical Energy Storage and Applications (CREESA) operates one of the UK’s only research-led, grid-connected, multi-megawatt battery energy storage testbeds. This environment enables researchers to test storage technologies not just in simulation or controlled cycling rigs, but under full-scale, live grid conditions. As Professor Gladwin notes, “we aim to bridge the gap between controlled laboratory research and the demands of real grid operation.”
At the heart of the facility is an 11 kV, 4 MW network connection that provides the electrical and operational realism required for advanced diagnostics, fault studies, control algorithm development, techno-economic analysis, and lifetime modeling. Unlike microgrid scale demonstrators or isolated laboratory benches, Sheffield’s environment allows energy storage assets to interact with the same disturbances, market signals, and grid dynamics they would experience in commercial deployment.
“The ability to test at scale, under real operational conditions, is what gives us insights that simulation alone cannot provide.” —Professor Dan Gladwin, The University of Sheffield
The facility includes:
The infrastructure allows Sheffield to operate storage assets directly on the live grid, where they respond to real market signals, deliver contracted power services, and experience genuine frequency deviations, voltage events, and operational disturbances. When controlled experiments are required, the same platform can replay historical grid and market signals, enabling repeatable full power testing under conditions that faithfully reflect commercial operation. This combination provides empirical data of a quality and realism rarely available outside utility-scale deployments, allowing researchers to analyse system behavior at millisecond timescales and gather data at a granularity rarely achievable in conventional laboratory environments.
According to Professor Gladwin, “the ability to test at scale, under real operational conditions, is what gives us insights that simulation alone cannot provide.”
Dan Gladwin, Professor of Electrical and Control Systems Engineering, leads Sheffield’s research into grid-connected energy storage.The University of Sheffield
One of Sheffield’s earliest breakthroughs came with the installation of a 2 MW / 1 MWh lithium titanate demonstrator, a first-of-a-kind system installed at a time when the UK had no established standards for BESS connection, safety, or control. Professor Gladwin led the engineering, design, installation, and commissioning of the system, establishing one of the country’s first independent megawatt scale storage platforms.
The project provided deep insight into how high-power battery chemistries behave under grid stressors. Researchers observed sub-second response times and measured the system’s capability to deliver synthetic inertia-like behavior. As Gladwin reflects, “that project showed us just how fast and capable storage could be when properly integrated into the grid.”
But the demonstrator’s long-term value has been its continued operation. Over nearly a decade of research, it has served as a platform for:
A recurring finding is that behavior observed on the live grid often differs significantly from what laboratory tests predict. Subtle electrical, thermal, and balance-of-plant interactions that barely register in controlled experiments can become important at megawatt-scale, especially when systems are exposed to rapid cycling, fluctuating set-points, or tightly coupled control actions. Variations in efficiency, cooling system response, and auxiliary power demand can also amplify these effects under real operating stress. As Professor Gladwin notes, “phenomena that never appear in a lab can dominate behavior at megawatt scale.”
These real-world insights feed directly into improved system design. By understanding how efficiency losses, thermal behavior, auxiliary systems, and control interactions emerge at scale, researchers can refine both the assumptions and architecture of future deployments. This closes the loop between application and design, ensuring that new storage systems can be engineered for the operational conditions they will genuinely encounter rather than idealized laboratory expectations.
Sheffield’s Centre for Research into Electrical Energy Storage and Applications (CREESA) enables researchers to test storage technologies not just in simulation or controlled cycling rigs, but under full-scale, live grid conditions.The University of Sheffield
A major focus is accurate state estimation during highly dynamic operation. Using advanced observers, Kalman filtering, and hybrid physics-ML approaches, the team has developed methods that deliver reliable SOC, SOH and SOP estimates during rapid power swings, irregular cycling, and noisy conditions where traditional methods break down.
