Hyundai, the South Korea based automotive company, unveiled its latest innovation this week at the Consumer Electronics Show -- a car with legs. The vehicle, dubbed Elevate, can walk and climb in addition to drive, and is geared toward aiding emergency responders in tough-to-reach areas after a natural disaster. "The legs have five-degrees of freedom. So, these legs can walk in mammalian mode and reptilian, and that really makes it omnidirectional," David Byron, manager of design and innovation at Sundberg Ferar, a company working with Hyundai on the project, told Fox News."It can go anywhere, it can drive like a regular car but when it gets to a situation where a normal wheeled vehicle reached its limit, this can standup -- crawl over various terrain." Although the concept sounds intriguing, John Suh, vice president and founding director of Hyundai CRADLE -- the company's corporate venturing innovation business -- stressed there is no timetable for actual production.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. A new version of the four-legged "Jueying" robot was released on Dec. 4. The new "Jueying" robot, a small-sized quadruped robot that can handle 20 kg objects, is capable of running and climbing stairs.

Apple is planning to release three new iPhones this year – with three cameras each, according to rumours. The company's 2019 line-up will include the same rough categories of phones that were released last year: a premium one, a bigger version of the premium one, and a cheaper one that sits somewhere in between in terms of size. But each of them will be upgraded when the new phones are released, most likely in September this year. Probably the biggest of those upgrades – and certainly the strangest to be leaked so far – is the fact the premium versions of the phone will include three lenses in its camera. Those three lenses and the features they allow are likely to be a central part of the marketing for the new phone, the Wall Street Journal reported.

NITI Aayog is partnering with Perlin – a Singapore-based AI start up – to launch the "AI 4 All Global Hackathon." NITI Aayog is inviting developers, students, start-ups and companies to develop AI applications to make significant positive social and economic impact for India. With the vision to further expand the idea of'Artificial Intelligence, AI for All' articulated in the National AI Strategy, NITI Aayog organises hackathons to source sustainable, innovative and technologically-enabled solutions to address various challenges in the development space. The challenge question seeks to develop solutions in Distributed Computing and Privacy Preserving techniques, such as multi-party computation, in AI. The objective of this hackathon is to promote awareness and subsequently develop solutions that deliver the twin benefit of efficient computing to address the infrastructure challenges, while also not compromising on privacy of data for training AI algorithms.

China is playing catch-up in the development of ethical guidelines in the field of artificial intelligence, with the establishment of an ethics committee. Chen Xiaoping – inventor of Jia Jia, the realistic humanoid "Robot Goddess", and KeJia, an intelligent home service robot – is leading the committee, which held its first conference last year and is due to meet again in May. Chen, professor and director of the Robotics Laboratory at the University of Science and Technology of China, said AI in China had developed to a point where ethical guidelines were now necessary to address potential risks in large-scale applications. "If the technology was far off being applied there would be no need to talk about ethics research, but there is value in this research into technologies that might be applied on a large scale in the next 10 or 20 years," he said. Chen was appointed to establish the ethics committee by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, the country's only state-level AI body.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most popular technologies of this modern era. The technology has attracted the attention of most of the leading technology companies and nations across the globe including China and the United States. Nations and companies that have ventured or invested in this technology are currently competing to see who emerges as the leader in this space. As such, artificial intelligence (AI) was a no-brainer bet for most humans in 2018. According to a recent report from both CB Insights and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), venture capital financing of artificial intelligence companies increased by 72% last year, reaching a record of $9.3 billion.

A robotics startup that designs bionic limbs for children in the style of superheroes has raised £4.6 million from investors including the Formula 1 team Williams. Bristol-based Open Bionics became the best-selling multi-grip bionic hand in the UK after launching its Hero Arm in 2018, and plans to use the funding to grow to international markets. Using 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies, the firm has managed to drastically reduce the cost of building robotic prosthetics, allowing the bionic limbs to be covered by national healthcare systems in the UK and abroad. "The Hero Arm is a custom made myoelectric prosthetic. This means users, amputees and people with limb differences below the elbow, can control their new bionic fingers by squeezing the muscles in their forearms," Open Bionics co-founder Samantha Payne told The Independent.

Fortnite Battle Royale has been a runaway success, so much so that it has brought in more than $1bn (£780m), and has broken into mainstream culture in a way few video games do. The rapper 2 Milly, the actor Alfonso Ribeiro and the family of Russell Horning, otherwise known as the Backpack Kid, are suing the company for allegedly copying what they say are their dance creations, and not paying them to do so. Jordan Erica Webber talks to Dr Barbara Lauriat of the Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College London about why we should look to the Elizabethan era to learn more about intellectual property law. She also chats to the Guardian's former Games editor Keith Stuart about what is happening with the lawsuits. The lawyer Alex Tutty then explains why it is unlikely to be an open-and-shut case.

These days, it seems artificial intelligence (AI) is finding its way into everything. Not too long ago, the idea that machines could think for themselves was considered science fiction. Since the dawn of modern computers, we could always explicitly program certain tasks to be carried out, but we couldn't teach machines to mimic the cognitive functions of human beings and learn for themselves -- until now. But as AI is increasingly incorporated into computer systems globally, it is also becoming the battle line between the bad actors and the good-faith efforts that the rest of the world makes to use the technology for the betterment of humanity. Bad actors are working to use AI to hold computer data and networks hostage.

If sometimes you feel like somebody's watching you, get ready to feel that way all the time. At least if you spend a good amount of time in your car. And you'll only be more surveilled in the future, as automakers find new and more efficient ways to keep track of what's happening inside their vehicles. One of the latest tools in this move toward a, let's say senior sibling, state comes from Guardian Optical Technologies, an Israeli outfit promising a whole new view of what's happening inside the car. This week at CES in Las Vegas, the Tel Aviv-based startup showed off what it calls Optical Cabin Control.