robot arms

A short clip of a ramen restaurant in Nagoya where robot arms cook the noodles. Human waiters serve the food.

A short Boston Dynamics clip of the Sand Flea, an 11-pound RC-car-style robot that can jump about 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented in flight and for landings.

Robin Deits presents the JuliaRobotics organization and shows how Julia is used to visualize, simulate and control a humanoid robot. The talk touches on real-time performance and composability across packages.

A short demo from the Ishikawa Komuro Lab of a high-speed robot hand paired with a 1000fps vision system performing dexterous manipulation. It shows what very low-latency vision and actuation can do.

An IEEE Spectrum compilation of humanoid robots falling over during the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals.

A University of Tokyo demo of a rock-paper-scissors robot that always wins, using high-speed vision to read the human hand and respond faster than people can perceive.

Short clip of Honda's ASIMO humanoid robot falling down stairs during a live demonstration.

A short 2009 WIRED clip showing Kiva Systems robots moving inventory shelves in a warehouse serving online retailer Zappos. It shows how mobile robots bring goods to pickers instead of people walking the aisles.

A short Boston Dynamics demo of RHex, a 30-lb six-legged robot built for rough terrain, remotely operated with a video uplink and about four hours of battery life. It can run right-side-up or upside-down.

A short clip from the Futurama episode I Dated a Robot, showing the in-universe propaganda film warning against dating robots.

A short Boston Dynamics clip of the DARPA-funded Cheetah quadruped robot hitting 28.3 mph on a treadmill, slightly faster than Usain Bolt's fastest 20 meter split.

Corridor Digital's comedic fake video of a Boston Dynamics robot fighting back against its human tormentors, made with motion capture and VFX.

CGTN coverage of the 2026 Spring Festival Gala, in which humanoid robots perform synchronized martial arts routines alongside children.

A KUKA commercial staging a table tennis match between German star Timo Boll and a KUKA KR AGILUS industrial robot. It is a polished showcase of robot speed and precision.

Toyota Research Institute presents an approach for teaching robots new dexterous behaviors from human demonstration. It explains why this capability matters and what advances made it possible.

Adam Savage builds a Victorian-style rickshaw carriage for Boston Dynamics' Spot robot to pull, with him riding as passenger. The video covers the build and the engineering problems of pairing cutting-edge robotics with vintage transport, such as tuning the payload through Spot's API.

Stuff Made Here builds a handwriting robot and sends its output to a handwriting expert to see whether it can pass as forgery. It walks through the engineering trials and errors along the way.

A dramatized fictional video of micro drones with facial recognition and swarm AI used as autonomous killer weapons. It is a Slaughterbots-style warning about lethal autonomous weapons.

A Corridor Digital parody of a Boston Dynamics promo, showing a CGI military robot trained for combat that goes rogue and refuses to kill a robotic dog.

A short Unitree promo for its G1 humanoid robot, priced from $16K, showing agile motion, dexterous hands and imitation and reinforcement learning.

A short CMU Robotics Institute clip on NavLab 1 from 1986, the first self-driving car to carry people on board. It was very slow but revolutionary for its era's computing power.

Erlang co-creator Joe Armstrong's Code BEAM SF 2018 keynote revisits good ideas from the history of computing that were dropped, and asks which should be revived. It also touches on Erlang and Elixir.

The first installment of a hobbyist's video diary documenting his build of a giant walking spider-like vehicle. The footage is casual and self-shot, following the early stages of the project.

Joe Armstrong's GOTO 2018 talk contrasts the problems computer scientists study with the problems users have. He revisits forgotten great ideas such as tuple spaces, flow-based programming, Xanadu and Unix pipes, with anecdotes.

Tom Scott tours Ocado's automated grocery warehouse, where thousands of robots move boxes on a grid called the Hive, and asks whether they are individual robots or a hive mind.

The full 1973 BBC Lighthill debate on artificial intelligence, featuring James Lighthill, Donald Michie, Richard Gregory and John McCarthy. It documents the argument that preceded the 1970s AI winter and includes early robot demos.

A short Boston Dynamics demo of Handle, a wheeled mobile manipulation robot that builds and unloads mixed-box pallets in a warehouse. It uses vision to find boxes and force control to place them against neighbors.

AutoX shows its fully driverless robotaxi navigating dense, chaotic urban village streets in Chinese cities. The vehicle nudges through crowds, bikes, scooters and pets.

Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation. He argues for ideas like naming things by content hash and throwing away your first version.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh. They discuss the meaning of object orientation, message passing, the META II paper, and the state of computer science.

Slaughterbots is a fictional short film, backed by Stuart Russell, depicting swarms of cheap autonomous drones that use facial recognition to assassinate targets. It was made to argue for banning autonomous weapons.

Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.

Festo's promo video of SmartBird, an ultralight bionic flying model inspired by the herring gull that flaps and twists its wings to fly. It shows the robot in flight.

A panel with Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong and Carl Hewitt, hosted by Francesco Cesarini, on the history and future of concurrency. The three creators of CSP, Erlang and the actor model discuss their differing approaches.

Boston Dynamics' March 2008 video of BigDog, a four-legged robot, walking on ice and snow, climbing rubble and recovering from slips and kicks.

Novelist Daniel Suarez warns in a TED talk about autonomous robotic weapons and drones. He argues that taking the decision to kill out of human hands threatens democratic accountability and calls for a ban.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, and Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki, discuss hypertext, Ted Nelson's idea of intertwingled knowledge, and a way to combine TiddlyWiki with Erlang. It is a Code Mesh LDN 2018 talk.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robots running a parkour course with jumps, balance beams and vaults, demonstrating whole-body athletic control.

Rob Miles explains for Computerphile why simple rule sets like Asimov's Three Laws cannot make robots and AI safe. Terms like harm and human are too ambiguous to specify precisely.

Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang, gives a GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on building fault-tolerant systems. He covers what to do and avoid when handling errors, arguing for letting processes fail and recover.