A team at the University of California San Diego proposed EgoThumb in an arXiv preprint, a wearable robotic thumb driven by a palm-side wide-angle camera and an imitation learning model that can autonomously grasp and stabilize objects, allowing users to complete tasks such as unscrewing bottle caps and stirring tea with one hand.
DTU is collaborating with Aarhus University, the Danish Technological Institute, and companies including TICRA and Arctic Unmanned to use physical vapor deposition (PVD) to produce ultrathin coatings that enhance or reduce drone radar reflection signals. Initial tests on simple shapes such as rectangular plates and cylinders achieved significant attenuation of reflected signals. The next step will be to adapt the method to drones with more complex geometries and test its radar detection effects in real environments. Another route in the project is to develop tunable artificial metasurfaces, which are said to potentially cost less to manufacture than PVD processing.
The paper uses an evolutionary algorithm to search for multicopter body morphologies suited to different objectives and constraints, and uses the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) to generate a set of bodies with performance trade-offs. Compared with a standard quadcopter, the Pareto front extrema improve maneuverability, thrust-to-weight ratio, and size by 489.2%, 23%, and 4.8%, respectively; the maneuverability improvement comes from motor tilt angles, and the thrust-to-weight ratio improvement comes from more propellers. Real drone racing experiments show that the evolved bodies outperform the standard body in number of gates passed, flight speed, and lap time.
The research team proposed a two-component optoelectronic soft suction cup designed for kiwifruit that uses optical signals to estimate interaction forces with real fruit within known contact intervals. On fruit not used in training, it achieved grouped cross-validation R²=0.968±0.005 (MAE=0.138 N), with a median per-fruit held-out R² of 0.973 (MAE=0.134 N).
Researchers at ETH Zurich changed how muscle connects to the frame, enabling a 1.5-centimeter robot to jump 5 millimeters with a single muscle contraction. They designed the muscle together with a flexible 3D-printed scaffold; tiny grooves on the scaffold help muscle fibers align neatly and provide firm anchor points for force.
Avnet, together with the National-Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, produced a 76-page white paper (August 2026) that uses five functional domains and six core modules as its framework to break down 10 categories of industrial deployment challenges, including heterogeneous computing workloads and platform adaptation, multi-axis real-time control, and dexterous hand integration.
OUCH is a wrist-worn pneumatic haptic stimulation device that uses stacked pneumatic pouch actuators, a rigid indenter, and a compliant spacer designed to buckle at a set load, so that the indenter contacts the skin only during actuation. At 200 kPa pouch inflation pressure, its indenter's contact pressure is estimated to reach 18,500 kPa, more than 25 times that of a commercially available handheld pressure algometer tip, while requiring less total force. In preliminary perceptual testing, the force required for this indenter to elicit discomfort was about 89% lower than that of the pressure algometer, providing a basis for controllable, repeatable noxious stimulation at the wrist.
The team led by Wu Xinyu at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has developed a wearable underwater exoskeleton. Its representative system, PEAKED, is a soft underwater hip exoskeleton that assists hip flexion and extension, supporting flutter kicking, breaststroke kicking, and underwater walking. In prior human experiments, PEAKED reduced per-minute breathing volume by 29.77% during flutter kicking, 25.70% during breaststroke kicking, and 18.35% during underwater walking.
A team at Tohoku University has developed a mechanical reflex module that requires no electronic sensors or circuits. Integrated into a musculoskeletal robot, it reproduced the knee-jerk reflex, and combined with high-level control that adjusts activation thresholds according to movement phase, it achieved bipedal walking. The module integrates sensing, computation, and actuation within its physical structure: it mechanically detects when an artificial muscle is stretched beyond a threshold and contracts automatically, inspired by human muscle spindles.
An ETH Zurich team has developed FlexiQuad, a ring-shaped flexible-frame quadrotor with no central body; on impact the frame deforms to absorb energy and the drone can keep flying. It reaches a top flight speed of 80 km/h, with collision tests at about 25 km/h; the frame material costs less than 15 Swiss francs, and it has been used to grasp and carry soft first-aid kits and payloads heavier than its own weight. The team also used reinforcement learning to let it stabilize its attitude after a collision before resuming autonomous flight, but reliable perception and autonomous navigation remain prerequisites for leaving the lab.
