At San Francisco's first fully automated restaurant, meals appear in little glass cubbies, just 90 seconds after customers order and pay on wall-mounted iPads. It's a human-less experience – no waitstaff, no cashier, no one to get your order wrong and no one to tip. The moment before the meal appears, the see-through display screen that fronts the cubbies goes black for the few seconds when you might catch sight of the hand that feeds you. Related: Would you bet against sex robots? AI'could leave half of world unemployed' Eatsa has not yet achieved total automation.

Baidu Inc. BIDU 2.44 % will soon start testing autonomous cars in the U.S., part of the Chinese tech giant's effort to introduce a commercially viable model by 2018. The move, disclosed by Baidu's chief scientist Andrew Ng in an interview late Tuesday, is a significant step for the company, which is trying to get ahead in the race to build autonomous cars and is now calling on the resources of its Silicon Valley tech center to advance the effort. At the same time, Baidu is advocating for better coordination with the U.S. government, which the company says is necessary to get self-driving cars on the road. Central to the push is Mr. Ng, an artificial-intelligence scientist who conducted groundbreaking research at Stanford University and at Alphabet Inc. GOOGL -0.40 % 's Google. Late last year, Beijing-based Baidu became the latest technology company to publicize its intention to develop self-driving cars.

South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol reviews the match with other professional Go players after the fourth match against Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo. South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol reviews the match with other professional Go players after the fourth match against Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo. The five-game clash pitting man against machine is over, with Google's artificial intelligence program winning the series.The program -- called AlphaGo -- took four of five games against Korean Lee Sedol, an 18-time world champion of the board game Go. "I feel a little regrettable because I believe that there is more that a human being could have shown in a match against artificial intelligence," Lee said following the final match. The matchup had all the mood and atmosphere of a prize fight. And play-by-play announcers who analyzed every move.

Google's Go-playing software defeated a human champion. Google's Go-playing software defeated a human champion. An artificially intelligent computer system built by Google has just beaten the world's best human, Lee Sedol of South Korea, at an ancient strategy game called Go. Go originated in Asia about 2,500 years ago and is considered many, many times more complex than chess, which fell to AI back in 1997. Google's programmers didn't explicitly teach AlphaGo to play the game. Instead, they built a sort of model brain called a neural network that learned how to play Go by itself. The Google program, known as Alpha Go, actually learned the game without much human help.

Midway through the first of five recent matches between Lee Sedol, a top-ranked professional Go player, and AlphaGo, a computer program conceived by Google DeepMind, an odd thing happened: Lee's jaw dropped, hanging open for a nigh-cartoonish twenty seconds, and then he laughed. AlphaGo had just mounted an aggressive, and evidently unexpected, attack. The moment was reminiscent of a famous episode in Go history, when Honinbo Shusaku, a future legend of the game, squared off against Inoue Genan Inseki, an older and more experienced player, in 1846. The story goes that a spectator--a local doctor who knew little of Go--correctly guessed that the seventeen-year-old Shusaku was beating Inseki. Asked how he knew, the doctor responded that, after an earlier move, Inseki's ears had flushed red, a clear indication of surprise.

Most of the world's robots are about as charismatic as a coffeemaker. Nexi is baby-faced and blue-eyed, and Leonardo has been described variously as a squirrel, a furry alien, and a giant Furby. After years of making emotionally engaging machines with her students at the MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group, Breazeal thinks the time has finally come for a personal robot to inhabit our homes and help us live our lives. To pursue that goal, she founded Jibo, a Boston startup that has raised US 38.6 million to produce a friendly robo-assistant to families. Equipped with cameras and microphones, the robot, also called Jibo, is a little taller than a toaster and shaped like a desk fan.

For decades, futurists have predicted that commercial miners would one day tap the unimaginable mineral wealth of the world's ocean floor. Soon, that subsea gold rush could finally begin: The world's first deep-sea mining robots are poised to rip into rich deposits of copper, gold, and silver 1,600 meters down at the bottom of the Bismarck Sea, near Papua New Guinea. The massive machines, which are to be tested sometime in 2016, are part of a high-stakes gamble for the Toronto-based mining company Nautilus Minerals. Nautilus's machines have been ready to go since 2012, when a dispute between the firm and the Papua New Guinean government stalled the project. What broke the impasse was the company's offer, in 2014, to provide Papua New Guinea with certain intellectual property from the mining project.

Last week was a holiday, and we're at CES this week, but nothing can stop the robot videos. Things should be back to normal around here next week (we hope). Let us know if you have videos or events to suggest, and enjoy today's Video Friday selection! Teaching robots how to avoid destruction and despise humanity at the same time is never a good idea. The world's most advanced bat robot now has membrane wings, just like real bats: A microprocessor-based onboard computer, a 6 DOF IMU sensor package, five DC motors with encoder feedback for flapping and wing articulation (asymmetric wing folding and leg/tail control), power/comm electronics, carbon-fiber frame, 3D printed parts, and silicone based membrane wings -- all at 92 grams.

There's still a huge amount of radioactive waste cleanup to do at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. Some of that cleanup can be done by careful humans. And there's some that's too dangerous for humans, but not quite dangerous enough to dissuade robots. Clearing the fuel rods out of the pool in reactor 3 is one of those tasks, and Toshiba has built a robot to tackle it. If you had to pick somewhere to eat a picnic lunch in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, inside the containment building of reactor 3 probably wouldn't be at the top of your list, but it also wouldn't be at the very bottom.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your weaponized Automaton bloggers. We'll be also 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. Intel's 100-drone performance was quite a spectacle: It's worth clicking through to Intel's page on this to see all the pretty pictures. To navigate snowy roads, Ford autonomous vehicles are equipped with high-resolution 3D maps – complete with information about the road and what's above it, including road markings, signs, geography, landmarks and topography.