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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.ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNAEnjoy today’s videos! We’re excited to announce the product version of our Atlas® robot. This enterprise-grade humanoid robot offers impressive strength and range of motion

This whitepaper provides MEMS engineers, biomedical device developers, and multiphysics simulation specialists with a practical AI-accelerated workflow for optimizing piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs), enabling you to explore complex design trade-offs between sensitivity and bandwidth while achieving validated performance improvements in minutes instead of days using standard cloud infrastructure.What you will learn about:MultiphysicsAI combines cloud-based FEM simulation with neural surrogates to transform PMUT design from trial-and-error iteration into systematic inverse optimizationTraining on 10,000 randomized geometries produces AI surrogates with 1% mean error and sub-millisecond inference for key performance indicators: transmit sensitivity, c

In recent months, I’ve noticed a troubling trend with AI coding assistants. After two years of steady improvements, over the course of 2025, most of the core models reached a quality plateau, and more recently, seem to be in decline. A task that might have taken five hours assisted by AI, and perhaps ten hours without it, is now more commonly taking seven or eight hours, or even longer. It’s reached the point where I am sometimes going back and using older versions of large language models (LLMs).I use LLM-generated code extensively in my role as CEO of

The IEEE Board of Directors has nominated IEEE Senior Member David Alan Koehler and IEEE Life Fellow Manfred “Fred” J. Schindler as candidates for 2027 IEEE president-elect.IEEE Senior Member Gerardo Barbosa and IEEE Life Senior Member Timothy T. Lee are seeking nomination by petition. A separate article will be published in The Institute at a later date.The winner of this year’s election will serve as IEEE president in 2028. For more information about the election, president-elect candidates, and the petition process, visit the ieee.org/elections.IEEE Senior Member David Alan Koehler

Imagine you’re at a bustling dinner party filled with laughter, music, and clinking silverware. You’re trying to follow a conversation across the table, but every word feels like it’s wrapped in noise. For most people, these types of party scenarios, where it’s difficult to filter out extraneous sounds and focus on a single source, are an occasional annoyance. For millions with hearing loss, they’re a daily challenge—and not just in busy settings.Today’s hearing aids aren’t great at determining which sounds to amplify and which to igno

Thanks to Hollywood, whenever I think of a Dictaphone, my imagination immediately jumps to a mid-20th-century office, Don Draper suavely seated at his desk, voicing ad copy into a desktop machine. A perfectly coiffed woman from the secretarial pool then takes the recordings and neatly types them up, with carbon copies of course.I had no idea the Dictaphone actually had its roots in the 19th century and a rivalry between two early tech giants: Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. And although it took decades to take hold in the modern office, it found novel uses in other fields.Who invented the Dictaphone?The Dictaphone was born from the competition and the cooperation of Bell and Edison and

The Trump administration has given corporations plenty of convenient excuses to retreat from their climate commitments, with its moves to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, roll back emissions regulations, and scale back clean energy incentives.But will the world’s largest corporations follow its lead?Some multinational companies have indeed scaled back. For instance, Wells Fargo dropped its goal for the companies the bank finances to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, saying the conditions necessary for meeting that goal, such as policy certainty,

If a data center is moving in next door, you probably live in the United States. More than half of all upcoming global data centers—as indicated by land purchased for data centers not yet announced, those under construction, and those whose plans are public—will be developed in the United States.And these figures are likely underselling the near-term data-center dominance of the United States. Power usage varies widely among data centers, depending on land availability and whether the facility will provide x

When it comes to viewing nebulae, galaxies, and other deep-sky objects, amateur astronomers on a budget have had two options. They can view with the naked eye through a telescope and perceive these spectacular objects as faint smudges that don’t even begin to capture their majesty, or they can capture long-exposure images with astrocameras and display the results on a view screen or computer, which robs the immediacy of the stargazing experience.Stand-alone telescope eyepieces with active light amplification do exist for a real-time viewing, but commercial products are pricey, costing hundreds to thousands of dollars. I wanted something I could use for the public-astronomy observat

In a few days, Las Vegas will be inundated with engineers, executives, investors, and members of the press—including me—for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest tech events of the year. If you can dream it, there’s a good chance it’ll be on display at CES 2026 (though admittedly, much of this tech won’t necessarily make it to the mainstream). There will be a range of AI toys, AI notetakers, and “AI companions,” exoskeletons and humanoid robots, and health tech to track your hormones, brain activity, and...