Category robotics

The core tension is clear: excitement must yield to scrutiny. This post moves businesses past the novelty of robot adoption and into the necessary preparation phase of risk mitigation and compliance review. It's time to build a solid foundation before the next bot rolls out.

The core tension is clear: excitement must yield to scrutiny. This post moves businesses past the novelty of robot adoption and into the necessary preparation phase of risk mitigation and compliance review. It's time to build a solid foundation before the next bot rolls out.

Claire chatted to Yuen Ting Chan from Natural History Museum about using robots to automate molecular biology experiments.

Yuen Ting Chan has nearly 20 years of experience working on translating, developing and optimising laboratory protocols, from DNA forensics to the biomedical field. She has brought automation to molecular laboratories for over 12 years, translating the laboratory protocols into bespoke scripts for a wide variety of liquid handling instruments. Her role at the Natural History Museum is to bring automation to the molecular laboratories, thus providing more opportunities for researchers to work on projects with large sample numbers for the wide variety of specimens within the museum.

Could tiny magnetic objects, that rapidly clump together and instantly fall apart again, one day perform delicate procedures inside the human body? A new study from researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart and at ETH Zurich introduces a wireless method to stiffen and relax small structures using magnetic fields, without wires, pumps, or physical contact.

Researchers have invented a new super agile robot that can cleverly change shape thanks to amorphous characteristics akin to the popular Marvel anti-hero Venom.

We’re partnering with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to bring clean, safe, limitless fusion energy closer to reality.

Powder bed-based laser melting of metals (PBF-LB/M) is a key technology in additive manufacturing that makes it possible to produce highly complex and high-performance metal components with customised material and functional properties.

We’re launching a new 27 billion parameter foundation model for single-cell analysis built on the Gemma family of open models.

Microrobots, small robotic systems that are less than 1 centimeter (cm) in size, could tackle some real-world tasks that cannot be completed by bigger robots. For instance, they could be used to monitor confined spaces and remote natural environments, to deliver drugs or to diagnose diseases or other medical conditions.

Researchers have created a class of robots made from thin sheets of material that can snap into hundreds of stable shapes, allowing them to execute a wide variety of actions despite the fact that they have no motor and are made of a single, flat material. These "metabots" essentially resemble animated sheets of plastic, capable of moving around a surface or grasping objects.

Researchers have developed a soft robotic skin that enables vine robots that are just a few millimeters wide to navigate convoluted paths and fragile environments. To accomplish this, the researchers integrated a very thin layer of actuators made of liquid crystal elastomer at strategic locations in the soft skin. The robot is steered by controlling the pressure inside its body and temperature of the actuators.

We’re rolling out significant updates to Veo that give people even more creative control.

From sorting objects in a warehouse to navigating furniture while vacuuming, robots today use sensors, software control systems, and moving parts to perform tasks. The harder the task or more complex the environment, the more cumbersome and expensive the electronic components.

The global demand for temperature-controlled logistics continues to grow, and with it comes an increase in operational complexity. These facilities require substantial investment, precise temperature regulation, and the capacity to adapt to market shifts quickly.

The 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025) will be held from 19-25 October in Hangzhou, China. The programme includes plenary and keynote talks, workshops, tutorials, forums, competitions, and a debate.

Plenary talks

There are three plenary talks on the programme this year, with one per day on Tuesday 21, Wednesday 22, and Thursday 23 October.

• Marco Hutter – The New Era of Mobility: Humanoids and Quadrupeds Enter the Real World
• Hyoun Jin Kim – Autonomous Aerial Manipulation: Toward Physically Intelligent Robots in Flight
• Song-Chun Zhu – TongBrain: Bridging Physical Robots and AGI Agents

Keynote talks

The keynotes this year fall under eleven umbrella topics:

