Michigan Robotics News | Michigan Robotics

Volunteers pose in front of a FIRST Robotics banner at a competition.

Robotics Outreach Ambassadors of 2026

April 29, 2026

We honor students who are enthusiastic in outreach through their extraordinary service to the robotics community and beyond.

A group at a conference table with a man speaking and gesturing.

Robotics, advanced manufacturing and national security Q&A

April 27, 2026

University of Michigan Engineering's Okwudire and Dawn Tilbury are providing expertise for a new Special Competitive Studies Project commission.

A sequence of eight high-speed photos showing colorful water droplets exploding upward from a tiny soft actuator membrane, captured over just 3 milliseconds.

'Spark of Color' wins soft robotics art awards

April 16, 2026

The artwork captured the explosive beauty of combustion actuators through a high-speed camera, winning two awards at the 2026 IEEE RoboSoft conference in Kanazawa, Japan.

Adam Hung, Robotics undergraduate, with a tripedal robot he developed at the Ford Robotics Building.

Five new concentrations for undergraduate robotics major

March 17, 2026

Michigan Robotics undergraduate students can choose from five new concentrations to build depth in perception, dynamics, hardware, human-robot interaction, or full stack systems.

Chad Jenkins speaks with attendees at the Distributed Teaching Collaborative Summer Session at the Ford Motor Company Robotics Building.

Chad Jenkins named ACM Fellow

March 11, 2026

The Association for Computing Machinery has named Chad Jenkins a 2025 ACM Fellow for contributions to robot learning and broadening participation in robotics and AI.

upcoming event

May 7, 2026 at 10:00 AM

Michigan Robotics Hackathon

Rendering of a soft microrobot with onboard depth camera, soft actuators, and anchor feet for climbing plant stems.

design & soft robotics

Soft microrobots to rescue plants from pests receive $1M award

February 25, 2026

The USDA awarded Michigan researchers $1M to develop soft microrobots that climb plant stems to detect pests, led by Xiaonan Huang and Dmitry Berenson.

3D printed concrete art on display during the 2019 Innovation in Concrete Symposium organized by the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Civil and Environmental Engineering department.

robot learning & foundational models

Using AI to improve 3D printing concrete

February 20, 2026

Professor Yulun Tian is developing an AI-enabled digital twin to monitor and correct robotic 3D concrete printing in real time, backed by a Bold Challenges Initiative award.

The robot has four legs with backward-facing knees. Each leg has three actuators, controlling hip ab/adduction, hip flexion/extension, and knee flexion/extension. Exposed wires link up to the motors. T.R.O.T is emblazoned on the case around the belly of the robot.

design & soft robotics

Open-source, modular robot for understanding evolution

February 11, 2026

A cost-effective, customizable quadruped could help researchers discover the particular advantages related to the length and segmentation of animal limbs.