Another key contribution is understanding cell-to-cell divergence in large strings. Sheffield’s data shows how imbalance accelerates near SOC extremes, how thermal gradients drive uneven ageing, and how current distribution causes long-term drift. These insights inform balancing strategies that improve usable capacity and safety.
Sheffield has also strengthened lifetime and degradation modeling by incorporating real grid behavior directly into the framework. By analyzing actual market signals, frequency deviations, and dispatch patterns, the team uncovers ageing mechanisms that do not appear during controlled laboratory cycling and would otherwise remain hidden.
These contributions fall into four core areas:
Beyond grid-connected systems, Sheffield’s diagnostic methods have also proved valuable in off-grid environments. A key example is the collaboration with MOPO, a company deploying pay-per-swap lithium-ion battery packs in low-income communities across Sub-Saharan Africa. These batteries face deep cycling, variable user behavior, and sustained high temperatures, all without active cooling or controlled environments. The team’s techniques in cell characterization, parameter estimation, and in-situ health tracking have helped extend the usable life of MOPO’s battery packs. “By applying our know-how, we can make these battery-swap packs clean, safe, and significantly more affordable than petrol and diesel generators for the communities that rely on them,” says Professor Gladwin.
Beyond grid-connected systems, Sheffield’s diagnostic methods have also proved valuable in off-grid environments. A key example is the collaboration with MOPO, a company deploying pay-per-swap lithium-ion battery packs in low-income communities across Sub-Saharan Africa. MOPO
A defining strength of Sheffield’s approach is its close integration with industry, system operators, technology developers, and service providers. Over the past decade, its grid-connected testbed has enabled organisations to trial control algorithms, commission their first battery assets, test market participation strategies, and validate performance under real operational constraints.
These partnerships have produced practical engineering outcomes, including improved dispatch strategies, refined control architectures, validated installation and commissioning methods, and a clearer understanding of degradation under real-world market operation. According to Gladwin, “It is a two-way relationship, we bring the analytical and research tools, industry brings the operational context and scale.”
One of Sheffield’s earliest breakthroughs came with the installation of a 2 MW / 1 MWh lithium titanate demonstrator. Professor Gladwin led the engineering, design, installation, and commissioning of the system, establishing one of UK’s first independent megawatt scale storage platforms.The University of Sheffield
This two-way exchange, combining academic insight with operational experience, ensures that Sheffield’s research remains directly relevant to modern power systems. It continues to shape best practice in lifetime modelling, hybrid system control, diagnostics, and operational optimisation.
As electricity systems worldwide move toward net zero, the need for validated models, proven control algorithms, and empirical understanding will only grow. Sheffield’s combination of full-scale infrastructure, long-term datasets, and collaborative research culture ensures it will remain at the forefront of developing storage technologies that perform reliably in the environments that matter most, the real world.
2025-12-12 21:26:23
In late April of 1968, a computer conference in Atlantic City, N.J., got off to a rocky start. A strike by telephone operators prevented exhibitors from linking their terminals to off-site computers, as union-sympathetic workers refused to wire up the necessary connections. Companies’ displays were effectively dead.
This article is an adapted excerpt from W. Patrick McCray’s README: A Bookish History of Computing From Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (The MIT Press, 2025).MIT Press
But a small cohort of teenage computer enthusiasts from the Princeton, N.J., area flaunted a clever work-around: They borrowed an acoustic coupler—a forerunner of the computer modem—and connected it to a nearby pay phone. With this hardware in place, the youngsters dialed in to an off-site minicomputer.
The teenagers called themselves the RESISTORS, a retronym (they picked the moniker first and then matched words to the letters) for “Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology, Or Research Studies.” The trade publication Computerworld gave the RESISTORS front-page billing—“Students Steal Show as Conference Opens”—and noted how the group drew a “fascinated crowd” of computer professionals. A reporter even suggested that the RESISTORS represented the vanguard of a small-scale social movement as the teens sought to engage with their counterparts from “underprivileged areas of Trenton” and introduce them to personal computing.