A University of Bristol team built a tabletop physical model simulating muscle contraction using a row of ordinary electric motors coupled to each other through a shared mechanical skeleton, with results published in the Royal Society journal Interface. In the experiments, the motors made intermittent contact with the skeleton to transmit force, and without direct communication, muscle-like behaviors spontaneously emerged, including a load-velocity relationship, more units participating as load increased, and coordination waves. The researchers believe this approach, in which coordination is handled by the structure itself, could help improve how robots are actuated.
The authors present MUSBRIC, a modular hardware platform and accompanying MuJoCo simulator for reconfigurable musculoskeletal robots, which uses LEGO-compatible endcaps to turn fiber-reinforced extensile pneumatic artificial muscles into reusable, plug-and-play muscle modules. An elbow-joint prototype validated load-dependent flexion and extension, with pulley-guided routing enabling reversible motion and a mechanical stop stabilizing the straight posture; a robotic hand demonstrated compliant grasping and multi-joint construction, 15 leg configurations completed matched sweeps in hardware and simulation, and a quadruped assembled from four legs achieved walking. The hardware design and simulation code will be open-sourced.
This study proposes Gaussian Evolutionary Specialists (GES), a reinforcement learning-based co-design framework. By maintaining a population of specialist policies whose design-space territories evolve according to their control performance, it mitigates behavioral diversity collapse, in which a single shared policy converges to the same control strategy across different morphologies.
A research team has released an open-source knee exoskeleton built from off-the-shelf components, whose biological torque controller is generated entirely by simulation, requiring no training data collected on the target device. The method uses a muscle-driven imitation policy to reproduce squatting motions from a public biomechanics dataset, then distills the knee joint torque into an estimator that relies only on onboard sensors.
An arXiv study used an elbow-assist exosuit to examine the physiological, perceptual, and cognitive consequences of force augmentation during lifting, finding that although assistance reduced muscle activity, behavioral outcomes did not simply correspond to this biomechanical change. Assistance reduced perceived weight, but this effect was strongly shaped by participants' initial experience; assistance also selectively reduced adaptation to changes in environmental conditions, and differences in effort-based decisions were likewise shaped by initial experience rather than simply following the decline in muscle activity or perceived fatigue. The authors therefore argue that the perceptual and cognitive consequences of force augmentation cannot be inferred from biomechanical benefits alone and must be assessed alongside physical performance.
A team from the University of Tartu in Estonia and the Italian Institute of Technology had a moth-inspired robot use an artificial circulatory system to deliver chemical raw materials such as pyrrole, synthesizing a polypyrrole UV sensor in situ where UV light struck, giving the robot a sensing capability it did not originally have.
ETH Zurich published a blog post on October 22 showcasing a biohybrid microrobot about 1.5 centimeters long, made from mouse skeletal muscle cells and a hydrogel scaffold, that can jump, run, swim, and grasp. The team used an algorithm to simultaneously optimize muscle tissue distribution, volume, and the hydrogel scaffold's shape and mechanical properties, achieving motion amplitudes up to 11 times greater than previous systems with similar muscle mass; the walking version reaches a speed of 6.2 millimeters per second, about 0.4 body lengths per second, which the study says is the highest speed reported to date for a walking biohybrid robot.
A University of Toronto engineering team has developed a flexible foot pad for the one-legged hopping robot Hopcopter, enabling it to hop on difficult terrain such as sand and ice. By enlarging the contact area, using a spherical joint that tilts with the terrain, a rubber band for return, and short spikes on the bottom for grip, the pad reduces takeoff error by up to 66%, improves efficiency by up to 64%, and cuts cross-terrain performance variation by 84%. The related paper was published in Advanced Intelligent Systems; the team's next step is to develop autonomous navigation, targeting scenarios such as search and rescue, pipeline inspection, and mining area inspection.
A UCLA and UC Davis team published in Science Robotics a fully polymer micro flying robot weighing 185 milligrams that uses electrostrictive polymer films to directly drive flexible conical wings, with no mechanical transmission. In tests it can generate lift about three times its own weight, take off autonomously at an average speed of 40 centimeters per second, and still resume flight after being hit by a fly swatter or pressed under a load about 11,000 times its own weight. The current prototype is powered through external wires; the team's next steps are to improve steering and landing control, increase payload, and advance onboard power, control electronics, and sensing toward autonomy.
