Video Friday: An Earthbound Mars Rover for the Moon
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.RSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEYSummer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUEActuate 2026: 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCOIROS 2026: 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGHEnjoy today’s videos! NASA is considering a mission concept for an advanced, nuclear-powered rover to be deployed to the Moon’s South Pole as part of the agency’s Moon Base plans. The PROMISE (Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration) mission concept relies on the Curiosity Mars rover mission’s testbed rover. Some elements of the Perseverance Mars testbed rover shown in this video could be used as well. As exact duplicates of Curiosity and Perseverance, the testbed rovers are equipped with flight-proven engineering systems capable of carrying technology as well as science instruments that would advance Moon Base efforts.A Mars rover for the Moon? That’s some OPTIMISM right there.[ JPL ]This is the absolute best thing since Festo’s AirPenguin.The project explores soft, lightweight robots that can gently float around people in indoor environments and invite playful, affectionate, and everyday interactions. Unlike conventional drones, our robot is designed to be quiet, soft, touch-safe, and socially approachable. Through this work, we ask what future indoor companion robots might feel like if they were not rigid machines, but gentle floating beings that share space with us.[ Paper ]Thanks, Mingyang!Today, we’re launching our home robot, Isaac 1. Deliveries will begin this fall.US $500 per month, with some basic task autonomy plus teleoperation.[ Weave Robotics ]A couple things from this new Figure video—thing one is that the cart pulling is a good illustration of how clumsy humanoid robots still are at basic tasks relative to humans. Thing two is that there are absolutey no humans anywhere near these robots. You can see one guy at 0:19, which I can only assume is an accident, because these robots are not safe to be around from an industrial safety perspective.[ Figure ]Our very own Kohava Mendelsohn met some robots at ICRA in Vienna, and only one of them was murderous.[ ICRA 2026 ]Welcome to Robot Park, where we’re building the future with Apollo 2. Robot Park is where Apollo learns today, getting the experience needed to make a difference tomorrow. Today we’re announcing Robot Park, our nearly 90,000-square-foot facility where Apollo 2 is collecting real-world training data needed to advance autonomous humanoid robots. [ Apptronik ]UBTech Robotics, the world’s first publicly traded humanoid robot-maker, has launched a humanlike robot that features lifelike silicone skin and “emotional AI”, as Chinese tech firms increasingly transition robots from the factory floor to the family living room.[ SCMP ]Spherephones are redefining how we experience sound. Created at Georgia Tech, this wearable uses spatial audio to alert users to movement from every direction—including behind and below. Built for safer human-robot collaboration, the technology is expanding into gaming and accessibility applications. See how music is becoming a new language for awareness and interaction.[ Georgia Tech ]Humanoid robots are meant to carry out long-horizon autonomous missions in a world built for humans. This is hard. These missions consist of many steps, each of which requires them to perceive, navigate, and interact with the environment. This is exactly Flexion’s goal: building the general-purpose intelligence that turns any robot into a useful helper.[ Flexion ]We’re introducing KinetIQ Ascend — our reinforcement learning approach designed to reach 99.9% manipulation reliability at human speed and beyond.[ Humanoid ]Dr. Sebastian “Basti” Scherer has worked in field robotics since the first DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004. He runs the AirLab at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and is the Director of Safe Embodied AI at FieldAI. While much of the industry is focused on local skills like tabletop manipulation, Dr. Scherer sees the greatest value in solving dirty, dull, and dangerous tasks that require operating in uncertain environments where the robot needs to “just work.” When robots “just work” they become less like robots and more like tools. “That’s the big challenge that we have to overcome,” he says, “and that’s the challenge that FieldAI is really primed to solve.”[ Field AI ]Look, I really appreciate how valuable robots like ElliQ can be, and robots that do good work and offer a financial benefit are incredibly important, especially in the context of family care. But in my opinion, you really shouldn’t suggest that a robot with FaceTime or whatever is an equal replacement for in-person human companionship, nor should you suggest that AI can replace a human wellness coach. If you can’t afford those things, then sure, ElliQ can offer some of those capabilities in a very limited way, but that’s all.[ ElliQ ]Very cool moves! Now get a job![ DEEP Robotics ]Drawing inspiration from restaurant waiters in Morocco and Turkey, among other places, we equip a robot with a hanging tray to transport objects from one location to another without dropping them or spilling their contents. We incorporate this approach into an interactive robot waiter demonstration, which uses computer vision and visual servoing to steer toward a person with a raised hand to serve them.[ Paper ]If you’re going to make robots wear skirts or shorts or pants, you have to give them butts, or it’s just not going to work. That is all.[ TechShare ] via [ Kazumichi Moriyama ]It’s Los Alamos, so of course we have robots. Some work inside gloveboxes, while others probe unexploded ordnance in the field and aid with repetitive lifting, Doc Ock–style. Legend has it there’s a fro-yo robot in the cafeteria.[ LANL ]Here are a couple of talks from the recent Humanoids Summit in Japan, from Ali Agha of Field AI as well as Hiroshi Ishiguro. [ Humanoids Summit ]]]>
Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org/video-friday-nasa-lunar-rover
