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On Sunday evening, legendary robotics company iRobot, manufacturer of the Roomba robotic vacuum, filed for bankruptcy. The company will be handing over all of its assets to its Chinese manufacturing partner, Picea. According to iRobot’s press release, “this agreement represents a critical step toward strengthening iRobot’s financial foundation and positioning the Company for long-term growth and innovation,” which sounds like the sort of thing that you put in a press release when you’re trying your best to put a positive spin on really, really bad news.This whole situat

Rock-paper-scissors is often a game of psychology, reverse psychology, reverse-reverse psychology, and chance. But what if a computer could understand you well enough to win every time? A team at Hokkaido University and the TDK Corp. (of cassette-tape fame), both based in Japan, has designed a chip that can do just that.Okay, the chip does not read your mind. It uses an acceleration sensor placed on your thumb to measure your motion and eventually earns which motions represent paper, scissors, or rock. The amazing thing is, once it’s trained on your particular gestures, the chip can run the calculation predicting what you’ll do in the time it takes you to say “shoot,” allowing it to defeat you in real time.

In 1950, the English mathematician Alan Turing devised what he called “the imitation game.” Later dubbed the Turing test, the experiment asks a human participant to conduct a conversation with an unknown partner and try to determine if it’s a computer or a person on the other end of the line. If the person can’t figure it out, the machine passes the Turing test.Power grid operators are now preparing for their own version of the game. Virtual power plants, which concatenate small, distributed energy resources, are increasingly being tapped to balance electricity supply and demand. The question is: Can they do their

Spain’s grid operator, Red Eléctrica, proudly declared that electricity demand across the country’s peninsular system was met entirely by renewable energy sources for the first time on a weekday, on 16 April 2025.Just 12 days later, at 12.33 p.m. on Monday, 28 April, Spain and Portugal’s grids collapsed completely, plunging some 55 million people into one of the largest blackouts the region has ever seen. Entire cities lost electricity in the middle of the day. In the bustling airports of Madrid, Barcelona, and other key hubs, departure boards went blank. No power. No Internet. Even mobile phone service—something most people take for granted—was severely compromised. It was just

Lyle Feisel, an influential engineering educator and dedicated IEEE volunteer, died on 5 November at the age of 90.Feisel was a professor of electrical engineering and the founding dean of the Watson engineering school at the State University of New York, Binghamton. He established its organizational structure, academic programs, and culture. He also hired the majority of its faculty.For more than six decades, the Life Fellow helped define IEEE’s long-term appr

Bell Labs is already highly recognized, but in its centennial year, the organization hoped to add more awards to burnish its reputation as one of the world’s leading centers of technical innovation.On 21 October, IEEE representatives, Nokia Bell Labs leaders, and alumni of the storied institution gathered to celebrate seven technological achievements recognized as IEEE Milestones:

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! Suzumori Endo Lab, Science Tokyo has developed a dog musculoskeletal robot using thin McKibben muscles. This robot mimics the flexible “h

Join Stephen Cass, Dina Genkina, and Kohava Mendelsohn as they discuss whether AI spells the end of distinct programming languages as we know it. IEEE Spectrum publishes a respected annual ranking of the year’s Top Programming Languages—but could this year be our last? This recording of the live webinar covers how AI is rapidly changing the landscape of programming languages, why knowing the best languages might not be necessary in your career, and what skills you’ll need instead. - YouTube

This is a sponsored article brought to you by The University of Sheffield.Across global electricity networks, the shift to renewable energy has fundamentally changed the behavior of power systems. Decades of engineering assumptions, predictable inertia, dispatchable baseload generation, and slow, well-characterized system dynamics, are now eroding as wind and solar become dominant sources of electricity. Grid operators face increasingly steep ramp events, larger frequency excursions, faster transients, and prolonged periods where fossil generation is minimal or absent.In this environment,

In late April of 1968, a computer conference in Atlantic City, N.J., got off to a rocky start. A strike by telephone operators prevented exhibitors from linking their terminals to off-site computers, as union-sympathetic workers refused to wire up the necessary connections. Companies’ displays were effectively dead.