Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your mysophobic 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. XDog is a small electric quadruped designed and built by Xing Wang, a graduate student at Shanghai University, with support from his adviser Jia Wenchuan. The robot has 12 motors (each leg has 3 DoF), and uses force sensors on each foot, IMU, and joint-angle sensors for control.

AlphaGo, a largely self-taught Go-playing AI, last night won the fifth and final game in a match held in Seoul, South Korea, against that country's Lee Sedol. Sedol is one of the greatest modern players of the ancient Chinese game. The final score was 4 games to 1. Thus falls the last and computationally hardest game that programmers have taken as a test of machine intelligence. Chess, AI's original touchstone, fell to the machines 19 years ago, but Go had been expected to last for many years to come. The sweeping victory means far more than the US 1 million prize, which Google's London-based acquisition, DeepMind, says it will give to charity.

Inside a modest-looking office building in Tokyo lives an unusually clever industrial robot made by the Japanese company Fanuc. Give the robot a task, like picking widgets out of one box and putting them into another container, and it will spend the night figuring out how to do it. Come morning, the machine should have mastered the job as well as if it had been programmed by an expert. Industrial robots are capable of extreme precision and speed, but they normally need to be programmed very carefully in order to do something like grasp an object. This is difficult and time-consuming, and it means that such robots can usually work only in tightly controlled environments.

AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence that has mastered one of our oldest and most complex games – Go – is the toast of Silicon Valley. But in South Korea, where Go is considered a form of expression akin to martial arts, the mood is different. Here, the game pulls in television contracts and corporate sponsors. Now, after 2500 years of tradition in the region, South Korea's top player has been bested by a cyborg, its culture shaken by technology. Watching Google's AlphaGo AI eviscerate Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol put the nation into shock, especially after the national hero confidently predicted that he would sweep AlphaGo aside.

Google's AlphaGo software has defeated human Go grandmaster Lee Sedol 4-1 in a five-game series. Despite Lee coming back to win the fourth game (see page "Machine outsmarts man in battle of the decade"), for many the realisation of what was taking place was stark. "I didn't think AlphaGo would play the game in such a perfect manner," Lee admitted in shock. The showdown has drawn eyes from around the world – 30 million people watched it in China alone. Like Deep Blue checkmating chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, or Watson answering questions on Jeopardy!, it represents a milestone in our relationship with machines.

If you're checking into a plush hotel, you expect a warm welcome, but it could be soon be common to receive it from a cold robot. Hotel chain Hilton Worldwide and IBM have joined forces to trial a robot concierge named'Connie' at a hotel in Virginia. The humanoid uses IBM's AI platform called Watson to tell guests about local tourist attractions and hotel features, as well as giving them dining recommendations. Hotel chain Hilton Worldwide and IBM have joined forces to trial a robot concierge named'Connie' at a hotel in Virginia. The cyborg (pictured above) uses IBM's AI platform called Watson to tell guests about local tourist attractions and hotel features, as well as giving them dining recommendations It is the first time IBM has made a Watson-enabled robot for the hospitality market using the NAO humanoid robot, which has previously been used to play football and help teach lessons in schools.

Nasa is shooting for a 2018 launch of the Mars Insight spacecraft which will examine the interior of the red planet. The robotic lander was supposed to lift off this month, but was grounded in December by a leak in a French instrument. It will now be completely redesigned in time for May 2018, the next available launch window. A French-made seismographic instrument destined for Nasa's InSight Mars mission lander (artist's impression pictured) was found to have leaks in its vacuum container. The mission, aimed at studying Mars' interior structure by monitoring its'marsquakes', has now been scrapped The lander, which is about the size of a car, was supposed to be the first mission devoted to understanding the interior structure of the red planet.

Battery technology has been accused of falling behind technology, with everything from phones to drones hit by it. Now a new fuel cell could change the way we charge and let you talk, text and WhatsApp for a week on a single charge - and keep drones airborne for an hour. The tiny solid oxide fuel cell is just 1.95 millimeters in diameter that combines porous stainless steel and a thin-film electrolyte and electrodes, and has shown'enhanced thermal robustness'. From irrigating crops to disaster relief to delivering pizza, the capabilities of drones are growing but small battery capacity limits flight time to less than an hour. Researchers developed a new technology that combines porous stainless steel, which is thermally and mechanically strong and highly stable to oxidation/reduction reactions, with thin-film electrolyte and electrodes of minimal heat capacity.

A human Go player has scored his first victory over an artificial intelligence computer program after'finding weaknesses' in the software. Google's AlphaGo computer had previously managed to win three games against Go world champion Lee Sedol in the five game match. This meant the company's DeepMind artificial intelligence program won the 1 million ( 706,388) prize for the match. South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol puts the first stone against Google's artificial intelligence program (pictured), which he later went on to win in 180 moves. On Saturday Facebook chief executive Marc Zuckerberg, who is developing his own AI personal assistant technology, congratulated the Google team on their victory.

Following its 4-1 victory over human Go champion Lee Sedol, Google's AlphaGo has been awarded the highest Go grandmaster rank possible. AlphaGo was given an honourary'ninth dan' professional ranking, equivalent to that held by Sedol who has 18 international titles to his name. It is a ranking reserved for players whose ability at the ancient board game borders on'divinity', South Korea's Go Association said. Following its 4-1 victory over human Go champion Lee Sedol (pictured), Google's AlphaGo has been awarded the highest Go grandmaster rank possible. AlphaGo was given an honourary'ninth dan' professional ranking, equivalent to that held by Sedol who has 18 international titles to his name Lee Sedol is widely considered one of the greatest Go players of the modern era.