Robots have been a prolific theme in Japanese pop culture and media since the 1950s, which includes global icons like the, and ( 1). Perhaps not coincidentally, Japanese citizens have a positive outlook on robotic technologies and their use in the labor sector compared to many other nations ( 2); much to their advantage, as robotics continues to be a vital pillar for ensuring Japan's economic resilience and future growth. Here, we discuss priorities and long-term agendas as presented in Japan's national robotics strategies. Although weather control is among Japan's lofty research goals for the next 25 years ( 3), geological disturbances remain inevitable. As such, disaster mitigation and response are high priorities that serve as motivation for robotics development in Japan ( 4).

Improving energy performance can effectively extend the time a robot can operate and reduce battery load, enabling lighter, more flexible, and more durable robotic systems. Nature has evolved optimal energy-saving locomotion strategies through billions of years of natural selection, providing unparalleled blueprints for robotic optimization. Among diverse modes of aquatic locomotion, intermittent swimming, also called bout-and-glide swimming, is a widespread adaptive behavior in aquatic organisms of a wide range of sizes, including larval zebrafish, red-nose tetra, koi carp, and even whales. This natural bout-and-glide gait features alternating motion phases: short periods of active body and tail undulation for propulsion, followed by passive gliding with a streamlined, straight body posture. It is widely recognized that this intermittent swimming gait is closely associated with optimizing biological energy, making it of great research value to transplant and explore such natural motion mechanisms into robotic control systems.

What does it take for a robot to hold a conversation with a room, not just a person? That was one of the questions at the heart of my last week (20th-24th July) at the Imperial Robotics Summer School, hosted at Imperial College, London; a week that sharpened my thinking and pushed me to look at robotics problems from angles I don't usually get to in my day-to-day work. The summer school brought together emerging researchers, academics, and industry professionals from across the robotics community for an intensive, hands-on programme. I came away having learned a huge amount, from expert-led lectures on robot kinematics, dynamics, sensing and control, and robot learning, through to specialised sessions on aerial robotics, robot intelligence, surgical robot vision, bio-inspired sensing and control, and personal assistive robotics. One of the standout parts of the week was getting into Imperial's robotics labs themselves, seeing research up close across adaptive and intelligent robotics, aerial robotics, robotic surgery, manipulation and touch, and assistive robotics.

"Who's Ahead, Who's Behind, and Where We Are Headed Next in the U.S.-China Technology Competition?" [5] D. J. Hicks and R. Simmons, "The National Robotics Initiative: A Five-Year Retrospective," in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, vol.

Robots walking down the street, surrounded by astounded onlookers, is an increasingly common sight. But these machines aren't yet the do-it-all assistants you'd want working in a kitchen or factory, and a major bottleneck is data. Much like humans, robots learn best by experience. The challenge is that it's labor-intensive and time-consuming to physically teach these machines so many actions across different settings. "One natural idea is to use simulation as a training ground. While there has been significant progress over the last few years in the physics engines that power robotics simulators, one of the remaining challenges has been creating sufficiently rich and diverse simulation content to capture the complexity of the real world," says Russ Tedrake, the Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and a principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Researchers at the University of Leeds and collaborators from the University of California San Diego won the Best Paper Award at RoboSoft, the leading international conference focused on soft robotics research. Soft robotics is gaining attention in medical applications because compliant machines can interact more safely with delicate objects and complex anatomy. The award-winning paper describes a 1.8 mm soft growing robot that can be steered magnetically, sense its own shape in real time, and operate without internal pressure. These advances could help improve patient outcomes following minimally invasive procedures. We spoke with lead author Benjamin Calmé about the team's work.

When a fish holds its position against a current in a river, its brain must figure out how fast to swim and how to steer to offset the water flow. Most fish use vision to register the world sliding past, detect optic flow speed and direction, and their brains turn these signals into compensatory swimming. The retina captures signals of optic-flow direction, central pretectal neurons interpret direction, and spinal nerves drive muscle contractions. The catch is that one cannot easily change the living brain to test how these circuits work. Although advances in imaging now allow detailed recording, and even manipulation, of neurons alongside behavior, rewiring connections to ask what a particular link actually does remains almost impossible in the living, complex animal.

UNSW researchers have developed a soft robotic model of the human heart that can mimic disease and provide a realistic environment for testing the next generation of cardiac devices. Researchers at UNSW Sydney have developed a fully synthetic soft robotic heart that reproduces the complex movements and internal structures of the human heart, opening the door to better treatments, safer medical devices and more personalised care. Published in Nature Communications and Advanced Science, the research introduces a beating model of the left side of the heart that includes artificial valves, papillary muscles and chordae tendineae - structures that are critical to healthy heart function and are frequently affected by disease. The device is able to accurately reproduce the process in a real heart where cardiac valves leak and blood flows backwards, which increases the risk of heart failure and other life-threatening complications. In that way, the research team say the new soft robot can eventually help provide a better understanding of heart conditions, reduce reliance on animal testing and provide doctors with patient-specific models to plan treatments before procedures are performed.

Scientists are expected to read newly published papers in their field to stay current and keep their work relevant. However, when faced with the massive number of publications, it may seem an overwhelming task to read all these papers, even if one were to reduce this to only a fraction related to one's own area of research. As an example, in 2024 alone, IEEE published no less than 46,968 papers on "robotics" or "automation", and IEEE publications represent only a fraction of the total research available online To assess the magnitude of this challenge, as well as to evaluate how much genuine progress is reported in today's publications, we undertook exactly this effort. For the task to be reasonable, we reduced our search to one particular subarea, learning from demonstration (LfD), that is methods whereby robots are taught by human experts. We monitor progress through both quantitative and qualitative metrics, offering a review on current trends and notable contributions.

On July 28, the United States' Federal Communications Commission blocked foreign-made " advanced robotic devices " from receiving the equipment authorization needed for sale in the United States, citing supply-chain vulnerabilities and cybersecurity risks . The block applies to networked humanoids, quadrupeds, other qualifying mobile robots weighing more than 4.4 lb. In a parallel action, the FCC also restricted foreign-produced connected power inverters. Existing authorized models are unaffected for now, and exemptions or conditional approvals may be available. Meanwhile, John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on China, told Reuters that the FCC move "protects our country and strengthens our nation's robotics industry."