RESISTOR Peter Eichenberger works on a DEC PDP-8 computer, which Claude Kagan convinced the company to donate to the group.Chuck Ehrlich
In the modern history of computing, a story about a small cohort of teens “playing” with computers might seem tangential. But the previously untold history of the RESISTORS highlights the fact that, years before there were machines called personal computers, some people regularly accessed computers for activities unrelated to their professional lives. Motives varied, but entertainment as well as the display of technical prowess mattered. Just as important, the story of the RESISTORS expands our sense of the hobbyist community beyond later and better-known groups like the Bay Area’s Homebrew Computer Club.
Fewer than 70 kids claimed membership in the RESISTORS over the group’s roughly decade-long existence. Nonetheless, a surprisingly large number of them went on to have careers in technology and science. Two members wrote books about computing that would sell millions of copies. Another member cofounded Cisco Systems, which got its start manufacturing Internet routers and other networking hardware and is now a multibillion-dollar business. Others became college professors or professional programmers. And starting around 1969, the RESISTORS became linked to computer pioneer Ted Nelson (more on that later).
An engineer named Claude Kagan was the nucleus around which the RESISTORS first organized. Born in 1924 in Orval, France, Kagan moved to the United States as a teen, served in the army, and earned an M.S. from Cornell University in 1950. He took a position with Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T, and in 1958, he moved to Hopewell Township, N.J., a short drive from Princeton.
Electrical engineer Claude Kagan [second from left] encouraged the RESISTORS to learn computing, using the large collection of used equipment stored in his barn. Chuck Ehrlich
Kagan’s specialty was high-level computer languages, such as Fortran and BASIC, in which programmers write code that is largely independent of the particular type of computer. He was also an inveterate collector of old computers and other electronics, which he stored in a large red barn on his property that was also home to some donkeys and malamutes.
Chuck Ehrlich, one of the original RESISTORS and later an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, recalls that in late 1966, he and a small group of “brainy social outcasts” were looking for some sort of clubhouse. The kids weren’t interested in smoking pot or social protests, and they were disenchanted with the science classes offered at their local schools. But they were into electronics.
Kagan knew one of the teens’ fathers and offered to let the group use his barn. They soon discovered Kagan’s collection of artifacts, including a surplus IBM paper tape punch, some analog telephone equipment, and a Friden Flexowriter (a kind of heavy-duty typewriter that could be linked to a computer).
The first computer the RESISTORS used was a Burroughs Datatron 205 mainframe, which occupied most of two walls in Kagan’s barn.David Gesswein
But the main attraction for the teens were Kagan’s computers. The most imposing of these was a Burroughs Datatron 205, a computer first manufactured in the mid-1950s and based on vacuum tubes. The enormous machine weighed several tons, and stories circulated about how Kagan had borrowed a tractor trailer to heroically transport the behemoth from Michigan to New Jersey.
Only slightly less imposing was an inoperable Packard Bell PB250, a refrigerator-size computer of more recent vintage that the teens managed to get working. Kagan also allowed the teens to connect to his employer’s DEC PDP-8 machine via teletype over phone lines so they could run programs written in TRAC (Text Reckoning And Compiling). Developed starting in 1959 by computer scientist Calvin Mooers, TRAC was an efficient language amenable to being run on machines that had relatively little memory. The teens were fond of connecting to the off-site computer and accessing a version of Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA chatbot program.
Being able to work with computers interactively and in real time was generally unavailable to nonprofessional computer users at the time. Kagan eventually persuaded the Digital Equipment Corp. to donate a PDP-8—no trivial gift, as new models sold for US $15,000 or more—which the RESISTORS worked with in the barn.
