IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday showcases robotics breakthroughs including humanoid robots taking outdoor steps and cable-climbing robot teams collaborating on bridge inspection.

IHMC Robotics' Alex humanoid robot took its first outdoor steps and later walked completely untethered during a demonstration in Maryland, marking a significant milestone as the first humanoid robot developed entirely by IHMC Robotics to venture outside the lab.

Generative Bionics designed GENE01 from scratch and sent it to batch production in three months, featuring two scalable lower bodies and physical AI for motor control and world-action modeling.

CCRobot-S, a team of cable-climbing robots with reconfigurable cable-driven manipulation, can collaboratively inspect and maintain long-span bridge stay cables through parallel operation for speed and morphological reconfiguration for reach.