Video Friday: Ameca Humanoid

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

3 min read

A gray anthropomorphic humanoid robot making an expression of surprise
Engineered Arts

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

CSIRO SubT Summit – December 10, 2021 – Online
ICRA 2022 – May 23-27, 2022 – Philadelphia, PA, USA

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.


Ameca is the world’s most advanced human shaped robot representing the forefront of human-robotics technology. Designed specifically as a platform for development into future robotics technologies, Ameca is the perfect humanoid robot platform for human-robot interaction.

Apparently, the eventual plan is to get Ameca to walk.

[ Engineered Arts ]

Looks like Flexiv had a tasty and exceptionally safe Thanksgiving!

But also kind of lonely :(

[ Flexiv ]

Thanks, Yunfan!

Cedars-Sinai is now home to a pair of Moxi robots, named Moxi and Moxi. Yeah, they should work on the names. But they've totally nailed the beeps!

[ Diligent Robotics ] via [ Cedars Sinai ]

Somehow we already have a robot holiday video, I don't know whether to be thrilled or horrified.

The Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the CTU in Prague wishes you a Merry Christmas and much success, health and energy in 2022!

[ CTU ]

Carnegie Mellon University's Iris rover is bolted in and ready for its journey to the moon. The tiny rover passed a huge milestone on Wednesday, Dec. 1, when it was secured to one of the payload decks of Astrobotic's Peregrine Lunar Lander, which will deliver it to the moon next year.

[ CMU ]

This robot has some of the absolute best little feetsies I've ever. Seen.

[ SDU ]

Thanks, Poramate!

With the help of artificial intelligence and four collaborative robots, researchers at ETH Zurich are designing and fabricating a 22.5-metre-tall green architectural sculpture.

[ ETH Zurich ]

Cassie Blue autonomously navigates on the second floor of the Ford Robotics Building at the University of Michigan. The total traverse distance is 200 m (656.168 feet).

[ Michigan Robotics ]

Thanks, Bruce!

The Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) will be held in the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi, in June 2023, where tech innovators will participate to seek marine safety and security solutions to take home more than US$3 million in prize money.

[ MBZIRC ]

Madagascar Flying Labs and WeRobotics are using cargo drones to deliver essential medicines to very remote communities in northern Madagascar. This month, they delivered the 250 doses of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine for the first time, with many more such deliveries to come over the next 12 months.

[ WeRobotics ]

It's... Cozmo?

Already way overfunded on Kickstarter.

[ Kickstarter ] via [ RobotStart ]

At USC's Center for Advanced Manufacturing, we have taught the Baxter robot to manipulate fluid food substances to create pancake art of various user created designs.

[ USC ]

Face-first perching for fixed wing drones looks kinda painful, honestly.

[ EPFL ]

Video footage from NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s 13th flight on Sept. 4 provides the most detailed look yet of the rotorcraft in action.

During takeoff, Ingenuity kicks up a small plume of dust that the right camera, or “eye,” captures moving to the right of the helicopter during ascent. After its initial climb to planned maximum altitude of 26 feet (8 meters), the helicopter performs a small pirouette to line up its color camera for scouting. Then Ingenuity pitches over, allowing the rotors’ thrust to begin moving it horizontally through the thin Martian air before moving offscreen. Later, the rotorcraft returns and lands in the vicinity of where it took off. The team targeted a different landing spot–about 39 feet (12 meters) from takeoff–to avoid a ripple of sand it landed on at the completion of Flight 12.

[ JPL ]

I'm not totally sold on the viability of commercial bathroom cleaning robots, but I do appreciate how well the techology seems to work. In the videos, at least.

[ SOMATIC ]

An interdisciplinary team at Harvard University School of Engineering and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University is building soft robots for older adults and people with physical impairments. Examples of these robots are the Assistive Hip Suit and Soft Robotic Glove, both of which have been included in the 2021-2022 Smithsonian Institution exhibit entitled "FUTURES".

[ SI ]

Subterranean robot exploration is difficult with many mobility, communications, and navigation challenges that require an approach with a diverse set of systems, and reliable autonomy. While prior work has demonstrated partial successes in addressing the problem, here we convey a comprehensive approach to address the problem of subterranean exploration in a wide range of tunnel, urban, and cave environments. Our approach is driven by the themes of resiliency and modularity, and we show examples of how these themes influence the design of the different modules. In particular, we detail our approach to artifact detection, pose estimation, coordination, planning, control, and autonomy, and discuss our performance in the Final DARPA Subterranean Challenge.

[ CMU ]

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