This tutorial derives the Jacobian-transpose torque mapping and the task-space spring-damper law from the principle of virtual work, implements end-effector impedance control for the Panda arm in MuJoCo, and measures the quantitative effects of stiffness, damping, and anisotropic stiffness ellipsoids on compliance.
This analysis focuses on stepper motor motion control, covering three techniques: microstepping, S-curve acceleration/deceleration, and step-loss detection. Specific parameters and experimental details are currently unavailable; readers can focus on how these three types of control help improve the smoothness and reliability of stepper motor motion.
Galbot's PASSAGE system enables humanoid robots to adapt full-body motion to cluttered spaces by crouching, stepping, or turning sideways. On the Unitree G1, it completed 50 real-world tests across 45 obstacle layouts without falling or requiring safety intervention. However, in simulation, when zero contact was required, the success rate dropped from 98.67% to 70.3%.
Xbotics and the OpenLoong community jointly launched a robot motion control training camp, "Motphys + RSL-RL, from Simulation to Qinglong Nano Real Robot," at ROSCon China 2026, using two days to guide participants through the complete pipeline of policy reproduction, fine-tuning, simulation validation, ONNX export, and real-robot deployment.
The UCLA RoMeLa lab has published a PhoneBot paper on arXiv: a bipedal robot 483 mm tall, weighing 1.8 kg, with 13 degrees of freedom and about $400 in material costs. A phone mounted on the torso serves as sensor, onboard computer, and interaction interface, handling motion control, image recognition, and voice interaction; speech-to-text and large-model inference still rely on an external laptop, and training uses simulation plus left-right leg mirroring. With a used phone, the total cost is under $500. The team describes it as a lab test device with no arms that does not perform complex tasks such as carrying loads or climbing stairs.
An electrohydraulically actuated soft robotic fish developed by the Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences achieved a measured swimming speed of 2.13 body lengths per second (about 26 cm/s) and a minimum cost of transport of 9.4 J/(kg·m), setting a speed record for soft robotic fish propelled by body and caudal fin (BCF) locomotion.
Rokae Robotics made its first appearance at the 2026 China International Industry Fair, presenting the results achieved after the delivery of 10,000 humanoid force-controlled arms. The Zhuxing H series wheeled humanoid robot, equipped with the ROKAE-Brain multimodal model and the Xuanhe iNex control system, has already been deployed in real manufacturing scenarios such as the Schaeffler factory for tasks including bin picking; ROKAE-Brain achieves a task success rate of 95%-99% in vertical tasks such as precision assembly. The Taibai AR series force-controlled arm has seven degrees of freedom, a force-control bandwidth exceeding 30Hz, and a force-control resolution of <0.05N.
qi-neo/active-suspension-lidar-preview released v3.0.1; the code of the suspension_control_v3 package is unchanged, and its version remains 3.0.0.
The Galbot team proposes the PASSAGE framework, which combines environmental perception, whole-body motion planning, and closed-loop control so that humanoid robots can autonomously plan and execute agile traversal motions based on their surroundings. The framework was trained on 100 hours of human data covering 1,500 scenes and achieves a 98.67% success rate on the Clutter Scene Traversal benchmark.
The ROSCon China 2026 OpenLoong Training Camp, themed "Bipedal Robot Reinforcement Learning Hands-On Practice: Motphys + RSL-RL, from Simulation to the Qinglong Nano Real Robot," will be held on October 17-18, 9:00-17:00, in Meeting Rooms A115 and A124 at Midea's Global Innovation Park in Shanghai.
Force Machine presented its self-developed DM0.5 general-purpose embodied brain at the AXERA booth at the 2026 China International Industry Fair, completing three task types: connector insertion quality inspection, Insert Anything general-purpose industrial insertion, and dexterous-hand flexible cutting, with model inference performed on the AXERA high-compute platform.
A team at North Carolina State University in the United States has developed a mechanically intelligent soft robot that carries no microcomputer and relies on no real-time algorithms. Using only two air tubes to control inflation and deflation, it can switch among three swimming modes—jellyfish, fish, and rotor—and perform actions such as ascending, descending, hovering, and turning. Its control logic is handled entirely by its materials and structure. The results were published in Science Advances.
A developer tested a Go2 equipped with dual SO-101 robotic arms and a 29-joint G1 in MuJoCo simulation within an office digital twin reconstructed from an Ouster OS0 LiDAR and phone imagery; this was purely simulation, not a real-robot demonstration. The G1 walking policy fell in all 12 trials on flat ground when an arm-raise motion was superimposed; a corrected Go2 grasp-and-place run landed 1.68 mm from the target, but reruns still failed. Inter-robot collisions were disabled in the shared scene, and multi-robot obstacle avoidance as well as mass and contact parameters remain to be validated.
The yuegang5-robotic-arm project released v0.3.0, adding forward/inverse kinematics solving, linear interpolation motion, action frame recording and playback, and five-point teaching; the program expanded from 331 lines to 1,211 lines.
A developer built a robot dog from scratch using low-cost gimbal motors, and a video shows the first 2-DOF leg test. Each actuator uses about 14:1 reduction, achieved with a combination of a planetary gearbox and belt reduction to keep the structure compact; the finished robot dog is planned to have 12 DOF and weigh about 3 kg.
A maker built a pneumatic precision press from off-the-shelf parts. The device detects the distance to the rod end (a black circular plate) with an ultrasonic sensor, and an Arduino controls the actuator's movement toward the target position. The maker used a 5/2 directional valve in an unconventional way, exhausting air from both sides of the cylinder to drive the rod, and because the effective areas at the two cylinder ports (port A and B) differ, used two pressure regulators to balance the forces and hold the rod at the target position.