One of the donkeys in Claude Kagan’s barn looks on as RESISTOR Doug Timbie works on some equipment.John A. Pietras/The Evening Times; Trenton Free Public Library
The bargain Kagan struck with the RESISTORS was unusual for several reasons. First, Kagan was gay, a fact that the teens (and their parents) were aware of but which, by all accounts, bothered no one. When the Hopewell Valley Jaycee-ettes held a house tour in April 1966, the brochure encouraged people to visit Kagan’s “unique bachelor setting” that he shared with artist George Furnish. Furnish passed away around the time the RESISTORS were forming, and the grieving Kagan assumed multiple roles for the group: guru, mentor, publicity agent, and landlord. Kagan provided the space, while the teens were responsible for maintaining both it and the equipment as well as covering the cost of electricity.
Most amateur computer clubs of the era were masculine spaces, but photographs of the RESISTORS almost always show one or more young women working at a terminal or solving a programming problem. When it came to deciding whose turn it was to use a machine, Jean Hunter—later a professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell—likened it to social time-sharing that required “beating people over the head to make them give you a turn.” John R. Levine, who was a RESISTOR before studying computer science at Yale and later coauthoring the bestseller The Internet for Dummies, recalled, “We were so nerdy that it didn’t occur to us that girls [would] be any different in terms of what they could do.”
There were also efforts to recruit African American teens from schools in Trenton. One of these kids, Joseph Tulloch, provided quirky, Dr. Seuss-like illustrations for a programming manual that Kagan and the teens assembled and published. Tulloch later became a programmer for the state of New Jersey.
New members were initiated into the group by having an omega sign, the engineer’s symbol for electrical resistance, drawn on their face with a Magic Marker (these were teenagers after all). One of the first things a new member would learn was how to use TRAC to write programs. For his part, Kagan held a dim view of traditional learning as practiced in local classrooms. He instead insisted that the RESISTORS learn by doing. The group’s pedagogical approach came from the African American motto “Each one, teach one.” As one member recalled, “If you want to teach someone how to do something, you had to let them sit at the keyboard.”
The RESISTORS’ location in the Princeton area contributed to their success. Several members had parents employed at nearby technology companies, such as AT&T and RCA. Others, such as Nat Kuhn, had parents who worked at Princeton University. Kuhn’s father was Thomas Kuhn, a historian and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the landmark book that introduced “paradigm shift” into the vernacular.
Twelve-year-old Nat Kuhn was just 10 when he joined the RESISTORS. “I was super geeky,” he later recalled. David Fox
As a kid, Nat built devices from hobbyist electronics kits with his father, a former physicist. Nat joined the RESISTORS after attending an open house the group sponsored in February 1968 at the Princeton Junior Museum. He was just 10 years old at the time. “I was super geeky,” he recalled, “and the computer became my hobby and obsession. You could understand things through it and make things happen.”
Soon after Nat had his face inked with an omega sign, another person, much older but just as passionate about personal computing, started showing up at Claude Kagan’s barn.
Ted Nelson had majored in philosophy at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1959, and then studied sociology at the University of Chicago and later Harvard, where he took his first computer course. Nelson’s 2010 autobiography includes a whole chapter, titled “The Epiphany of Ted Nelson,” about this revelatory experience. When he realized that the computer, instead of a dreary number-crunching device, “could be whatever it was programmed to be,” his “world exploded.”
Ted Nelson met the RESISTORS in the late 1960s, when he was developing his ideas around hypertext and globally interconnected networks for publishing.Ted Nelson
Nelson had a penchant for writing, and so an even bigger revelation was that computers could handle text by manipulating, storing, printing, and, above all, displaying it on screens. And, if this could be done with text, it could probably also be done with images and sound. “The future of mankind was at the computer screen,” he decided, as the “interactive computer would become the workplace of the future.”
Equally profound for Nelson was recognizing that once a person had text on a computer screen, they could use it to construct parallel, nonsequential textual passages. These word assemblages could then be linked to one another or branch off in entirely new directions—a farsighted idea for the time.
In 1964, Nelson accepted a teaching position at Vassar College, where his new colleagues invited him to describe how the future of work and artistic creativity would happen on computer screens. In the promotional flyer for the talk, he introduced a new word: hypertext.