A team led by Elliot Hawkes at Stanford University designed the soft robotic intubation system SRIS based on the vine robot principle. In cadaver tests, 12 participants, including 8 emergency responders, received 5 minutes of training; 87% achieved successful intubation on the first attempt, with an average time of 21 seconds. Under the same conditions, video laryngoscopy had a 63% success rate and an average time of 44 seconds.
This study proposes a dual-UAV payload transport framework that uses a custom compact force sensor at the cable anchor point to measure interaction forces, with static and dynamic tests evaluating its linearity, hysteresis, repeatability, and crossload. Control uses a cascade structure: inner loops handle vehicle stabilization, while outer loops compensate for the measured forces, validated in simulations and indoor experiments under position uncertainty. Payload-drop and constrained-space tests compared with literature-based distributed methods show improved stability, coordination, and disturbance rejection.
EgoThumb is a fully open-source, vision-driven supernumerary robotic thumb that uses a visual imitation learning policy to map first-person images from a palm-facing camera directly to continuous joint positions, enabling autonomous grasping and holding assistance. Its compact dual tendon-driven finger relocates the actuation unit to the forearm to reduce distal weight and support precise active joint control. The authors state that the design generalizes across different users and environments, that both hardware and software are open-sourced, and that the paper has been accepted to IROS.
Researchers propose an electric-field induction motor whose rotor is made of discrete circuit elements between a finite number of conductive vanes, overcoming the limits of a single continuous material in resistivity, permittivity, and circuit characteristics. This macroscale motor uses circuitry on the rotor surface to emulate the "deep bar" rotor design of magnetic induction motors, providing higher torque over a wide speed range. The study completed the analysis, design, and demonstration of the motor.
This paper investigates two passive geometric approaches to reduce the acoustic signature of a flapping membrane wing and validates them on an exemplary wing. After optimizing the venation layout based on a dynamic snap-through model of the membrane wing, experiments measured a reduction of up to 8 dB in the stroke-reversal snap noise; an additive trailing-edge fringe inspired by hummingbird feathers further reduced the broadband swoosh by 3–4 dB without loss of lift. The paper notes that engineered wings are 15–30 dB louder than the animals they imitate.
This paper proposes a hybrid discrete-continuous multi-objective bilevel framework for the structure-actuation co-design of all-electric heavy-duty robotic manipulators: the upper level optimizes geometry and actuation topology, while the lower level searches for feasible configurations of motors, gearboxes, and screws for each joint. A system-level coordinator selects actuator packages based on hardware mass, co-design cost, and loss-aware supply energy, and feeds the resulting actuator masses back into the robot model until mass consistency is reached.
For the high-school remote-control division of the 2027 NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge, a study presents an integrated, reproducible design assessment of a four-wheel educational rover: 10.919 kg, 215 mm wheels at 200 RPM give a theoretical rolling speed of 8.105 km/h, and the nominal motor specifications are insufficient to demonstrate compliance with the 8 km/h design ceiling.
The research team proposed Torch-Hand, a humanoid dexterous hand featuring an all-linkage transmission architecture with 21 degrees of freedom, including 5 DOF in the thumb and 4 DOF in each of the other four fingers. The hand integrates its actuators into the palm in a serial-robot-like arrangement, so that motor motion corresponds directly to joint kinematics while balancing grasp force and payload capacity. Experiments evaluated the reachable workspace, fingertip coordinated trajectories, thumb opposition, coverage of 33 grasp categories, grasp force, payload, and task-level manipulation.
The paper proposes a learning-based real-to-sim-to-real framework that converts biological curves into cable-driven modular soft robot configurations through surrogate-assisted inverse design and uncertainty-guided refinement. The learned forward surrogate reduces deformation prediction time from 1.53×10^5 ms to 0.0008 ms, a speedup of about 1.9×10^8 times; inverse design time drops from 1.99×10^6 ms to 4.18 ms.
Researchers from Southern University of Science and Technology and other institutions published NI-skins artificial skin in Nature Machine Intelligence; it reads more than 10,000 sensing elements per second and processes signals hierarchically, taking about 23 milliseconds from sensing to interpretation.
