The Robotics and AI Institute (RAI) published a paper in Science Robotics introducing the dual-arm robot AthenaZero completing three baseball-inspired tasks: throwing a ball, catching a ball, and hitting a ball with a bat.
A team led by Professor Sejoon Lee at Dongguk University in South Korea combined a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) with a flexible graphene-channel ionic-gel-gated transistor to create a flexible device that needs no battery, harvests energy from human movement, and enables neuromorphic sensing and learning.
Leju, through the OpenLET community, has partnered with Qingtong Vision to release the LET-HumanMotion-Ruban2 dataset. Built on Qingtong's MotionDecode human motion capture data, it outputs standardized robot motion trajectories for Ruban 2 after retargeting, motion refinement, and format adaptation.
UCLA researchers have launched PhoneBot, a small open-source humanoid robot platform that uses an Android smartphone as its torso, handling visual perception, motion sensing, and motion control computing. Its hardware cost is about 400 US dollars (excluding the phone).
An 18-day joint Western Pacific hydrothermal expedition by Tsinghua University, the Qingdao Institute of Marine Geology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and other institutions conducted seven dives and identified a new large high-temperature active hydrothermal field, preliminarily confirming its potential for large-scale polymetallic sulfide resources, with associated gold content of up to 15.4 ppm and associated silver content of up to 1,271 ppm.
Amirhossein Kazemipour's team at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab fitted a commercial robotic hand from Wuji Technology with an 80-gram backpack (containing a battery, IMU, and Raspberry Pi Zero) and used reinforcement learning in simulation to train a policy that lets it crawl on its fingertips.
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) are designing and validating smart automation systems that can sense their environment in real time and respond to changes, aimed at high-mix, low-volume production needs to expand the capacity of a constrained workforce.
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed an underwater soft robot inspired by feather stars that achieves three-dimensional maneuverability—up and down, forward and backward, and rotation about an axis—using only two actuators, whereas such motion typically requires at least six. The robot uses four elastic monostable wings and completes hovering, translation, and steering through combinations of a jellyfish mode, a fish mode, and a rotor mode. The research has demonstrated the robot carrying a camera to explore underwater spaces and cooperating with multiple robots to lift objects; a fully wireless version is still in development, and the paper was published in Science Advances.
MIT researchers proposed SANDO, a safe trajectory planning system for drones that generates flight paths in unknown environments with moving obstacles that are mathematically proven to avoid collisions. The results were published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
Researchers at EPFL's Soft Transducers Laboratory have introduced FiberMotor, a thread-like motor that converts electrical energy directly into motion; the work was published in Advanced Materials. FiberMotor is 1–3 mm in diameter and consists of two concentric hollow fibers. A slightly thicker-than-a-hair insulated copper wire electrode is densely wound around the outside of the fibers; when voltage is applied, electrostatic force makes the inner fiber slide inside the outer fiber like a telescope, so no gears or transmission are needed and it can be driven in reverse.
In a white paper with IEEE Spectrum and Wiley, Noitom Robotics presents the HiPHI dataset, which contains 617.5 hours of optical motion capture full-body human motion data at sub-millimeter accuracy.
PAIR learns a shared representation between perception and action for continuous-action vision-language-action models, improving the performance of OpenVLA-OFT and VLA-Adapter on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, CALVIN ABC-D, and seven real-world tasks.
CMU researchers designed human-hand-inspired fingertips that can be mounted on the DeltaHands flexible robotic hand. They combine strain gauges to measure pinch pressure with a microphone that captures micro-vibrations through a plastic fingernail, enabling the hand to count paper cups, identify materials, and grasp fragile items such as tofu cubes and potato chips. Each fingertip costs less than 100 US dollars, compared with about 800 US dollars to build a similar setup from off-the-shelf products. The work was presented at the 2026 Intelligent Robots and Systems Conference in Pittsburgh.
Why it matters: The original text provides details on the multimodal tactile design of the human-inspired fingertips and their cost of less than 100 US dollars, helping readers understand how force and vibration sensing support manipulation control.
A University of Glasgow team used AR to overlay and test 5 prototype faces (animal, robot, emoji, anime, and eyes-only) and 5 sounds (cat meow, human-like voice, electronic tone, music, and "animalese") on the social robot Qoobo, with 24 volunteers ranking the combinations. Results showed that animal and anime faces paired with animal sounds were most liked, and that faces conveyed emotion better than sound. The study is based on their AZRA system and could inform the design of future zoomorphic social robots and user-customizable appearances.