Some of the ideas that Ted Nelson discussed with the RESISTORS later turned up in Nelson’s opus Computer Lib/Dream Machines.Microsoft Press
As Nelson defined it in a 1965 paper, hypertext meant “a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.” Almost any topic could, in principle, be represented on a computer screen with “links” connecting one entry to another, along with annotation, footnotes, and summaries, while also including “every feature a novelist or absent-minded professor could want.”
Nelson imagined that his system of information storage, retrieval, and documentation could “grow indefinitely,” containing more and more of the world’s knowledge while revealing important connections between all of the entries.
Nelson soon quit Vassar and started raising money and his professional profile. His goal was to design and implement a universal text handling, publishing, and globally connected electronic library system, which he named Project Xanadu, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” (It’s also the name of Charles Foster Kane’s mansion in Orson Welles’s 1941 classic, Citizen Kane.) Xanadu would turn into Nelson’s lifelong obsession.
The catalyst that brought Nelson together with Claude Kagan and the RESISTORS wasn’t some new computer but an avant-garde art show. In the fall of 1970, a lavish new exhibition titled Software opened at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Museum director Karl Katz handpicked the influential art theorist Jack Burnham to curate the show. Burnham, in turn, was inspired by Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic concepts and wanted to explore how conceptual artists might experiment with new computing technologies, such as “real-time computing” and “interactivity,” in a gallery setting. The exhibition gave thousands of visitors an opportunity to see, and in some cases use, minicomputers, teletype equipment, high-speed copy machines, and closed-circuit television.
When the Jewish Museum launched an ambitious art and tech exhibition in 1970, members of the RESISTORS collaborated with artists and provided tech support. The Jewish Museum
A contributor to the show and its technical adviser, Ted Nelson recruited the RESISTORS to help him and some of the artists. As he later wrote in his influential 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, “Some people are too proud to ask children for information. This is dumb. Information is where you find it.” For Agnes Denes, a Hungarian-born conceptual artist, the teens coded a minicomputer to animate triangles on a screen for a piece called Trigonal Ballet. For conceptual artist Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim, the teens used the I Ching to program a piece called Conceptual Typewriter. A visitor could select one of several buttons, such as “the silent” (represented by a circle) or “the providing” (illustrated by sheaves of wheat), and then use a light pen to alter the image. Both artists provided the initial ideas, but the RESISTORS executed them.
Nelson, working with programmer Ned Woodman, contributed a piece titled Labyrinth. Running on a PDP-8 that DEC provided, Labyrinth was explained as “the first public demonstration of a hypertext system.” To use it, a visitor would sit at a terminal and begin reading the displayed text. For the passage “The exhibition you are attending is called Software. It was organized by Jack Burnham,” you could use keystrokes (such as F for forward) to navigate the text and retrieve a definition of “software” or biographical details about Burnham.
Conceptual artist Agnes Denes [right] programmed her piece Trigonal Ballet at the Jewish Museum with help from RESISTORS [from left] Peter Eichenberger, J Laurence Sarno, and John Levine.The Jewish Museum
For many museumgoers, the entire exhibition suggested a technological future where people easily navigated the information-rich realm of what would become known as cyberspace.
The RESISTORS, meanwhile, gradually faded throughout the 1970s as its members went off to college and the supply of new recruits dwindled. Nonetheless, members like Nat Kuhn and John Levine recall that ideas they bantered about in bull sessions with Nelson in Kagan’s barn materialized later in the pages of Computer Lib/Dream Machines. “There was certainly very little in that book that we hadn’t already heard about before it appeared,” Levine said.
When I talked with former RESISTORS, it was surprising to hear how many members remained in touch with one another more than a half-century later. Many of them still included their participation on résumés. Courtships formed, and at least two members married each other. Their activities left a long-lasting echo in the world of computing as well. Len Bosack cofounded Cisco Systems. Cynthia Dwork, a professor of computer science at Harvard, made pioneering contributions to cryptography. Steve Kirsch was one of two people to invent the optical mouse and went on to become a successful tech entrepreneur.
