Cyborg Beetles With Microchip Backpacks Could Aid Rescue Missions

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.

IEEE World Haptics: 8–11 July 2025, SUWON, SOUTH KOREA

IFAC Symposium on Robotics: 15–18 July 2025, PARIS

RoboCup 2025: 15–21 July 2025, BAHIA, BRAZIL

RO-MAN 2025: 25–29 August 2025, EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS

CLAWAR 2025: 5–7 September 2025, SHENZHEN, CHINA

ACTUATE 2025: 23–24 September 2025, SAN FRANCISCO

CoRL 2025: 27–30 September 2025, SEOUL

IEEE Humanoids: 30 September–2 October 2025, SEOUL

World Robot Summit: 10–12 October 2025, OSAKA, JAPAN

IROS 2025: 19–25 October 2025, HANGZHOU, CHINA

Enjoy today’s videos!

Common beetles equipped with microchip backpacks could one day be used to help search and rescue crews locate survivors within hours instead of days following disasters such as building and mine collapses. The University of Queensland’s Dr. Thang Vo-Doan and Research Assistant Lachlan Fitzgerald have demonstrated they can remotely guide darkling beetles (Zophobas morio) fitted with the packs via video game controllers.

[ Paper ] via [ University of Queensland ]

Thanks, Thang!

This is our latest work about six-doF hand-based teleoperation for omnidirectional aerial robots, which shows an intuitive teleoperation system for advanced aerial robot. This work has been presented in 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025).

[ DRAGON Lab ]

Thanks, Moju!

Pretty sure we’ve seen this LimX humanoid before, and we’re seeing it again right now, but hey, the first reveal is just ahead!

[ LimX Dynamics ]

Thanks, Jinyan!

Soft robot arms use soft materials and structures to mimic the passive compliance of biological arms that bend and extend. Here, we show how relying on patterning structures instead of inherent material properties allows soft robotic arms to remain compliant while continuously transmitting torque to their environment. We demonstrate a soft robotic arm made from a pair of mechanical metamaterials that act as compliant constant-velocity joints.

[ Paper ] via [ Transformative Robotics Lab ]

Selling a platform is really hard, but I hope K-Scale can succeed with their open source humanoid.

[ K-Scale ]

MIT CSAIL researchers combined GenAI and a physics simulation engine to refine robot designs. The result: a machine that out-jumped a robot designed by humans.

[ MIT News ]

ARMstrong Dex is a human-scale dual-arm hydraulic robot under development at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) for disaster response applications. Designed with dimensions similar to an adult human, it combines human-equivalent reach and dexterity with force output that exceeds human physical capabilities, enabling it to perform extreme heavy-duty tasks in hazardous environments.

[ Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute ]

This is a demonstration of in-hand object rotation with Torobo Hand. Torobo Hand is modeled in simulation, and a control policy is trained within several hours using large-scale parallel reinforcement learning in Isaac Sim. The trained policy can be executed without any additional training in both a different simulator (MuJoCo) and on the real Torobo Hand.

[ Tokyo Robotics ]

Since 2005, Ekso Bionics has been developing and manufacturing exoskeleton bionic devices that can be strapped on as wearable robots to enhance the strength, mobility, and endurance of soldiers, patients, and workers. These robots have a variety of applications in the medical, military, industrial, and consumer markets, helping rehabilitation patients walk again and workers preserve their strength.

[ Ekso Bionics ]

Sponsored by Raytheon, an RTX business, the 2025 east coast Autonomous Vehicle Competition was held at XElevate in Northern Virginia. Student Engineering Teams from five universities participated in a two-semester project to design, develop, integrate, and compete two autonomous vehicles that could identify, communicate, and deliver a medical kit with the best accuracy and time.

[ RTX ]

This panel is from the Humanoids Summit in London: “Investing in the Humanoids Robotics Ecosystem—a VC Perspective.”

[ Humanoids Summit ]