"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is a collection of short stories by American writer Raymond Carver. In his collection, he doesn't provide a direct definition of love but instead lets the perception of the nature of love form in the minds of the reader through narrating a series of short stories. This idea of perception leads me to my point. In my previous post, I highlighted the widespread reproducibility issues still haunting robotics research. These issues need to be fixed if we want to talk about Robotics as a science.

It's considered one of the first "robotic" devices in history. For centuries, inventors will refine the design. The first robot was a steam-powered "pigeon," created around 400 to 350 BCE by the ancient Greek mathematician Archytas, known as the father of engineering. He was using the robot to study birds in flight. The first android in the Western World, a completely mechanical figure which simulated a living human or animal, operating with apparently responsive action, is believed to have been constructed in 1525 by Hans Bullmann (?-1535) of Nuremberg, Germany. The height of the Lute Player automaton (see the lower image) is 44 cm.

Who is leading in AI research among big players like IBM, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft? Firstly, my response contains some bias, because I work at Google Brain and I really like it there. My opinions are my own, and I do not speak for the rest of my colleagues or Alphabet as a whole. I rank "leaders in AI research" among tech companies as follows: I would say Deepmind is probably #1 right now, in terms of AI research. Their publications are highly respected within the research community, and span a myriad of topics such as Deep Reinforcement Learning, Bayesian Neural Nets, Robotics, transfer learning, and others.

"I can't wait to push some paper today!" The mind-numbing work to keep the wheels of commerce rolling--filling out invoices, deciphering hand-written memos, processing insurance claims--can be a real grind. It's been that way since the time when Ebenezer Scrooge refused to provide another lump of coal to help warm overworked clerk Bob Cratchit. Lacking frailty of mind and body, artificial intelligence for business process automation appears to be a no-brainer. In fact, a number of companies are employing AI techniques such as machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing to automate business processes.

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 two 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. It moves just a little too quickly for my general level of comfort around robots that look like giant bugs. I don't think it's recognized widely enough that SpaceX is building giant rockety robots with a whole bunch of very sophisticated autonomy going on: At some point, someone in a meeting said, "The best way to solve this problem is by putting a flamethrower on a drone."

After a delayed launch and one aborted delivery attempt, SpaceX's caution paid off Thursday when its Dragon capsule stuffed full of food, equipment, and experiments successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS). Now on its 10th re-supply mission, the private space company has become an essential part of the supply lines supporting an increasingly intricate space operation. After a GPS error scuttled its first docking attempt Wednesday, the Dragon capsule smoothly slipped close enough to the ISS for the space station's robotic arm to snag the craft early Thursday morning, along with the 5,500 pounds of goodies on board. "Looks like we've got a great capture," radioed space station commander Shane Kimbrough. In addition to a much needed food refresh, the capsule also contains more than 250 science experiments.

An important shipment has finally arrived at the International Space Station, after a series of errors, delays and challenges. The SpaceX capsule smoothly arrived at the station the second time around as astronauts grabbed hold of the cargo ship, as the two of them floated somewhere over Australia. The capsule had been scheduled to arrive on Wednesday. But a GPS error stopped it from getting too close and the move had to be aborted. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater.

Will humans have to merge with technology in order to keep pace with artificial intelligence? "Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he also launched Tesla in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). More from CNBC: Musk explained what he meant by saying that computers can communicate at "a trillion bits per second", while humans, whose main communication method is typing with their fingers via a mobile device, can do about 10 bits per second. That's not good, is it? And am I the only one wondering what the "digital version of [myself]" is?

Machine learning is becoming an increasingly important artificial intelligence approach to building autonomous and robotic systems. One of the key challenges with machine learning is the need for many samples, the amount of data needed to learn useful behaviors is high. In addition, the robotic system is often non-operational during the training phase. This requires debugging to occur in real-world experiments with an unpredictable robot. Microsoft's Aerial Informatics and Robotics platform has a solution for these two problems: It will provide realistic simulation tools for designers and developers to generate the training data needed and will also leverage recent innovations in physics to create accurate, real-world simulations.

For many it is no more than the first port of call when a niggling question raises its head. Found on its pages are answers to mysteries from the fate of male anglerfish, the joys of dorodango, and the improbable death of Aeschylus. But beneath the surface of Wikipedia lies a murky world of enduring conflict. A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years. Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply "bots", that are built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic housekeeping tasks.