Claude Kagan’s computer-filled barn in Hopewell Township, N.J., shown here in 2008, was the headquarters for the RESISTORS. David Gesswein
Even as the RESISTORS were fading as a group, massive technological changes were just over the horizon. Personal computers, introduced in the early 1970s, soon became consumer goods found in hundreds of thousands of homes. That technological revolution would be solidified when Time named the PC “Machine of the Year” in 1982. New computing worlds beckoned to experts and neophytes alike, but it was a future that a group of teens in a New Jersey barn had already seen and lived.
This article is adapted from the author’s new book, README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (The MIT Press, 2025).
2025-12-11 23:00:02
Ghost Robotics is today announcing a major upgrade for their Vision 60 quadruped: an arm. Ghost, a company which originated at the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, specializes in exceptionally rugged quadrupeds, and while many of its customers use its robots for public safety and disaster relief, it also provides robots to the United States military, which has very specific needs when it comes to keeping humans out of danger.
In that context, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Ghost’s robots may sometimes be used to carry weapons, and despite the proliferation of robots in many roles in the Ukraine war, the idea of a legged robot carrying a weapon is not a comfortable one for many people. IEEE Spectrum spoke with Ghost co-founder and current CEO Gavin Kenneally to learn more about the new arm, and to get his perspective on selling robots to the military.
The Vision 60’s new arm has six degrees of freedom. Ghost Robotics
Ghost Robotics initially made a name for itself with its very impressive early work with the Minitaur direct-drive quadruped in 2016. The company also made headlines in late 2021, when a now-deleted post on Twitter (now X) went viral because it included a photograph of one of Ghost’s Vision 60 quadrupeds with a rifle mounted on its back.
That picture resulted in a very strong reaction, although as IEEE Spectrum reported at the time, robots with guns affixed to them wasn’t new: To mention one early example, the U.S. military had already deployed weapons on mobile robots in Iraq in 2007. And while several legged robot companies pledged in 2022 not to weaponize their general purpose robots, the Chinese military in 2024 displayed quadrupeds from Unitree equipped with guns. (Unitree, based in China, was one of the signers of the 2022 pledge.)
The issue of weaponized robots goes far beyond Ghost Robotics, and far beyond robots with legs. We’ve covered both the practical and ethical perspectives on this extensively at IEEE Spectrum, and the intensity of the debates show that there is no easy answer. But to summarize one important point made by some ethicists, some military experts, and Ghost Robotics itself: robots are replaceable, humans are not. “Customers use our robots to keep people out of harm’s way,” Ghost CEO Kenneally tells Spectrum.
It’s also worth pointing out that even the companies who signed the pledge not to weaponize their general purpose robots acknowledge that military robots exist, and are accepting of that, provided that such robots are used under existing legal doctrines and operate within those safeguards—and that what constraints should or should not be imposed on these kinds of robots is best decided by policymakers rather than industry.
This is essentially Ghost Robotics’ position as well, says Kenneally. “We sell our robots to U.S. and allied governments, and as part of that, the robots are used in defense applications where they will sometimes be weaponized. What’s most critical to us is that the decisions about how to use these robots are happening systematically and ethically at the government policy level.”
To some extent, these decisions are already being made within the U.S. government. Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, ‘Autonomy in Weapon Systems,’ lays out the responsibilities and limitations for how autonomous or human-directed robotics weapons systems should be developed and deployed, including requirements for human use-of-force judgements. At least in the U.S., this directive implies that there are rules and accountability for robotic weapons.
Ghost sees its Vision 60 quadruped as a system that its trusted customers can use as they see fit, and the manipulator enables many additional capabilities. “The primary purpose of the robot has been as a sensor platform,” Kenneally says, “but sometimes there are doors in the way, or objects that need to be moved, or you might want the robot to take a sample. So the ability to do all of that mobile manipulation has been hugely valuable for our customers.”
