UPDATED 12/23/15: More robot holiday videos added! This week, we've collected a whole bunch of holiday-themed robot videos from around the Internet. If we missed yours, send it to us, or post a comment and we'll add it. We're going to take some time off over the next week, but we'll be back in force with January, with in-depth coverage of whatever robots happen to show up at the Consumer Electronics Show, which kicks off the first week of 2016. We'll also take a look back at 2015, and let you know what our plans are for the next year.

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.

It wouldn't be CES without a new drone from Parrot. Not that we're complaining: Parrot makes awesome drones. You can probably guess what's new about the Disco, though: a pronounced lack of rotors and the addition of a symmetrical pair of passive lifting surfaces. In other words, it's got wings. As soon as we saw this thing, we were like, "Oh, that looks familiar!"

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.

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.

It is the year 2023, and for the first time, a self-driving car navigating city streets strikes and kills a pedestrian. A lawsuit is sure to follow. But exactly what laws will apply? Today, the law is scrambling to keep up with the technology, which is moving forward at a breakneck pace, thanks to efforts by Apple, Audi, BMW, Ford [pdf], General Motors, Google, Honda, Mercedes, Nissan, Nvidia, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen. Google's prototype self-driving cars, with test drivers always ready to take control, are already on city streets in Mountain View, Calif., and Austin, Texas. In the second half of 2015, Tesla Motors began allowing owners (not just test drivers) to switch on its Autopilot mode.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by a society of mindful 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. Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer and MIT professor, died on Sunday in Boston. Dr. Minsky, an IEEE Life Fellow, made numerous seminal contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics, exploring, among other things, how a better understanding of human cognition could lead to advances in machine intelligence, and vice versa.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your AI-enhanced 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. A video went around last week of a kid in Russia being pulled along on a snowboard by a drone. The title of the vid is "first droneboarding," and here it is in all its underwhelming glory: Now, here's a much more exciting video (using a much bigger quadrotor), also posted last week: "EPFL scientists have invented a new soft gripper that uses electroadhesion: flexible electrode flaps that act like a thumb-index gripper. It can pick up fragile objects of arbitrary shape and stiffness, like an egg, a water balloon or paper."

Everybody knows that anthropomorphic robots that try to look and act like people are creepy. There's been a bunch of research into just what it is about such androids that we don't like (watch the video below to get an idea of what we're talking about), and many researchers think that we get uncomfortable when we begin to lose the ability to confidently distinguish between what's human and what's not. This is why zombies are often placed at the very bottom of the Uncanny Valley: in many respects, they directly straddle that line, which is why they freak us out so much. The tricky part about robots, however, is that they can manifest "human-ness" in ways that are more than just physical. When robots start acting like humans, as opposed to just looking like them, things can get much more complicated.

Last Friday, we posted a bunch of videos from the AAAI Video Competition. There are lots of good videos (really, they're all good), and we didn't want to play favorites or otherwise influence your votes, so we didn't add much in the way of commentary or anything like that. But it's been almost a week, and a few of those videos are certainly worth taking a closer look at. First, we have a video accompanying "Evolution of Collective Behaviors for a Real Swarm of Aquatic Surface Robots," by Miguel Duarte, Vasco Costa, Jorge Gomes, Tiago Rodrigues, Fernando Silva, Sancho Moura Oliveira, and Anders Lyhne Christensen, from the BioMachines Lab and Institute of Telecommunications, in Lisbon, Portugal. This video is fantastic because, among other reasons, I HAD THAT EXACT SAME PLAYMOBIL PIRATE SHIP WHEN I WAS A KID.