Thousands of TurtleBots are out in the world right now, providing a (mostly) straightforward and (mostly) affordable way to get started with ROS. They're (mostly) portable and (mostly) extendable, allowing you (with a limited amount of inconvenience) to modify the robot to keep up with your needs. TurtleBot 2 is a great platform (I certainly love mine), but its size and cost usually restrict it to people who already have some ROS experience, and know that a TurtleBot is something worth investing in. For people who want to get started with ROS but aren't prepared to make as much of an investment, there just aren't a lot of options with the same kind of community and support that you get with TurtleBot. At ROSCon this past weekend, the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and South Korean robot maker ROBOTIS are tackling these problems by announcing a shiny new version of TurtleBot: TurtleBot 3. TB3 is small enough to fit into a backpack, and with a single-board computer instead of a netbook and just two Dynamixel motors driving a pair of wheels, it's both simpler than previous TurtleBots and significantly cheaper.

It turns out Mafia III is the game I worried it might be, just not in the ways I expected. It's hard to see at first, given how long it takes to unpack its slow pyramidal crime climb, or how well and powerfully told its mob-revenge story is. It has many charms, in other words. But as a game (for PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), it's mired in monotony, and more than a few play-futzing bugs. A stirring cinematic opening that's smartly delivered documentary-style from the vantage of people reflecting on what happened initially obscures this.

Artificial intelligence continues to have its moment in the spotlight, with a surge of interest in startups and efforts from huge tech companies to push the boundaries of how we might best use machine learning, computer vision and other areas of AI in the future. The latest development on that front comes from China's Huawei, which today announced that it would form a research partnership with UC Berkeley focused on AI, and fund it to the initial tune of 1 million. The alliance, between Huawei's Noah's Ark Laboratory and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), is being billed as a "strategic partnership into basic research", and it will cover areas like deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision. "The two parties believe that this strategic partnership will fuel the advancement of AI technology and create completely new experiences for people, thus contributing greatly to society at large," Huawei notes. Some of these areas of AI you will have heard a lot about already.

Founders Factory has received a multimillion pound investment from Chinese private equity firm CSC Group to help nurture AI talent in Europe and China. As part of the partnership, the accelerator and incubator launched by Brent Hoberman, Henry Lane Fox and Jim Meyerle, will invest in and scale five early stage AI startups and co-create two new companies a year. Founders Factory and CSC Group will work together to give AI startups access to the Chinese market and to import Chinese AI talent into the European tech ecosystem. Dania Zhou, CSC group senior managing director and CSC Union Co-Founder, commented on the news: "This is just the beginning of a long term relationship with Founders Factory; a relationship that will give us access to the best European talent through its unique model backed by other large corporate partners. The founding team has a great track record at building businesses; something we now want to do together with a focus on artificial intelligence."

As banking organisations, financial services providers and brands predict and plan for the way consumers will manage their money in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is high on the business development strategy for 2016 and beyond. Gideon Hyde, co-founder of Market Gravity, proposition design consultancy, shares his thoughts on this emerging technology and explains how businesses can embrace AI to enhance their offerings, meet consumer demand for speed, personalisation and convenience, and launch new products and services to stand out in the competitive marketplace. Gideon Hyde is co-founder and CEO of Market Gravity, which has offices in London, Edinburgh and New York. It works with big businesses, including Boots, Barclaycard, HSBC, Aegon, Standard Life, RWE npower and The AA, to help them realise their innovation capabilities and release the start up within. AI is already around us and used everyday within payments, money management and for robo-advice, particularly in the area of intelligent digital assistants that handle regular customer service enquiries and tasks.

Building on the innovative thinking that jump-started three previous life-changing eras – steam-powered mechanised production, mass production assembly lines, and the first electronics and IT-based automations – we're about to find out how this latest evolution will take us places we can't begin to imagine. In the most disruptive industrial revolution yet, AI advancements are infiltrating our existence at every level, whether they're in the guise of IBM Watson's Jeopardy-playing prowess, or Uber's self-driving cars. The businesses we run, the jobs we perform and the lives we live will never be the same again. With every new era comes fresh concerns that the latest advancements will usurp our role as humans, and make our work redundant. From driving our cars to diagnosing the sick, if machines are being trained to do our thinking for us, will we still need to think for ourselves?

Today on In Case You Missed It: Robots have finally gotten around the'needing human assistance' thing when it comes to sewing clothing. The Sewbo is one such option, which can stitch together clothing as long as the garment is first dipped in a stiffening solution that makes it feel like cardboard. Meanwhile MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab created a computer program made to simplify the process of 3D-printing with different materials in the same object. News about the Foundry is here. The video we can't stop watching from Russia is here.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

The motorcycle of the future is so safe riders can cruise without a helmet and never fall off, giving all of the thrills with none of the danger, according to BMW. The German automaker unveiled its Motorrad Vision Next 100, a sleek, self-balancing prototype the company released as part of its 100th anniversary celebrations. The zero-emissions bike has self-balancing wheels designed to stand upright even at a complete stop, stability that the company says will allow riders to forgo riding a helmet. The self-balancing BMW Motorrad Vision Next 100 concept motorcycle is unveiled on the last of four international stops of the'Iconic Impulses' event, celebrating 100 years of BMW. A'flexframe' extends from the front to the rear wheel, which means means the bike can be steered without the various joints found on today's motorcycles.

Since 1956, when computer science researchers gathered in the small town of Hanover, N.H. at Dartmouth College to talk about the field's nascent investigations into artificial intelligence, both government and industry in the U.S. have grappled with how to structure a systematic approach to research and development in the newly important field. From the government's perspective, this is increasingly important. With both federal research institutions and private companies pursuing artificial intelligence breakthroughs at breakneck speed, the federal government is frankly having a bit of an existential crisis about its role in research efforts and the priorities it has for what AI research should look like. To wit, in 2015 government spending on unclassified research and development in AI-related technologies was around 1.1 billion, according to one of the twin reports released today. But in the last five years alone, mergers and acquisitions among private companies vying for dominance in the AI market have far outstripped that figure, according to data from CB Insights.