SimForcing proposes a simulation-guided framework that injects motion knowledge from a simulation teacher into an action-conditioned robot world model through latent-variable distillation, mitigating appearance differences and reducing the extent to which inaccurate simulation predictions mislead real-video generation.
A research team from UC3M and UPNA published a paper in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics proposing a modular soft gripper that can roll and reorient objects between its fingers without releasing them.
Almost all dual-arm robots are equipped with wrist cameras, but these add bulk, cost, and complexity. EyeRobot 2.0 instead uses an active gaze approach with a head-mounted stereo camera to replace wrist cameras. —Do dual-arm robots really need wrist cameras? Maybe not!
Sanctuary AI proposes TIGER (Task-Space Imitation Guidance for Efficient Reinforcement Learning), which does not execute the imitation policy but instead maps its action chunks through the controller into end-effector reference trajectories, converting them into dense rewards for reinforcement learning.
Why it matters: The original text provides the specific approach for converting imitation policies into dense rewards along with ablation data, allowing readers to judge whether it can be applied to their own sparse-reward manipulation training.
Chemnitz University of Technology and TU Berlin tested pedestrian interaction with an autonomous shuttle from July to August 2026. Initial results show the interaction was generally perceived as safe and comfortable, with no significant effect from the three simulated operating modes: autonomous, manual, and teleoperated. Higher vehicle speeds slightly reduced perceived safety and comfort while increasing perceived efficiency; braking method and final stopping position also significantly affected pedestrian evaluations. Data is still being analyzed and will be published, with results to be presented on October 6 at CVAG
A team at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) developed the ALBATROSS bioinspired platform, which, when released from 150 meters, descends stably by passive autorotation on a rigid wing-sail, splashes down with low impact and self-rights, then sails autonomously between set waypoints.
The paper LATENT, with Galbot as a participant, received the IROS 2026 Best Entertainment and Amusement Paper Award. The work starts from imperfect human motion data and achieves real humanoid robot tennis rallying. The post provides the project page http://zzk273.github.io/LATENT/, the arXiv address http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12686, and the code repository http://github.com/GalaxyGeneralRobotics/LATENT, and congratulates the co-authors and collaborators.
A team at Toyohashi University of Technology conducted five experiments using real autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and VR; 92% of participants perceived a robot approaching from behind as faster than one approaching from the front at speeds of 0.5–1.0 m/s. A simulation incorporating this perceptual bias into a navigation model showed that, when overtaking pedestrians from behind, the robot began avoiding 0.57 s earlier than with a conventional model and increased passing distance by up to 0.40 m. The results were published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
A research team from the Georgia Tech H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) published a paper in INFORMS Journal on Data Science proposing a new framework called Mutual Information Surprise, which helps AI agents, robots, and autonomous systems identify "meaningful surprises" and judge whether they need to stop and reassess.
Researchers at Georgia Tech have proposed an evaluation benchmark called FindingDory, using 60 tasks that require sustained interaction and awareness of environmental context to test the memory capabilities of vision-language models such as Gemini 2.0-flash and GPT-4o; the tasks cover three categories of high-difficulty scenarios: spatial, temporal, and multi-objective.
A team from the National University of Singapore's College of Design and Engineering published research in Science Advances using wire-bonded junctions (WBJ) inspired by octopus neuromuscular junctions, enabling a single shape-memory alloy spring artificial muscle to heat and contract in selected segments, achieving multi-segment controllable bending along a continuous arm without needing an independent actuator at each position.
The ML3DHS 3D hierarchical semantic segmentation framework, developed by Assistant Professor Zhao Na's team at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) with collaborators from Southwest Jiaotong University, was presented at the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in 2026, and assigns each 3D point multiple related labels at once, from "furniture" to "chair" and "table".
At the IROS 2026 Tech Talk, Zhijian Dynamics presented its precision manipulation work for robot loading and unloading of CNC lathes, where the clearance between the workpiece and the chuck is only 0.5 millimeters; the approach covers motion generation, multi-view perception, historical memory, and contact feedback.
KAIST's quadruped robot RAIBO2 finished the Persimmon Marathon in Sangju, South Korea, in 4 hours 19 minutes 52 seconds, slightly faster than the human average, without swapping or recharging its battery, and still had 34% charge at the finish; the team described the work in a Nature paper last week.
