The future has moving parts.

MOVA's AstraX brings an arm to the lawn. The interesting question is what happens before the grass gets cut.

Roomba Duo asks whether a large floor cleaner should carry a smaller colleague for the awkward bits.

Carnegie Mellon's robotic fingertips combine pressure sensing with a microphone behind a tiny fingernail.

ETH Zurich's tiny biohybrid robots pair living muscle with a carefully designed soft scaffold.

An MIT-led system assembles an optical experiment and corrects the alignment when the setup is disturbed.

NASA's Psyche spacecraft has settled into a long electric push toward a metal-rich asteroid.

A repair robot finishes a museum job, then finds one little brass screw left over. Every exhibit becomes a suspect.

A 2015 experiment gave damaged robots a repertoire of possible behaviors. After a leg failed, the hexapod tested new ways to move.

At an imagined repair café, a kitchen robot gets a replacement hand that cannot do its old job. Its owner brings a recipe anyway.

A 2017 soft-robotics study repaired cuts in pneumatic grippers, hands and artificial muscles with a heat-assisted polymer process.

Introducing a fictional apology system that turns one wrong name into a full-service birthday disaster.

An inherited garden robot keeps tending the balcony it remembers, though the light and the person who planted it have changed.

One sleeping human. Six mugs. A rubber duck with no respect for the mission.

DayDreamer learned from real experience and practiced in a learned model. A 2022 experiment worth revisiting.

A robot tries counting sheep. By morning, the meadow has excellent data quality.

A tiny robot jazz trio has a difficult venue and a very large spoon.

Real modular robots incorporate compatible parts. The kitchen in our illustration is entirely imaginary.

An alarm robot gives you five more minutes. The sunrise would like them back.

Five minutes, one printer and a joke that did not survive the explanation. Try rescuing it.

A robot takes the family photograph. The cat supplies the only successful capture.

Real puffed-rice wings took flight in 2022. Keep the battery off the menu.

Six robots, three cups and a pigeon with an excellent contract. The toast is harder to explain.

The real Kilobot swarm made shapes with local rules. From ground level, a star is a traffic problem.

A robot loads the dishwasher perfectly. Then somebody introduces water.

A café robot, an impatient cyclist and the problem with two per cent. Adjust the serving. Keep an eye on the floor.

Cornell gave fungal electrical signals a robot body. The interesting part is everything between the culture and the wheels.

A robot’s flat inspection in Cubao reveals a suspiciously clean circle and an undocumented requirement for wear and tear.

M4 can roll, fly and rearrange itself. Choosing the right body comes with an energy bill.

At the Office of Misplaced Things, a robot tries to reclaim its shadow. The shadow has other plans.

In an imaginary lending library, intelligence is portable. The stairs are less accommodating. Choose a body and discover the return conditions.

A Stanford robot reaches forward by turning itself inside out. Sometimes the interesting part is what doesn’t move.

A service robot visits a Manila apartment. The doorway has several opinions and one very specific trick.

JPL’s EELS grips its surroundings with rotating screws. A glacier test shows both the promise and the practical limits.

The plaza robot has identified a local stakeholder. Negotiations are progressing at the speed of a pigeon.

Remarkable insect-scale flight is real. Understanding what stayed outside the robot makes it more interesting.

Eight notices from a workplace with excellent uptime and a complicated fridge.

Eight ordinary requests. Twenty-four ways to interpret them. Find the useful question hiding inside each one.

Two different worlds. The very same pixels. Play with an ideal camera and find the assumption hiding inside its answer.

Four stars. A visiting robot discovers sunsets, sand and the complicated meaning of “not hungry.”

Move the signal-delay slider. Watch why a rover cannot wait for every answer from home.

A quarterly review of an employee whose explicit requirements keep arriving as vibes.

UniTac explores how existing robot measurements can help locate a touch. Look at what was actually tested.

It can do everything. Except let you feel useless. Adjust its need for human assistance.

Equip a palm-sized expedition. Cross the Birdbath Sea. Bring everyone home.

What tiny machines can actually do, and what still separates a lab from a living world.