The author tests MyoLeg's official pretrained policy and a spinal reflex baseline, shifting the walking control target from torque to 80 neural excitation channels, involving activation dynamics, force-length-velocity relationships, and moment arms. The article presents quantitative results on gait mechanics, impact recovery, muscle weakness, and fatigue, and summarizes lessons learned in reproducing the reflex circuit.
Any2Track addresses the difficulty of a single reinforcement learning policy handling vastly different motions such as dancing, fighting, and getting up from a fall. It uses a two-stage approach: first training specialized teachers by cluster, then using DAgger to aggregate the teachers' behaviors into a single student network, and it presents G1 simulation comparison results.
As a Gold Sponsor of ROSCon China 2026, Infineon is presenting four robot demo solutions, including a robot head solution based on the Real3™ iToF sensor IRS2976C (capable of recognizing objects ≥0.5 mm).
As a platinum sponsor of ROSCon China 2026, Avnet, together with 15 semiconductor manufacturers, is exhibiting five DEMO solutions covering robotics motion control and on-device AI interaction.
stable-flight has released its first version, 0.1.0, offering a flight control pipeline written in Rust, including Pipeline components such as Commander, Guidance, Stabilizer, Mixer, and TelemetryPublisher, along with the fixed execution order of FlightLoop on each tick.
STIER has recently won a bid for an intelligent grinding project for core engine components at a globally renowned automotive parts manufacturer. The company will build an AI-enabled flexible intelligent production line for rocker shaft machining that integrates robotic intelligent loading and unloading, automated ground-rail transport, and robotic precision grinding. The solution relies on the SeeV vision system, the NextBrain™ AI brain, and the PolishX flexible force control system to achieve dynamic perception, adaptive control, and closed-loop quality control, supporting automation upgrades and flexible production in the manufacturing of core components.
Galbot's fully autonomous tennis robot made its Korean debut at the 2026 Seoul AI Robot Show! Singles, doubles... and quite a few startled looks back. 🎾🤖 #GALBOT #AstraTennis #HumanoidRobot #PhysicalAI
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.
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.
At IROS 2026, Zhijian Dynamics debuted a real-robot demonstration of its self-developed world action model SimpleWAM, with the i7 Pro running on-device to complete tasks such as tape sealing and box packing; the i7 Pro and iX demonstrated motion control capabilities together on site.
Why it matters: The original article provides specific optimization data for on-device inference latency and real-robot demonstration scenarios, which can be used to assess the practical level of this model's deployment.
Stial has launched an AI flexible grinding solution for grinding weld seams on welded boxes, achieving uniform removal of weld seams, smooth transitions between welds and base material, and no damage to thin-walled base material. The solution uses the self-developed SeeV vision system to locate weld seams, and NextBrain™ AI Mushroom Cloud computing to calculate grinding allowance and generate grinding paths. After digital twin simulation verification, a six-axis robot works with the PolishX flexible force control system to execute the grinding, with force control accuracy of ±0.5%FS and output force as low as 4N, suitable for energy storage, electrical, new energy battery housings, and other multi-category box scenarios.
STIAL Robotics recently won an AI flexible grinding project from a leading company in China's rail transit sound barrier industry. The grinding targets sound barrier columns up to 9 meters long. In the solution, the SeeV vision system uses 3D line laser scanning to extract weld seams, and NextBrain™ AI automatically matches grinding trajectories and force control parameters. The end effector is equipped with the PolishX flexible force control system, achieving contact force control accuracy of ±0.5% FS, capable of removing 2mm weld spatter residue and adapting to changeover between multiple column specifications.
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.
Yaskawa Electric began sales on September 29, 2026, of the CPU-14U CPU unit for the MPX1010 and the CM-EC02 and CM-EC02M EtherCAT communication units/modules, all new additions to the MPX1000 series. The CPU-14U's processing performance is 1.5 times that of the CPU-12U within the series and 12 times that of the MP3300's CPU-301; the CPU alone can synchronously control up to 256 servo motors, and with the addition of the SVF-12 motion unit this reaches 640 axes. Pricing is open.
ROKAE's 10,000th humanoid force-controlled arm officially rolled off the line and was delivered on September 29 at its smart manufacturing future factory. The company says it has partnered with more than 80 leading industry partners, and that its force-controlled arms continue to enter real application scenarios. Its humanoid force-controlled product line includes the Xuanji HSA series force-controlled joints with built-in high-precision torque sensors; the Taibai AR series humanoid force-controlled arms, which cover a payload range of 3-20 kg and adopt a humanoid seven-degree-of-freedom and cross-wrist configuration; and the Xuanhe iNex control system, which integrates force control with WBC whole-body motion control.
Why it matters: The piece explains in fairly specific terms the path of transferring a decade of industrial force-control expertise to humanoid actuation units, as well as the product line composition that supports the 10,000-unit delivery.
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.
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.
High-jump star Zhang Guowei visited the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, where he interacted with Tiangong Omni, Tiangong Ultra, and Tiangong 3.0 in running, high-jumping, and tug-of-war experiences; Beijing Humanoid gifted Tiangong Ultra to Zhang Guowei. Tiangong Omni can run at speeds exceeding 10 m/s, while Tiangong Ultra has broken world records 34 times and set a 3.4-meter high-jump record, supported by the Huisi Kaiwu embodied intelligence platform. Its data base covers nearly 6,000 square meters, is equipped with more than 150 robots, has an annual data capacity of up to 180,000 hours, and has delivered nearly 30,000 hours of real-machine data.
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.