Video Friday: Drones Go Heavy in DARPA Lift Challenge
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.
Actuate 2026 : 18–19 August 2026, SAN FRANCISCO
IROS 2026 : 27 September–1 October 2026, PITTSBURGH
Humanoids Summit Seoul : 22–23 September 2026, SEOUL
Enjoy today’s videos!
The DARPA Lift Challenge is taking place through this weekend. There are a couple of very brief overview videos from the past couple of days, which are only really interesting because they give you a quick look at some utterly bizarre heavy-lift drone designs. If you like what you see, DARPA has recorded livestreams of the entire event so far. We’ve posted one of those at the end of this section, and if you want to be impressed by some super-weird drones, check out this and this .
[ DARPA Lift Challenge ]
When NASA’s SkyFall helicopters take to the Martian skies, one of their tasks will be to hunt for frozen water—a critical resource for future astronauts—using ground-penetrating radar. For that radar to work, the rotorcraft will carry a flexible, fabric-based antenna that extends below the aircraft without interfering with landings or breaking at touchdown.
[ NASA ]
Why would you even want a five-fingered humanoid hand when you could have something so much better?
[ Flexiv ]
We’ve improved how GEN-1 learns to adapt to new actuators and new robots at the lowest level, with up to 10-20x gains on internal benchmarks. This significantly boosts performance on high-precision tasks like disassembling parts from a NIST board.
[ Generalist ]
This is certainly one of the best-looking humanoid robots out there.
[ Generative Bionics ]
A little on the technical side, but the concept here is important, I think: being able to control an assistive robot through touch.
[ Tac-Nav ]
We present SonicFly, a passive aeroacoustic perception framework that enables one unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to estimate and follow another using only the leader’s intrinsic flight sound.
[ General Robotics Lab ]
Okay, but... Get a job?
[ ROBOTIS ]
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