Watch These Robots Throw, Catch, and Hit a Baseball

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.

SOSV Robotics Matchup: 1–5 December 2025, ONLINE

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

Enjoy today’s videos!

Researchers at the RAI Institute have built a low-impedance platform to study dynamic robot manipulation. In this demo, robots play a game of catch and participate in batting practice, both with each other and with skilled humans. The robots are capable of throwing 70mph [112 kph], approaching the speed of a strong high school pitcher. The robots can catch and bat at short distances (23 feet [7 m]) requiring quick reaction times to catch balls thrown at up to 41 mph [66kph] and hit balls pitched at up to 30 mph [48kph].

That’s a nice touch with the custom “RAI” baseball gloves, but what I really want to know is how long a pair of robots can keep themselves entertained.

[ RAI Institute ]

This week’s best bacronym winner is GIRAF: Greatly Increased Reach AnyMAL Function. And if that arm looks like magic, that’s because it is, although with some careful pausing of the video you’ll be able to see how it works.

[ Stanford BDML ]

DARPA concluded the second year of the DARPA Triage Challenge on October 4, awarding top marks to DART and MSAI in Systems and Data competitions, respectively. The three-year prize competition aims to revolutionize medical triage in mass casualty incidents where medical resources are limited.

[ DARPA ]

We propose a robot agnostic reward function that balances the achievement of a desired end pose with impact minimization and the protection of critical robot parts during reinforcement learning. To make the policy robust to a broad range of initial falling conditions and to enable the specification of an arbitrary and unseen end pose at inference time, we introduce a simulation-based sampling strategy of initial and end poses. Through simulated and real-world experiments, our work demonstrates that even bipedal robots can perform controlled, soft falls.

[ Moritz Baecher ]

Oh look, more humanoid acrobatics.

My prediction: once humanoid companies run out of mocapped dance moves, we’ll start seeing some freaky stuff that leverages the degrees of freedom that robots have and humans do not. You heard it here first, folks.

[ MagicLab ]

I challenge the next company that makes a “lights-out” video to just cut to just a totally black screen with a little “Successful Picks” counter in the corner that just goes up and up and up.

[ Brightpick ]

Thanks, Gilmarie!

The terrain stuff is cool and all but can we just talk about the trailer instead?

[ LimX Dynamics ]

Presumably very picky German birblets are getting custom nesting boxes manufactured with excessively high precision by robots.

[ TUM ]

All those UBTECH Walker S2 robots weren’t fake, it turns out.

[ UBTECH ]

This is more automation than what we’d really be thinking of as robotics at this point, but I could still watch it all day.

[ Motoman ]

Brad Porter (Cobot) and Alfred Lin (Sequoia Capital) discuss the future of robotics, AI, and automation at the Human[X] Conference, moderated by CNBC’s Kate Rooney. They explore why collaborative robots are accelerating now, how AI is transforming physical systems, the role of humanoids, labor market shifts, and the investment trends shaping the next decade of robotics.

[ Cobot ]

Humanoid robots have long captured our imagination. Interest has skyrocketed along with the perception that robots are getting closer to taking on a wide range of labor-intensive tasks. In this discussion, we reflect on what we’ve learned by observing factory floors, and why we’ve grown convinced that chasing generalization in manipulation—both in hardware and behavior—isn’t just interesting, but necessary. We’ll discuss AI research threads we’re exploring at Boston Dynamics to push this mission forward, and highlight opportunities our field should collectively invest more in to turn the humanoid vision, and the reinvention of manufacturing, into a practical, economically viable product.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

On November 12, 2025, Tom Williams presented “Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice” as part of the Michigan Robotics Seminar Series.

[ Michigan Robotics ]

Ask the OSRF Board of Directors anything! Or really, listen to other people ask them anything.

[ ROSCon ]