The paper proposes a scalable analog sensor readout architecture based on serial-in parallel-out (SIPO) shift registers, in which sensor modules can be expanded using only three signal lines. The authors integrated 16 joint sensor modules and one four-channel tactile sensor module on a tendon-driven dexterous hand, achieving full scanning of 20 channels at 1 kHz and stable operation up to 1.5 kHz; the maximum slope absolute percentage error of the joint sensors was 0.446%, and on the tactile side an LSTM model performed force estimation and contact-location classification at 1 kHz.
ArrayTac is a closed-loop piezoelectric tactile platform that can simultaneously and continuously render three tactile dimensions—shape, stiffness, and friction—on a 4×4 actuator array. Each unit integrates a three-stage micro-lever amplifier and end-effector Hall-effect feedback, achieving up to 5 mm displacement, an array refresh rate above 500 Hz, and a closed-loop bandwidth of 123 Hz.
A NeurIPS 2026 Position Paper proposes body-control co-design to achieve physical Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) in humanoid robots: using experience from the current body and policy to recursively improve both morphology and behavior at the same time. The paper discusses co-design methods grounded in strategic exploration, Sim2Real transfer, and meta-policy learning, argues for their necessity from methodological, application, and community perspectives, and lists open research questions ranging from short-term innovations to long-term goals.
The authors propose ORBIT (Orbital Reconfigurable Base-actuated Integrated Theta-motion Hand), a modular multi-finger robotic hand platform whose core is a rotating knuckle mechanism: fingers travel around a cylindrical palm via a belt drive, enabling finger-layout reconfiguration within 1 second without disassembly.
A Korean team proposed the RAIWAY wheeled bipedal robot and a contact-informed control method. The robot is equipped with 20-inch wheels and can roll across irregular and discontinuous terrain. The method distills multi-contact events into a latent representation in simulation, and at deployment infers it online from proprioception alone, requiring no contact sensors. Real-world tests covered steep slopes, gravel, studded surfaces, and rocky terrain, and demonstrated continuous ascent on outdoor stairs with step heights up to 15 cm, outperforming baselines without the contact-informed mechanism.
Researchers have developed a bionic robot called BeetleBot that mimics a beetle's body and limb structure and gait control, allowing it to move stably across complex terrain such as rubble, sand, and narrow crevices. Experiments show it can climb over complex obstacles and quickly recover its movement state after external impacts or being flipped over. The robot is expected to be used in post-disaster search and rescue, exploration of hazardous areas, inspection of industrial facilities, and environmental monitoring.
The paper proposes a series-parallel humanoid leg design that combines a knee parallel mechanism, an ankle parallel mechanism, and a nonlinear knee-ankle coupling, with all actuators placed near the hip. The authors derive coupled nonlinear transmission models and validate them in simulation and on hardware. The 6 kg leg achieves an effective reflected mass of 0.37 kg at the foot end; the coupling passively assists ankle dorsiflexion to lift the foot when the knee flexes, and assists plantarflexion for push-off when the knee extends.
The research team proposes DASH, a da Vinci adapter for serial-link and humanoid robots that mounts da Vinci Classic and Xi instruments onto general-purpose robots without modifying the instruments themselves. The two adapter types are compatible with robotic platforms of various load capacities, engage the instruments' native latches, and wirelessly identify inserted instruments to load the corresponding kinematics and coupling matrices. Teleoperation experiments validated the approach and its role in lowering the barrier to surgical robotics research.
Researchers propose a standardized robotic module that combines a magnetic docking interface with two actuated joints and can fold from a flat two-dimensional configuration into three-dimensional structures. Modules of a single design can be assembled into two morphologies: a three-module "trilobite" and a five-module "seal". Using a small set of discrete motion commands, an operator steers an assembled parent robot to dock magnetically in sequence with spare modules, assembling a second, structurally identical individual that then separates from the parent. The parent retains all of its original modules, forming budding-style physical reproduction.
MIT researchers have developed a paper-thin micro swimming robot driven by living muscle cells; the cells respond to flashes of light, enabling the robot to swim and steer. The research is seen as potentially advancing future biohybrid robots and micro-machines.
A research team at ETH Zurich published a study in Nature Communications in which they used computer simulation to co-design mouse skeletal muscle tissue and a soft hydrogel scaffold as an integrated whole, producing a biological actuator about 1.5 centimeters long with a range of motion up to 11 times that of existing systems with the same amount of muscle.