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. With all the hype about SpotMini recently, it's a good time to take a look back at another quadruped that Boston Dynamics helped develop. This system is the first of its kind that can automatically keep a cluttered room neat and tidy at a practical level, something that has been difficult to achieve using conventional robot system.

Efficient and precise classification of histological cell nuclei is of utmost importance due to its potential applications in the field of medical image analysis. It would facilitate the medical practitioners to better understand and explore various factors for cancer treatment. The classification of histological cell nuclei is a challenging task due to the cellular heterogeneity. This paper proposes an efficient Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architecture for classification of histological routine colon cancer nuclei named as RCCNet. The main objective of this network is to keep the CNN model as simple as possible. The proposed RCCNet model consists of only 1,512,868 learnable parameters which are significantly less compared to the popular CNN models such as AlexNet, CIFARVGG, GoogLeNet, and WRN. The experiments are conducted over publicly available routine colon cancer histological dataset "CRCHistoPhenotypes". The results of the proposed RCCNet model are compared with five state-of-the-art CNN models in terms of the accuracy, weighted average F1 score and training time. The proposed method has achieved a classification accuracy of 80.61% and 0.7887 weighted average F1 score. The proposed RCCNet is more efficient and generalized terms of the training time and data over-fitting, respectively.

In this paper, we propose a new systematic approach based on nonquadratic Lyapunov function and technique of introducing slack matrices, for a class of affine nonlinear systems with disturbance. To achieve the goal, first, the affine nonlinear system is represented via Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy bilinear model. Subsequently, the robust H_inf controller is designed based on parallel distributed compensation (PDC) scheme. Then, the stability conditions are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) by utilizing Lyapunov function. Moreover, some slack matrices are proposed to reduce the conservativeness of the LMI stability conditions. Finally, for illustrating the merits and verifying the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the application of an isothermal continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) for Van de Vusse reactor is discussed in details.

Tim Cook has hit back at Bloomberg for a story claiming the servers of tech giants including Apple contained spy chips. Apple, Amazon and Super Micro, the Chinese motherboard manufacturer Bloomberg claimed introduced the chips, all deny claims the chips, which were'not much bigger than a grain of rice,' would have given China unprecedented backdoor access to computers and data. There is no truth in their story about Apple,' Cook told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview. 'They need to do that right thing and retract it.' Apple CEO Tim Cook, center, talks with Qu Zhangcai, left, and Liu Zhipeng, right, founders of the Xichuangzhu software app, during a visit to the Confucius Tempe in Beijing earlier this month.

"I'm used to bad news," Merkel said, according to a participant's recollection. The German chancellor had just returned from China, where she spent a day in the Shenzhen tech hub visiting companies like ICarbonX, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup focused on disease detection. A trained physicist, Merkel had been impressed by what she saw. The money and manpower China poured into AI left the 64-year-old with little doubt that the country viewed the technology as its key to becoming a global superpower. "We really do have to walk the extra mile to make sure we're not left behind" -- Jörg Bienert, president of a new association representing more than 50 AI startups Germany, by contrast, had no plan for AI. So on her return to Berlin, Merkel met the country's top 32 AI experts at the chancellery to hear how the country was doing. Their assessment was sobering: Germany, they said, has a good track record in AI research, but it suffers from problems ranging from brain drain to a weak record in transforming basic research into real-world applications that are hampering its ability to compete in a new technology race. After three hours, Merkel left concerned -- and made her worries public a month later. "For centuries, or let's say since the age of Enlightenment, we in Europe were used to being the first ones to come up with technological innovations," she told a tech conference.

He noted that China's labor productivity is below the global average, while the economy is transitioning to one reliant on consumption. Seong said he expects AI to have a significant impact in sales and marketing, which could boost consumer spending. He also predicted AI will produce notable returns for supply chain and manufacturing businesses. The McKinsey report laid out how AI will likely impact the economy through multiple channels, including helping or augmenting human labor, substituting it, expanding available products and services, increasing global data flows and creating wealth. But the report noted the implementation of the technology will likely incur a range of corporate and societal restructuring costs, as well as disrupt employment, reducing consumption.

A project from Google's secretive X division that uses giant plane-like kites to generate renewable electricity may be about to be launched. Makani Power has been developing airborne wind turbines with the support of the Internet giant's research and development facility founded to pursue "moonshot" ideas. If successful the plan would negate the need for costly construction materials and labour that is required for ground-based wind turbines. But after more than 10 years of development, the kites are yet to be used beyond testing. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

While many companies struggle to figure out what to do with AI, a few are emerging as leaders in deploying it, with only a handful succeeding in incorporating AI in the sensitive area of customer relations. The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Israel Discount Bank, using an AI platform from Personetics, are premier examples of how to do AI right, right now. RBC is focusing its use of AI on "solving real customer problems--and the number one source of anxiety for Canadians is managing their finances," says RBC's Peter Tilton, Senior Vice President, Digital. "In finance, like in any other field, people want and expect faster, easier, more accessible and proactive service," says Arik Frishman, EVP and head of the digital and data division at Discount Bank. "AI is the main enabler for all of these," he adds.

A push for a global agreement on autonomous weapons is stalled, much to the chagrin of advocates who believe a treaty is urgently needed. From Singapore to Israel, countries besides the United States and China are striving to play a role in the field of artificial intelligence. Fully autonomous cars are years away, but it's the automobile where artificial intelligence could have a critical role for the greatest number of people. Data and tech expects share their takes on the current A.I. revolution Artificial intelligence has its own insider jargon. Here are some crucial concepts and terms, defined and digested for the rest of us.

These are some of the skills new robots presented at the World Robot Summit in Tokyo can perform. From enormous'construction workers' to helpful personal shoppers, here are some of the latest breakthroughs in robotics. CarriRo, shaped like a toy London bus with friendly'eyes' on its front, delivers packages by rolling around streets at four miles per hour. It directs itself via GPS to addresses within a one-mile radius, explained Chio Ishikawa from Sumitomo Corp which is promoting the robot. The person receiving the package is sent a code to their smartphone which allows them to open up CarriRo and retrieve whatever it is delivering them.