• Rehabilitation & Physically Assistive Systems
  • Patrick Wensing – From Controlled Tests to Open Worlds: Advancing Legged Robots and Lower-Limb Prostheses
  • Hao Su – AI-Powered Wearable and Surgical Robots for Human Augmentation
  • Lorenzo Masia – Wearable Robots and AI for Rehabilitation and Human Augmentation
  • Shingo Shimoda – Science of Awareness: Toward a New Paradigm for Brain-Generated Disorders
• Bio-inspired Robotics
  • Kevin Chen – Agile and robust micro-aerial-robots driven by soft artificial muscles
  • Josie Hughes – Bioinspired Robots: Building Embodied Intelligence
  • Jee-Hwan Ryu – Soft Growing Robots: From Disaster Response to Colonoscopy
  • Lei Ren – Layagrity robotics: inspiration from the human musculoskeletal system
• Soft Robotics
  • Bram Vanderborght – Self healing materials for sustainable soft robots”
  • Cecilia Laschi – From AI Scaling to Embodied Control: Toward Energy-Frugal Soft Robotics
  • Kyu-Jin Cho – Soft Wearable Robots: Navigating the Challenges of Building Technology for the Human Body
  • Li Wen – Multimodal Soft Robots: Elevating Interaction in Complex and Diverse Environments
• Al and Robot Learning
  • Fei Miao – From Uncertainty to Action: Robust and Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Embodied AI
  • Xifeng Yan – Adaptive Inference in Transformers
  • Long Cheng – Learning from Demonstrations by the Dynamical System Approach
  • Karinne Ramírez-Amaro – Transparent Robot Decision-Making with Interpretable & Explainable Methods
• Perception and Sensors
  • Davide Scaramuzza – Low-latency Robotics with Event Cameras
  • Kris Dorsey – Sensor design for soft robotic proprioception
  • Perla Maiolino – Shaping Intelligence: Soft Bodies, Sensors, and Experience
  • Roberto Calandra – Digitizing Touch and its Importance in Robotics
• Human Robot Interaction
  • Javier Alonso-Mora – Multi-Agent Autonomy: from Interaction-Aware Navigation to Coordinated Mobile Manipulation
  • Jing Xiao – Robotic Manipulation in Unknown and Uncertain Environments
  • Dongheui Lee – From Passive Learner to Pro-Active and Inter-Active Learner with Reasoning Capabilities
  • Ya-Jun Pan – Intelligent Adaptive Robot Interacting with Unknown Environment and Human
• Embodied Intelligence
  • Fumiya Iida – Informatizing Soft Robots for Super Embodied Intelligence
  • Nidhi Seethapathi – Predictive Principles of Locomotion
  • Cewu Lu – Digital Gene: An Analytical Universal Embodied Manipulation Ideology
  • Long Cheng – Learning from Demonstrations by the Dynamical System Approach
• Medical Robots
  • Kenji Suzuki – Small-data Deep Learning for AI Doctor and Smart Medical Imaging
  • Li Zhang – Magnetic Microrobots for Translational Biomedicine: From Individual and Modular Designs to Microswarms
  • Kanako Harada – Co-evolution of Human and AI-Robots to Expand Science Frontiers
  • Loredana Zollo – Towards Synergistic Human–Machine Interaction in Assistive and Rehabilitation Robotics: Multimodal Interfaces, Sensory Feedback, and Future Perspectives
• Field Robotics
  • Matteo Matteucci – Robotics Meets Agriculture: SLAM and Perception for Crop Monitoring and Precision Farming
  • Brendan Englot – Situational Awareness and Decision-Making Under Uncertainty for Marine Robots
  • Abhinav Valada – Open World Embodied Intelligence: Learning from Perception to Action in the Wild
  • Timothy H. Chung – Catalyzing the Future of Human, Robot, and AI Agent Teams in the Physical World
• Humanoid Robot Systems
  • Kei Okada – Transforming Humanoid Robot Intelligence: From Reconfigurable Hardware to Human-Centric Applications
  • Xingxing Wang – A New Era of Global Collaboration in Intelligent Robotics
  • Wei Zhang – Towards Physical Intelligence in Humanoid Robotics
  • Dennis Hong – Staging the Machine: Not Built for Work, Built for Wonder
• Mechanisms and Controls
  • Kenjiro Tadakuma – Topological Robotic Mechanisms
  • Angela P. Schoellig – AI-Powered Robotics: From Semantic Understanding to Safe Autonomy
  • Lu Liu – Safety-Aware Multi-Agent Self-Deployment: Integrating Cybersecurity and Constrained Coordination
  • Fuchun Sun – Knowledge-Guided Tactile VLA: Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap with Physics and Geometry Awareness

Debate

On Wednesday, a debate will be held on the following topic: “Humanoids Will Soon Replace Most Human Workers: True or False?” The participants will be: XingXing Wang (Unitree Robotics), Jun-Oh Ho (Samsung and Rainbow Robotics), Hong Qiao (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Andra Keay, (Silicon Valley Robotics), Yu Sun (EiC, IEEE Trans on Automation Science and Engineering), Tamim Asfour (Professor of Humanoid Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley, Moderator).

Tutorials

There are three tutorials planned, taking place on Monday 20 and Friday 24 October.

• Enhancing Digital Accessibility in Higher Education
• Design and Development of Rehabilitation Robotic Devices: Healthcare Challenges
• Retico: A Framework for Robot-ready Spoken Dialogue with Robots

Workshops

You can find a list of the workshops here. These will take place on Monday 20 and Friday 24 October.There are 83 to choose from this year.

Find out more

• Conference webpage
• Forums
• Competitions