Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your thick-necked 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. Here we report the untethered operation of a robot composed solely of soft materials. The robot is controlled with microfluidic logic that autonomously regulates fluid flow and, hence, catalytic decomposition of an on-board monopropellant fuel supply.

"The problem with the lionfish is it's like Darwin's nightmare," Oliver Steeds said, standing on the deck of the Baseline Explorer. A late afternoon sun dwindled over the 146-foot research vessel, as it sat anchored in St. George's Harbour on Bermuda's northeast corner. Licks of ocean water dried off a gold-plated submersible parked next to Steeds, the director of a deep ocean exploration project called the Nekton mission, as he recounted the basics of the invasive species. "Lionfish are chowing their way through the food chain, because they don't have any predators," Steeds said. Map of the lionfish spread based on sightings from 1985 to 2015. The first lionfish sightings occurred off the Florida coast in the mid-1980s.

Scientists have found another Earth, which might have the right conditions for us or aliens to live. But will we ever actually get there and find out for sure? Though the planet is in one sense our closest next door neighbour – orbiting around Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own – it's still a good 4.3 lightyears away. That will mean that it will be incredibly difficult to get there, and the conventional rockets that we have today would take thousands of years to arrive. It will take new kinds of technology to actually reach our newly-discovered neighbour.

China has revealed the first pictures of the rover it is going to send to mars in 2020. The newly-unveiled little robot will explore the planet for three months, according to state media, and it is the latest part of China's ambitious and expensive space programme. China became the third country to put a man in space, after the US and Russia, in 2003. Since then it has been aiming at other achievements in its space programme. 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.

A rocky planet that might have aliens on it has been found, close enough that we could travel there. The new world is just slightly bigger than Earth and sits about four light years away, orbiting Proxima Centauri. That star is the nearest one to our solar system. As such, it is the most easily studied and understood of any "second Earth" that has ever been found. And it appears to be almost perfectly set up to serve as a home for alien life.

The first female pilot to fly solo from Britain to Australia has been'brought back to life' with ground-breaking 3D technology. Amy Johnson completed the journey from London to Darwin in 1930 - one of many record-breaking flights during her career. To mark 75 years since her death, experts have created a fully interactive digital 3D version of Ms Johnson, which can even walk and talk about her achievements. The first female pilot to fly solo from Britain to Australia has been'brought back to life' with ground-breaking 3D technology. 'Virtual Amy' will go display in the children's library within Hull Central Library as part of the Amy Johnson Festival.

The sun was sparkling on the Mediterranean Sea on the afternoon when a graduate student from my lab tossed our prize robot into the water for the first time. I watched nervously as our electronic creation sank beneath the waves. But the bot didn't falter: When we gave it the command to swim, it filled its expandable mantle with water, then jetted out the fluid to shoot forward. When we ordered it to crawl, it stiffened its eight floppy arms in sequence to push itself along the sandy bottom and over scattered rocks. And when we instructed it to explore a tight space beneath the dock, the robot inserted its soft body into the narrow gap without difficulty.

The private spaceflight company landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the sixth time in the last eight months early Sunday morning, pulling off the feat during the successful launch of the JCSAT-16 commercial communications satellite. The two-stage Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 1:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, carrying JCSAT-16 toward a distant geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). Less than 9 minutes later, the rocket's first stage came back for a pinpoint landing on the deck of a robotic ship called Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles off the Florida coast. A textbook touchdown had been anything but guaranteed. "Given this mission's GTO destination, the first stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing challenging," SpaceX representatives wrote in a pre-launch JCSAT-16 press kit.

Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully landed a reusable Falcon 9 rocket on a floating drone ship at sea on Sunday morning. The company's eighth launch this year was part of its ongoing effort to re-use costly rocket parts instead of discarding them into the ocean. It is the fourth time SpaceX has vertically landed a Falcon 9 rocket on a floating platform at sea. The company has also landed another rocket safely on land. The rocket launched under a dark night sky from Cape Canaveral, Florida in the early hours of Sunday morning.

SpaceX launched JCSAT-16 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and landed the first stage on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday, July 28, 2016 with a secret payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral and landed it about eight minutes later. United Launch Alliance launched an Atlas V rocket at 10:30 a.m. SpaceX launched a pair of communications satellites from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, but it was unknown if the first stage landed successfully.