Why it matters: The research moves energy saving for legged robots from optimizing single components to holistic design across joints and circuits, offering concrete methods transferable to long-duration outdoor robots.
An MIT team published in Advanced Functional Materials a paper-thin, two-finned swimming robot powered by a single layer of living muscle cells that can follow light to swim through a simple underwater maze. The robot's skeleton is a GelMA gel film about the size of a stick of gum and roughly half a millimeter thick, stamped with square recessed grooves on its underside; muscle cells on its surface are genetically engineered to twitch in response to light, and researchers steer direction and speed by alternately illuminating the two fins, with the robot able to swim about 4 times its body length in one minute at its fastest.
Professor Hong Chul Moon's team at KAIST published in Advanced Materials on Ionograsper, an ionic soft material inspired by the Venus flytrap that integrates sensing, actuation, and shape retention into a single material.
Researchers at the Chair of Intelligent Biorobotic Systems at the Technical University of Munich have developed a soft, lightweight exoskeleton that uses artificial tendons to assist hip extension, helping older adults stand up and walk more efficiently; the paper was published in Nature Communications.
CMU and Siemens partnered to develop a method for evaluating the "safe stoppability" of humanoid robots, and used simulation to define the conditions under which a robot can be safely stopped. The result is PRISM (Proactive Refinement of Importance-sampled Stoppability Monitor).
Why it matters: The article introduces PRISM, a method that uses simulation to define the conditions under which a humanoid robot can be safely stopped, and it is a useful reference for readers interested in humanoid robot safety monitoring and certification.
An EPFL and NYU team published ScaFi in npj Robotics, a biomimetic robotic fish based on the tail-swinging motion of cod and mackerel, scaled up by simply thickening a fiberglass tail rod proportionally. The team built three sizes—0.6, 1.1, and 2.9 meters—and tested them in a creek and Lake Geneva; after normalization by body length, the swimming gait was largely consistent. The largest model has lower energy efficiency and needs a stronger motor, while under disturbance the smaller models are more agile but recover more slowly.
Episode 170 of the RLChina Paper Seminar will be streamed live on September 30, 2026, from 14:00 to 14:30. Ma Shaojin, a master's student at Tianjin University, will present the paper "One Act, Many Masks: Effect-Marginal Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agents," with Guo Wei, a doctoral student at Tianjin University, moderating.
Qualcomm Technologies has reached an agreement to acquire PickNik Robotics, the developer of the MoveIt open-source manipulation framework, and will advance the integration of MoveIt with the Qualcomm Dragonwing platform while keeping MoveIt open source.
A team at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute has developed the LAMP (Long-Horizon Adaptive Manipulation Planning) system, which helps multiple robots collaborate to move objects in severely cluttered spaces by jointly planning object and robot motion rather than handling them separately.
A KAIST team published RAIBO2, a quadruped robot, in Nature; it completed the Sangju Marathon in South Korea on a single charge in 4 hours and 19 minutes, running alongside human runners.
DirectHop is a roughly 1-gram micro jumping robot developed at the University of Washington that uses a tiny motor to drive takeoff directly rather than a spring, achieving jump-height precision of 1 centimeter; it can jump repeatedly and clear a standard step height. Its self-righting success rate after landing is 90%. The current prototype requires external power and is controlled by a laptop, and the team is developing onboard power and a camera to enable autonomous navigation. The paper will be published at IROS 2026, and the researchers estimate a production cost of about 10 dollars per unit.
ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab taught an off-the-shelf humanoid robotic hand to walk autonomously, press arrow keys, and push blocks. With a battery, motion sensors, and a microcomputer added to the back of the hand, and after reinforcement learning training in simulation, the hand crawled on 14 indoor and outdoor surfaces, and recovered its standing posture on its own in 21 of 25 sideways-fall tests. It pressed the correct arrow key 29 out of 32 times. In 15 tests, the block was pushed to within 2 centimeters of the target. The paper Fingers as Legs has been published on arXiv.
Real-Time EXPO-FT enables π0.5 to tackle challenging dynamic tasks such as balancing a ball and striking a ball into a goal; the paper page is https://pd-perry.github.io/real-time-expo-ft/. Chelsea Finn explains that the approach handles latency in reinforcement learning by having the base VLA use older images while a small editing policy runs in real time, and states that it significantly outperforms RTC across comparisons.