Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your stigmergic Automaton bloggers. We're 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. "Academy Award -nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The Google Lunar XPRIZE is the largest prize competition of all time with a reward of 30 million and aims to incentivize entrepreneurs to create a new era of affordable access to the Moon and beyond, while inspiring the next generation of scientists, engineers, and explorers." "DARPA's Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) program seeks to provide innovative cross-pollination between fixed-wing and rotary-wing technologies and by developing and integrating novel subsystems to enable radical improvements in vertical and cruising flight capabilities.

MIT's Personal Robotics Group has been one of the driving forces behind social robotics since… well, since they pretty much invented social robotics. Led by Professor Cynthia Breazeal, who is also founder of social robot startup Jibo, the MIT group has built an amazing collection of smart, cute, and squishy creatures, and now they have a new one. The latest, smartest, cutest, and squishiest social robot that MIT has been testing out is named Tega, and it's already gotten to work, adorably teaching Spanish to preschoolers. We spoke with Jackie Kory Westlund, a Ph.D. student in the MIT Media Lab who's been doing research with Tega, about why it's such a useful social assistive robotics platform and how to keep preschoolers from utterly destroying it with hugs. To provide some context for Tega, have a look at a couple of the other robots developed by MIT's Personal Robotics Group, which is really just an excuse to post one of my favorite robot videos of all time: You can sort of imagine that Dragonbot and Tofu maybe got extra cuddly one lonely night at the Media Lab, and Tega was the result.

Last night Google's AI AlphaGo won the first in a five-game series against the world's best Go player, in Seoul, South Korea. The success comes just five months after a slightly less experienced version of the same program became the first machine to defeat any Go professional by winning five games against the European champion. This victory was far more impressive though because it came at the expense of Lee Sedol, 33, who has dominated the ancient Chinese game for a decade. The European champion, Fan Hui, is ranked only 663rd in the world. And the machine, by all accounts, played a noticeably stronger game than it did back in October, evidence that it has learned much since then.

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.