Video Friday: Albatross Falls, Spins, Self-Rights, and Sails Away

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

CoRL 2026: 9 — 12 November 2026, AUSTIN

Humanoids 2026: 6 — 9 December 2026, SANTA CLARA, CA

Enjoy today's videos!

We've developed ALBATROSS (Airborne Lander with Buoyant AuToROtating Sailing Sensor), a hybrid aerial-marine robot. It can be released from the air, autorotate down to the water without a parachute, passively self-right after landing, and then reuse the same rigid wings as sails for autonomous wind-powered navigation.The key idea is to make the physical structures do as much of the work as possible. Rather than carrying separate systems for aerial descent, landing, and marine propulsion, ALBATROSS uses the same wings for both autorotation and sailing, with minimal actuation. Ultimately, we're interested in whether platforms like this could combine rapid aerial deployment with persistent, energy-efficient marine sensing.

[ Singapore University of Technology and Design ] paper via [ Science Robotics ]

Thanks, Shane!

I'm just getting so burnt out on the humanoid publicity stunts, you know?

[ Figure ]

Sharpa unveiled three major proprietary new products at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS): D01, the first integrated tactile-sensing robot built for dexterous manipulation; W02, a next-generation fully tactile, ultracompact, lightweight dexterous hand; and AE01, a high-fidelity haptic exoskeleton data glove.

[ Sharpa ]

Why will Boston Dynamics win the humanoid robotics race? We've already commercialized autonomous mobile robots, creating markets with Spot and Stretch. Now we're doing it again with Atlas: learning in real environments, designing for manufacturing at scale, and introducing a new era of physical intelligence.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

This work presents a lightweight, compliant footpad that enhances the terrain adaptability of a hopping robot. The design combines a planar foot supported by a compliant spherical joint for self‑alignment with embedded spines to improve traction on uneven or slippery surfaces.

[ CLIMB Lab, University of Toronto ]

Heterogeneous robot teams distribute complementary capabilities across specialized agents, but their physical roles and capacities typically remain fixed throughout a mission. We present HARP, a Heterogeneous Aerial Robotic modules Platform, in which independently deployable aerial robots physically reconfigure to compose their capabilities for field operations.

Some very impressive mobility from ANYmal.

[ ETH Zurich RSL ]

Daniel writes, "I'm a high school student in Canada, and I built a self-constructing robot arm that assembles itself. It's designed to be low-cost, with disaster response in mind: Small robots can squeeze through gaps in rubble but are too weak to move things, while big arms are strong but can't fit through. My arm is split into three wheeled modules that travel separately, then dock together using a spring-lock mechanism."

[ Daniel Zhu ]

Autonomous highway driving not impressive enough for you? Try this.

[ XPENG ]

The IT Imperial team has connected MaleCNS — a published connectome of a male fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) — to a physical Unitree G1 humanoid robot. The system creates a closed loop: camera → fruit-fly neural model → motor decoding → physical robot movement. The robot receives visual input through its stereo camera. The images are transformed into a representation adapted to the fly's visual system, processed by the computational model based on the reconstructed nervous system, and then converted into movement commands for the robot.

[ IT Imperial ]

Thanks, Anna!

My guess is that this is far easier than it looks or far harder than it looks, and I'm honestly not sure which.

[ Paper ]

I cannot believe that this is still a thing, but good on them!

[ Tevel ]

In Part 1 of Dexterity Explained, we break down what manual dexterity is, why it matters, and how robotic hands and physical AI work together to bring greater skill, precision, and control to physical tasks.

[ Sanctuary AI ]

XPENG has a lot of money to build a lot of these robots. They do look very human. I'm not sure what they're going to do, though.

[ XPENG ]

That's a lot of robots! Tell me what they're all going to do!

[ UBTECH ]

When floods swept away roads and bridges in Nepal, local drone pilots stepped in to help map the damage, support search teams, and deliver essential supplies to communities cut off from help. In this episode of Ground Truth with Flying Labs, host Leka Tingitana speaks with Uttam Pudasaini, an advisor to Nepal Flying Labs, and Raj Bikram Maharjan, cofounder of Airlift Technology, about the drone community's response to the devastating floods of 26 August 2026.

[ WeRobotics ]

• Robotic Raven Gains Altitude ›

• Festo's New Bio-Inspired Robots Include a Feathery Bionic Bird - IEEE Spectrum ›

Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.