Scientists at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have developed a robotic hand that can hear a melody once and play it back after just two minutes of self-taught practice on a keyboard, without relying on sheet music or preprogrammed scores.
Cyborg insects have long been studied as bio-hybrid systems that combine living organisms with small electronic devices. These systems may one day support tasks such as disaster search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and sensing in spaces too small or dangerous for conventional robots. However, most existing systems control insects based mainly on externally visible behavior, such as whether the insect is walking or stopping.
Mechanical hands dexterous enough to thread a needle, childlike dancing robots and adult-sized ones to help with deliveries were on display Thursday as the Humanoids Summit Tokyo opened.
Engineers have invented an ingenious liquid-metal pump that could make future soft robotics and wearable devices much more portable and agile. The innovation, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Nature Communications, presents a low-voltage power source with the potential to transform robotic systems for a wide range of applications, from robotic legs to haptic gloves used in medical and industrial settings.
Symmetry is everywhere in nature, from the bilateral form of vertebrates to the radial geometry of starfish. For decades, roboticists have tried to copy these shapes and their abilities with bodies that look like humans, dogs or insects.
Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a tiny seed-sized robot that can navigate across soft and uneven surfaces to perform five surgical functions wirelessly, paving the way for developing robots to make surgeries and medical treatments more precise.
There's a delicate art to teaching robots, even when you're preparing them for predictable environments like factories, where they'll repeat the same tasks a little differently depending on the obstacles they face. Whether a human is suddenly in their way or there's new clutter, the machine must closely mimic its operator's actions by staying on a trajectory (or motion path).
Soft robotics—machines made of flexible, muscle-like materials—can bend and stretch in fluid ways that put the rigid robots of old sci-fi movies to shame. But the flexibility that lets them pick ripe tomatoes or navigate a search-and-rescue site comes at a cost: Soft robotics are notoriously difficult to control.
Over the past few decades, roboticists worldwide have introduced increasingly advanced robots that can understand human instructions, move in their surroundings and reliably complete basic manual tasks. While they perform well in some scenarios, many of these robots still struggle to translate the instructions of users into precise and executable actions that would allow them to successfully complete desired tasks.
Cornell engineers have developed a robotic collective that behaves less like a machine and more like a material that flows, reshapes, and adapts to its environment without centralized control. The system, called the Cross-Link Collective, consists of dozens of small robots that have limited mobility individually, but together exhibit coordinated and sustained motion.
Even advanced technology can struggle when the real world becomes unpredictable. In April 2026, a Waymo robotaxi in San Antonio, Texas, drove into a flooded lane during severe weather, prompting the company to recall about 3,800 vehicles for a software fix.
Imagine navigating a city street during rush hour—cars and bikes zipping by, pedestrians hustling down a crowded sidewalk, your eyes adjusting to the shop windows' glare in one moment and a dark underpass the next. Our brain, of course, does all this without us being aware of the complex processes going on in that moment. In real time, our eyes and brain create a three-dimensional, accurate representation of a dynamic scene, constantly calculating distances between objects with myriad shapes, sizes, and surfaces.
In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly through a collapsed building to map the scene, giving rescuers information they need to quickly reach survivors. But this remains an extremely challenging problem for an autonomous robot, which would need to swiftly adjust its trajectory to avoid sudden obstacles while staying on course.
As robots enter hospitals and care facilities, questions remain about whether they actually make care easier for the people who give and receive it. A new Cornell Tech-led study approaches that challenge by inviting health care workers, long-term care residents, and community members to help design the robots themselves.
It sounds like science fiction, but also strangely familiar: drones buzzing around, inspecting tomatoes in greenhouses, delivering your package or inspecting an industrial site. With all the talk about drone-swarms, development in drones seems to move fast. But their navigation still requires a lot of computing power and memory, making them heavy, expensive and energy-hungry.