Humanoid robots can now handle monkey bars. Researchers at ETH Zürich’s Robotic Systems Lab showed an EngineAI PM-01 leaping onto a sparse overhead ladder, swinging hand over hand from one thin rung to the next, and dropping cleanly to the floor in a single unbroken sequence. The work, titled Learning Agile Perceptive Traversal of Sparse 3D Structures for Humanoids, treats the playground classic as a hard test of seeing thin, hanging geometry and then moving the whole body with split-second accuracy.

Steven Gong and his University of Waterloo engineering classmates needed a capstone that actually finished a chore companies have chased for years. Folding laundry looks simple until cloth bunches, sleeves hide, and every shirt arrives in a different mess. Their answer was a pair of follower arms that copied two leader arms driven by human hands, a pile of recorded demonstrations, and a single night of training.