As it turns out, arms are good for more than manipulation. “One thing that’s been very interesting is that our customers have been using the arm as a sensor boom, which is something that we hadn’t anticipated,” says Kenneally. Ghost’s robot has plenty of cameras, but they’re mostly at the viewpoint of a moderately-sized dog. The new arm offers a more human-like vantage and a way to peek around corners or over things without exposing the whole robot.
Ghost was not particularly interested in building their own arm, and tried off-the-shelf options to get the manipulation bit working. And they did get the manipulation working; what didn’t work were any of those arms after the 50 kilogram robot rolled over on them. “We wanted to make sure that we could build an arm that could stand up to the same intense rigors of our customers’ operations that the rest of the robot can,” says Kenneally. “Morphologically, we actually consider the arm to be a fifth leg, so that the robot operates as a unified system for whole-body control.”
The rest of the robot is exceptionally rugged, which is what makes it appealing to customers with unique needs, like special forces teams. Enough battery life for more than three hours of walking (or more than 20 hours on standby) isn’t bad, and the Vision 60 is sealed against sand and dust, and can survive complete submergence in shallow water. It can operate in extreme temperatures ranging from -40 °C to 55 °C, which has been a particular challenge for robots. And if you do manage to put it in a situation where it physically breaks one of its legs, it’s easy to swap in a spare in just a few minutes, even out in the field.
The Vision 60 can open doors withe high-level direction from a human operator.Ghost Robotics
Despite Ghost quietly selling over a thousand quadrupeds to date, Kenneally is cautious about the near future for legged robots, as is anyone who has seriously considered buying one, because it’s impossible to ignore the option of just buying one from a Chinese company at about a tenth the cost of a quadruped from a company based in the U.S. or Europe.
“China has identified legged robotics as a lynchpin technology that they are strategically funding,” Kenneally says. “I think it’s an extremely serious threat in the long term, and we have to take these competitors very seriously despite their current shortcomings.” There is a technological moat, for now, but if the market for legged robots follows the same trajectory as the market for drones did, that moat will shrink drastically over the next few years.
The United States is poised to ban consumer drone sales from Chinese manufacturer DJI, and banned DJI drone use by federal agencies in 2017. But it may be too late in some sense, as DJI’s global market share is something like 90 percent. Meanwhile, Unitree may have already cornered somewhere around 70 percent of the global market for quadrupeds, despite the recent publication of exploits that allow the robots to send unauthorized data to China.
In the United States in particular, private sector robotics funding is unpredictable at the best of times, and Kenneally argues that to compete with Chinese-subsidized robot-makers American companies like Ghost who produce these robots domestically will need sustained U.S. government support, too. That doesn’t mean the government has to pick which companies will be the winners, but that it should find a way to support the U.S. robotics industry as a whole, if it still wants to have a meaningful one. “The quadruped industry isn’t a science project anymore,” says Kenneally. “It’s matured, and quadruped robots are going to become extremely important in both commercial and government applications. But it’s only through continued innovation that we’ll be able to stay ahead.”
2025-12-11 22:00:02
Even if a GPU in a data center should only require 700 watts to run a large language model, it may realistically need 1,700 watts because of inefficiencies in how electricity reaches it. That’s a problem Peng Zou and his team at startup PowerLattice say they have solved by miniaturizing and repackaging high-voltage regulators.
The company claims that its new chiplets deliver up to a 50 percent reduction in power consumption and twice performance per watt by sizing down the voltage conversion process and moving it significantly closer to processors.
Traditional systems deliver power to AI chips by converting AC power from the grid into DC power, which then gets transformed again into low-voltage (around one volt) DC, usable by the GPU. With that voltage drop, current must increase to conserve power.
