Research news
Short summaries of what matters in robotics, each linking to its original source, plus our own interviews and features. Have a story?
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On October 11, Perseverance passed 45.22 km of total driving on Mars, overtaking the record previously held by Opportunity. JPL credits the rover's AutoNav self-driving system, used about 90% of the time and upgraded over five years, including a higher allowed slope of up to 24 degrees.
· IEEE Spectrum
Researchers at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab fitted a commercial Wuji Technology hand with a small battery and computer pack and trained it with reinforcement learning to walk on its fingers. It moved at about 9 cm per second over 14 surfaces and pushed objects to targets, which the team sees as useful for maintenance and search and rescue in tight spaces.
· IEEE Spectrum
MIT researchers led by Jonathan P. How have built SANDO, a trajectory planner that builds time-aware safe corridors around moving obstacles so drones can fly without collisions in unmapped areas. It beat rival planners to the goal in simulation and avoided every dynamic obstacle across 12 real flights, with search and rescue, mine exploration and delivery as target uses.
· MIT News
University of Glasgow researchers used augmented reality to try five face styles and five sounds on a Qoobo robot with 24 volunteers. Animal-like and anime faces scored equally well, faces conveyed emotion better than voices, and pet owners leaned towards animal designs; the work was presented at the MobileHCI conference.
· Robohub
Runway has introduced Praxis-1, a world action model trained mostly on ordinary video rather than robot demonstrations, aimed at the scarcity of robot training data. Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra are testing it on their hardware ahead of a public open-weight release planned in the coming months.
· The Robot Report
DH-Robotics presented two backdrivable, direct-drive hands at IROS 2026: the five-finger ADH-5-13 with 13 active degrees of freedom, 735 g and fingertip tactile sensing, and the three-finger UDH-3-7 with 7. They target embodied-AI research and teleoperation; no prices or delivery dates were given.
· Robotics Tomorrow
Honda is developing a system that pairs its multi-fingered robot hand with Redwire's STAARK arm and experiment lockers to handle sample retrieval and lab chores on future commercial space stations. The concept is still at the exploration stage, with talks planned with station developers to free up time for smaller crews.
· Robotics Tomorrow
A team led by Ritu Raman at MIT created a flat biohybrid robot whose two fins are powered by genetically engineered muscle that contracts under light, letting researchers steer it through a water maze. Published in Advanced Functional Materials, the work suggests thin designs could make biohybrid robots cheaper to build than bulkier 3D versions.
· MIT News
Researchers from EPFL and NYU built ScaFi, a tendon-driven robotic fish produced in three lengths from 0.6 m to 2.9 m that swims with the same motion at every size by changing only the tail rod diameter. Described in npj Robotics, the approach could simplify fielding quiet underwater robots that avoid disturbing sediment and wildlife, though energy efficiency across sizes remains an open problem.
· Robohub
Robotics software company Viam presented BoxBot at IROS 2026, a robot that cuts tape with visual servoing and opens flaps using a fine-tuned open source SmolVLA policy. Engineers gathered the 125 teleoperated demonstrations in about five hours, and the model runs on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Code and data are published on Hugging Face.
· Robotics Tomorrow
MIT researchers led by Marin Soljacic built a reconfigurable lab where a seven-joint robot arm places mirrors, lenses and light sources, then adjusts them with micron-level accuracy. It assembled a working laser cavity in 50 moves within 30 minutes. The work, presented at IROS, could speed materials testing for solar cells and quantum devices.
· MIT News
Researchers at the University of Queensland fitted giant burrowing cockroaches with electronics to steer them by remote control while they carry wireless cameras or spring-loaded injectors for disaster rescue. In tests they completed a 2.5-meter course in all 25 trials and hit injection targets 72% of the time, according to a paper in Advanced Science.
· IEEE Spectrum
In a Science Robotics study, 50 people talked with a Pepper robot that sometimes erred while being either animated or still. Mistakes cut trust in both cases, but brain imaging showed errors from the animated robot were processed more like social violations, and higher oxytocin predicted lower trust, a finding relevant to humanoid interface design.
· Robohub