Video Friday: Two Birotors Make a Quadrotor
Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos includes robots building robots, Lunabotics challenge competitors, and more.
By Evan Ackerman, IEEE Spectrum's robotics editor | 4 min read
This Week's Headliner: Two Birotors, One Quadrotor
A quadrotor is really just two birotors that want to maintain a meaningful connection.
Credit: CLIMB Lab
About Video Friday
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum. As robotics research accelerates into 2026, we're seeing increasingly creative approaches to aerial locomotion, autonomous construction, and multi-robot coordination—all of which feature in this week's lineup.
What's in This Week's Roundup
- Birotor-to-quadrotor transformation: Two small dual-propeller robots demonstrate how paired birotor platforms can cooperatively emulate quadrotor flight dynamics via a physical tether.
- Robots building robots: A look at autonomous assembly research pushing toward self-replicating and self-constructing robotic systems.
- Lunabotics Challenge competitors: University teams showcase lunar excavation robots designed for NASA's Artemis-era regolith mining missions.
- And more: Additional highlights from the global robotics research community.
Why It Matters in 2026
With NASA's Artemis program targeting sustained lunar surface operations and commercial drone delivery now mainstream, modular and reconfigurable aerial platforms—like the tethered birotor pair featured here—are gaining traction. Such designs offer redundancy, adaptive flight modes, and the potential for cooperative payload handling that single rigid airframes cannot match.
Stay tuned for next week's edition, and as always, we hope you enjoy the videos!