If you’re at #ICRA2026 stop by today’s Mechanisms, Design and Control session this afternoon to see Chen’s talk 🧨 robot-destruction.github.io/ ⏰ 17:55-18:05 📍 Lehar 1-4 🪪 ThBT3.8

Northwestern University researchers developed modular robots using AI that can adapt to damage and navigate unpredictable terrain, according to a new study

These robots are born to run—and never die 🤖 Northwestern engineers developed the first modular robot with athletic intelligence. They can transform into new configurations and keep moving no matter what's thrown at them.

Sure your legged robot can learn, but can it evolve? These robots can. You can also chop them in half, they don’t mind. In fact, they like it. paper: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.25… website: modularlegs.github.io/ video: youtu.be/8VKSx1zSg7Q

These robots are going to Rio 🇧🇷 See you at #ICLR2026

A research team with Professors Wei Chen and Ryan Truby harnessed physics, computation, and 3D printing to autonomously produce materials that change shape on demand. spr.ly/6016APlO0

Be part of the next generation of virtual creatures: Enter the 2025 Virtual Creatures Competition (VCC)! Held at #ALIFE2025, the #VCC is an annual competition to showcase recent research in the field of artificial life. Judges and prizes to be announced soon. ⬇️⬇️

We’ve all seen humanoid robots doing backflips and dance routines for years. But if you ask them to climb a few stairs in the real world, they stumble! We took our robot on a walk around town to environments that it hadn’t seen before. Here’s how it works🧵⬇️

“This type of robot… is rarely seen in any applications. Unless the authors can show that this type of robot is widely use or will be widely used, the research in this paper is meaningless.” —Reviewer Xjm2, NeurIPS 2025

Professor Ryan Truby (@TrubyLab) developed a soft artificial muscle, paving the way for untethered animal- and human-scale robots. The new actuators provide the performance and mechanical properties required for building robotic musculoskeletal systems. spr.ly/6018fr932

My ICRA Keynote: “Robot Learning in Isolation” This keynote talk is about technical paths for systems that do not have communications and are operating in novel environments, building machine learning models from scratch as they go. youtube.com/watch?v=hcYrL820…

Tired of tuning PPO or blaming it on reward, task design, etc.? Introducing EPO -- our second (and hopefully final :) attempt at fixing PPO at scale! Contrary to intuition, as the batch size or data increases, PPO saturates due to a lack of diversity in sampling. We proposed a solution in SAPG (sapg-rl.github.io/) by incorporating an ensemble at training (not test time), but the variance was high. Our latest paper, EPO, fixes this issue with interesting insights! Try it out.

our new system trains humanoid robots using data from cell phone videos, enabling skills such as climbing stairs and sitting on chairs in a single policy (w/ @redstone_hong @junyi42 @davidrmcall)

Material? Robot? It’s a metabot. "You can transform between a material and a robot, and it is controllable with an external magnetic field." — Glaucio Paulino, @eprinceton professor In an article published in @Nature, researchers describe how they drew inspiration from origami to create a structure that blurs the lines between robotics and materials. The invention is a metamaterial, which is a material engineered to feature new and unusual properties that depend on the material’s physical structure rather than its chemical composition. In this case, the researchers built their metamaterial using a combination of simple plastics and custom-made magnetic composites. Using a magnetic field, the researchers changed the metamaterial’s structure, causing it to expand, move and deform in different directions, all remotely without touching the metamaterial. The team called their creation a “metabot” — a metamaterial that can shift its shape and move: bit.ly/43fERsn

Online this afternoon … a visionary project on the possibilities of alien life 👽led by @claire_i_webb , featuring planets imagined by @leecronin @ProfSaraSeager @Kriegmerica @Estelle_inspace and more

A new #ScienceReview presents an overview of neuroevolution and explores how neuroevolution experiments can be used to gain insight into neuroscience questions. scim.ag/4aWVr2J