This exchange happens near the processor, but the current still travels a meaningful distance in its low-voltage state. A high current traveling any distance is bad news, because the system loses power in the form of heat proportional to the current squared. “The closer you get to the processor, the less distance that the high current has to travel, and thus we can reduce the power loss,” says Hanh-Phuc Le, who researches power electronics at the University California, San Diego and has no connection to PowerLattice.
Given the ever-growing power consumption of AI data centers, “this has almost become a show-stopping issue today,” PowerLattice’s Zou says.
Zou thinks he and his colleagues have found a way to avoid this huge loss of power. Instead of dropping the voltage a few centimeters away from the processor, they figured out how to do it millimeters away, within the processor’s package. PowerLattice designed tiny power delivery chiplets—shrinking inductors, voltage control circuits, and software-programmable logic into an IC about twice the size of a pencil eraser. The chiplets sit under the processor’s package substrate, to which they’re connected.
One challenge the minds at PowerLattice faced was how to make inductors smaller without altering their capabilities. Inductors temporarily store energy and then release it smoothly, helping regulators maintain steady outputs. Their physical size directly influences how much energy they can manage, so shrinking them weakens their effect.
The startup countered this issue by building their inductors from a specialized magnetic alloy that “enables us to run the inductor very efficiently at high frequency,” Zou says. “We can operate at a hundred times higher frequency than the traditional solution.” At higher operating frequencies, circuits can be designed to use an inductor with a much lower inductance, meaning the component itself can be made with less physical material. The alloy is unique because it maintains better magnetic properties than comparable materials at these high frequencies.
The resulting chiplets are less than 1/20th the area of today’s voltage regulators, Zou says. And each is only 100 micrometers thick, around the thickness of a strand of hair. Being so tiny allows the chiplets to fit as close as possible to the processor, and the space savings provide valuable real estate to other components.
PowerLattice’s chiplets would sit on the underside of a GPU’s package to provide power from below.PowerLattice
Even at their small size, the proprietary tech is “highly configurable and scalable,” Zou says. Customers can use multiple chiplets for a more comprehensive fix or fewer if their architecture doesn’t require it. “It’s one key differentiator” of PowerLattice’s solution to the voltage regulation problem, according to Zou.
Employing the chiplets can reduce 50 percent of power needs for an operator, effectively doubling performance, the company claims. But this number seems ambitious to Le. He says that 50 percent power savings “could be achievable, but that means PowerLattice has to have direct control of the load, which includes the processor as well.” The only way he sees it as realistic is if the company has the ability to manage power supply in real time depending on a processor’s workload—a technique called dynamic voltage and frequency scaling—which PowerLattice does not.
Right now, PowerLattice is in the midst of reliability and validation testing before it releases its first product to customers, in about two years. But bringing the chiplets to market won’t be straightforward because PowerLattice has some big-name competition. Intel, for example, is developing a Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator, a device partially devoted to solving the same problem.
Zou doesn’t consider Intel competition because, in addition to the products differing in their approaches to the power delivery problem, he does not believe Intel will be providing its technology to its competitors. “From a market position perspective, we are quite a bit different,” Zou says.
A decade ago, PowerLattice wouldn’t have room to succeed, Le says, because companies that sold processors only ensured reliability for their chips if customers purchased their power supplies as well. “Qualcomm, for example, can sell their processor chip and the vast majority of their customers also have to buy their proprietary Qualcomm power supply management chip because otherwise they would say, ‘We don’t guarantee the reliable operation of the whole system.’”
Now, though, there may be hope. “There’s a trend of what we call chiplet implementation, so it is a heterogeneous integration,” Le says. Customers are mixing and matching components from different companies to achieve better system optimization, he says.
And while notable providers like Intel and Qualcomm may continue to have the upper hand with notable customers, smaller companies—mostly startups—building processors and AI infrastructures will also be power hungry. These groups will need to look for a power supply source, and that’s where PowerLattice and similar companies could come in, Le says. “That’s how the market is. We have a startup working with a startup doing something that actually rivals, and even competes with, some large companies.”