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.

In retrospect, it seems crazy that we sent people to the moon with nothing there waiting for them. If something had gone wrong, there was no Plan B. We're probably not going to take a risk like that again, which is why we're working so hard on robots that can go to the moon or Mars to get things all set up and running and warm and cozy for us in advance. Setting up bases and habitats and doing exploring and whatnot may be the exciting extraterrestrial work, but there's other Very Important things that need to be done. One of the most important things is a high quality landing pad, and the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration (PISCES) has gotten a teleoperated robot to build one. The reason that you need a landing pad is that dust on the moon (and on Mars) is nasty, nasty stuff.

On tap at the brewpub. A nice dark red color with a nice head that left a lot of lace on the glass. Aroma is of raspberries and chocolate. Not much depth to speak of despite consisting of raspberries. The bourbon is pretty subtle as well. I really don't know that find a flavor this beer tastes like. I would prefer a little more carbonization to come through. It's pretty drinkable, but I wouldn't mind if this beer was available.

Neural networks learn to recognize objects in images and perform other artificial intelligence tasks with a very low error rate. But they're typically too complex to run on a smartphone, where, you have to admit, they'd be pretty useful. At the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, MIT engineers presented a chip designed to use run sophisticated image-processing neural network software on a smartphone's power budget. The great performance of neural networks doesn't come free. In image processing, for example, neural networks like AlexNet work so well because they put an image through a huge number of filters, first finding image edges, then identifying objects, then figuring out what's happening in a scene.

The best part about scuba diving is being able to see all kinds of amazing animals, plants, animals that looks like plants, and plants that look like animals. The worst part about scuba diving is not being able to squidge any of these things. I mean, don't you just want to give this thing a great big hug? While it's unlikely that me personally hugging any of these adorable creatures will ever be a good idea (however much I was seriously considering it while taking those pics), it is occasionally important for sea creatures to be aggressively groped in the name of science. Researchers at Harvard have endowed undersea robots with some squishy robotic fingers that allow them to non-destructively collect underwater specimens from under da sea.

I think the idea of designing robots that look like humans to better interact with humans is a solid "meh." The concept is good, but the execution is usually horrible, and the more your robot tries to look like a human, the more horrible it gets. Having said that, I think that the idea of using robots with specific human features, like eyes, can be a substantial asset for human-robot interaction, if you know what you're doing. Sean Andrist, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (who knows what he's doing), has been researching social gaze with robots. He's developed algorithms that help robots look at people at the right times and in the right ways.

Someday, U.S. soldiers fighting in the streets of a sprawling megacity will need an airdrop of ammunition, food, or water that can't be safely delivered by ground convoy or helicopter. But the supplies parachuting from the skies won't have to rely on GPS signals that suffer from inaccuracy in cluttered city environments or can be disrupted by enemies. The U.S. military has been testing new supply airdrops that can automatically aim for a precise landing based on images of the target area. Recent tests of the U.S. Army's Joint Precision Airdrop System (JPADS) have been trying new navigational software--developed by the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., and other companies--to achieve GPS-style accuracy with images alone. The software figures out its current location by comparing ground terrain features, such as trees or buildings seen by onboard cameras, with the latest satellite or drone images of the target area in its database.

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.