The University of Florida's Marston Makerspace held a Crappy Robots event where teams had to use motors and battery packs to get a robot across a five-foot plank without falling off. Participants built everything from an alligator robot to a caterpillar-style machine and robots with spinning arms.
One participant even argued that the rules never said the whole robot had to reach the end, then tried to catapult just a piece of it down the plank. The event rewarded improvisation, loopholes and gloriously imperfect machines.
Lower the success bar and rule-lawyering becomes the most advanced technology in the room. The catapult interpretation is wonderful.
Press a button and the Vomit Comic Robot generates a one-off random comic and spits it from its mouth on receipt paper. Created by Cadin Batrack, the machine combines a Raspberry Pi, a thermal printer and a laser-cut plywood body. Processing software arranges hand-drawn elements into comic panels at random. There is no intended narrative relationship between the images, but the comic layout encourages people to invent one anyway. Even the physical output mechanism reinforces the joke: the robot appears to vomit nonsense comics on demand.
A thermal printer would have worked, but giving the output a robot body and calling it vomiting makes the interface impossible to ignore.
Bentobot was built so online friends could control real combat robots from phones and computers anywhere in the world. Thomas Nguyen created three small Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W-powered machines with drive motors and separate weapon motors, including flippers and spinning weapons. Viewers could join live streams, receive access through an app and immediately fight physical robots in the arena. Nguyen even created a lightweight custom language to reduce control latency. Instead of simulating robot combat online, the network ends at actual machines hitting each other.
Most online games keep the damage virtual. Here, the internet connection ends in two real robots smashing into each other.
To automate livestock hygiene, researchers built an autonomous robot that uses AI, geolocation and a hybrid power system to clean organic waste from barns.
The machine was developed at Peru's Universidad Continental by Diego Cajachagua Guerreros, Rodrigo Ortiz Zacarias and Olga Huari Huamán, and won a gold medal at KIWIE 2026 in South Korea. Its technology stack is sophisticated; its assignment is extremely practical: clean the barn.
AI, geolocation and hybrid power all converge on one mission: clean the barn properly. Advanced robotics is very good at getting real work assigned to it.
The 2026 Tokyo edition of Hebocon, a robot contest specifically for people with low technical skills, was held on August 29. Homemade robots battle on a small sumo-style ring, but using technology that is too sophisticated can earn a High-Tech Penalty. Sankei reported on the event on September 6, highlighting the awkward machines, unusual performances and enthusiastic crowd.
It's a robot contest where building the robot too well can cost you points. Maintaining low-tech purity may be a skill of its own.
Robot vacuums work well on flat floors, but stairs stop them completely. Saros Rover tackles that problem with wheel assemblies that extend like legs, letting the machine lift itself one step at a time. It was demonstrated at IFA 2026.
The robot carefully raises its body onto each tread and cleans as it goes, taking about three minutes in the demonstration. Rather than being carried upstairs by another device, the vacuum itself performs the climb.
Instead of giving the vacuum a ride upstairs, they gave the vacuum legs. That's a very demanding version of independence.
Silly Robots Contest is a San Francisco event where the goal is not usefulness or commercial value, but simply making people laugh. Entries are invited to be whimsical, silly, funny or completely unnecessary, with the event scheduled for September 10, 2026.
The call explicitly welcomes “cursed kinematics,” “unnecessary degrees of freedom” and “beautifully overengineered mechanisms,” celebrating robots that move in the opposite direction from conventional performance competitions.
A robot contest judged by “is it funny?” instead of “is it useful?” feels like a very healthy use of engineering.
A small robot car has been built to detect a face with its camera, turn until that face is centered and then drive toward the person it sees. The project upgrades an Elegoo robot car kit with an Arduino UNO Q and webcam, using computer vision to locate faces and adjust steering. It was created by Iulia Feroli and featured on Arduino's official blog.
Face detection is familiar on a screen; connecting the detection result directly to motion gives the same software a much stronger physical presence.
Face detection feels harmless on a screen, then you add wheels and it starts closing the distance. Giving AI mobility really changes the mood.
During a cheerleading performance at the World Humanoid Robot Games, roughly ten humanoids were dancing in sync when one suddenly collapsed. Its control sequence apparently kept running, because the fallen machine continued moving its arms and legs from the floor.
The other robots carried on upright while staff approached to retrieve it, leaving one participant performing the same routine at an entirely different height.
The body has fallen, but the program is still cheerful. It's like nobody updated the robot's situation.
Wheeled delivery robots struggle with stairs, curbs and thresholds. R-dog tackles those obstacles by using a quadruped body that can step over them, while also carrying deliveries and potentially displaying advertising on its sides.
The current product page adds another layer: pet the robot's head and a sensor makes its tail wag. The dog-like body is not only functional; the design also commits to dog behavior for charm.
Four legs make practical sense, but then the design continues to “well, a dog should wag its tail.” That's serious commitment to the role.
ClankerVids is a site that collects large numbers of robot-failure videos into categories such as Fails, Humanoids Eating It, Robot Dogs Being Weird and Factory Chaos. It also runs a daily Robot Digest and trending sections.
Instead of treating robot fails as clips you happen to encounter on social media, the site organizes them as a video genre to search, categorize and browse intentionally.
Go looking for robot fails and discover the genre already has something like its own channel. Apparently the audience is real.
Larger robot vacuums can struggle to fit beneath furniture and into other tight spaces. Roomba Duo tackles that problem with a large cleaning robot that carries a smaller companion robot and lowers it to the floor using a mechanical arm on top. iRobot presented the two-robot system as a concept at IFA 2026.
The main unit handles regular vacuuming and mopping, while the roughly 8.35 cm-tall companion can enter places the larger robot cannot. Both share the same home map, dividing the job between two machines of different sizes.
Robot vacuums now have something like parent-and-child roles. The appliance is starting to look more like a tiny team.
Lower the success bar and rule-lawyering becomes the most advanced technology in the room. The catapult interpretation is wonderful.