In the 2015 film "Creed," aged boxing legend Rocky Balboa stares up at the sky in confusion after his young protege tells him a smartphone picture has been saved in the cloud. Rocky might feel even more befuddled if he heard about Microsoft's experiment in putting the cloud's computer servers under the sea. As crzay as it sounds, the underwater data center initiative, called Project Natick, could revolutionize the way companies Internet services such as streaming video, music, or games. Microsoft's first underwater test involved a car-sized capsule that weighs more than 17,236 kilograms and has a computing power equivalent to 300 desktop computers. That's tiny compared with existing data centers.

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.

Scatterings of completed buildings, sporting new plantings of drought-tolerant grasses, are already occupied; other buildings are going up quickly, including a new fire station. There's Nissan's new Silicon Valley research center, a well-financed medical device startup called Spiracur, a digital cash startup called Quisk, and a biotech startup incubator. And there is Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab--my destination along this dusty road crowded with construction vehicles. It's good to spend time in a new research lab; there's not only fresh paint and hip decor--like living walls of plants--there are fresh, excited faces, and empty desks waiting to be filled. In mid-2014, I spent a morning on just the other side of nearby Moffett Field watching a far more somber group of researchers moving out of a suddenly closed division of Microsoft Research.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. The DARPA Robotics Challenge this past summer showcased how far humanoid robots have come--but also how far they have yet to go before they can tackle real-world practical applications. Even the best of the DRC behemoths stumbled and fell down, proving, as IEEE Spectrum noted at the time, that "not walking is a big advantage." There is, in fact, a new not-walking way for robots to perform many kinds of tasks better and faster: the dexterous drone.

Can artificial intelligence evolve as human baby does, learning about the world by seeing and interacting with its surroundings? That's one of the questions driving a huge cognitive psychology experiment that has revealed crucial differences in how humans and computers see images. The study has tested the limits of human and computer vision by examining each one's ability to recognize partial or fuzzy images of objects such as airplanes, eagles, horses, cars, and eyeglasses. Unsurprisingly, human brains proved far better than computers at recognizing these "minimal" images even as they became smaller and harder to identify. But the results also offer tantalizing clues about the quirks of human vision--clues that could improve computer vision algorithms and eventually lead to artificial intelligence that learns to understand the world the way a growing toddler does.

There are two generalized schools of thought when it comes to robot hand design. You have robot hands that are simple and straightforward and get the job done, like two- or three-finger grippers that can reliably do many (if not most) things well without any fuss. And then you have very complex hands with four fingers and a thumb that are designed to closely mimic human hands, on the theory that human hands were intelligently designed by millions of years of evolution, and we've designed all of our stuff around them anyway, so if you want your robot to be able to do as many things as possible as well as possible you want a hand that's as humanlike as possible. Because of the inherent complexity of a real human hand, biomimetic anthropomorphic hands inevitably involve lots of compromises to get them to work properly while maintaining a human-ish form factor. Zhe Xu and Emanuel Todorov from the University of Washington, in Seattle, have gone crazy and built the most detailed and kinematically accurate biomimetic anthropomorphic robotic hand that we've ever seen, with the ultimate goal of replacing human hands completely. Here's why it was important for them to design a new kind of robotic hand, according to Xu: "The conventional approach to designing anthropomorphic robotic hands often involves mechanizing biological parts with hinges, linkages, and gimbals in order to simplify the seemingly complicated human counterparts. This approach is helpful for understanding and approximating the kinematics of the human hand in general, but inevitably introduces undesirable discrepancies between the human and robotic hands since most of those salient biomechanical features of the human hand are discarded in the mechanizing process. The inherent mismatch between mechanisms of these robotic hands and biomechanics of human hands essentially prevents us from using natural hand motion to directly control them. Thus none of the existing anthropomorphic robotic hands can achieve the human-level dexterity yet."

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your highly automated* 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. Mark your calendars: the premiere of NOVA's "Rise of the Robots" is in less than two weeks! Loyal readers of this blog will probably recognize all of the robots and most of the people in the trailer, but it looks like NOVA--which bills itself as "the most-watched primetime science series on television"--scored some great expert commentary along with footage of DRC robots that we've never seen before.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your highly caffeinated 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. A reminder: Next week is the premiere of NOVA's "Rise of the Robots." You don't want to miss this show because it's an awesome overview of the promises and challenges of robotics today, focusing, in particular, on the robots and humans of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Human skin's natural ability to feel sensations such as touch and temperature difference is not easily replicated with artificial materials in the research lab. That challenge did not stop a Saudi Arabian research team from using cheap household items to make a "paper skin" that mimics many sensory functions of human skin. The artificial skin may represent the first single sensing platform capable of simultaneously measuring pressure, touch, proximity, temperature, humidity, flow, and pH levels. Previously, researchers have tried using exotic materials such as carbon nanotubes or silver nanoparticles to create sensors capable of measuring just a few of those things. By comparison, the team at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia used common off-the-shelf materials such as paper sticky notes, sponges, napkins and aluminum foil.

You may recognize one of the dogs in this picture: we're pretty sure it's Andy Rubin's dog, Alex Cosmo [we've just been notified that the dog's name is in fact Cosmo, and Cosmo not only "contributes to most big decisions at Playground" but also serves as its head of security]. Andy Rubin is the co-founder of Android, and for about a year, he managed the robotics program at Google (now known as Alphabet). More recently, he's been running a hardware incubator called Playground, which has enough clout to summon up another robotic dog with Google ties: Boston Dynamics' Spot. The video was posted by Steve Jurvetson, a partner at VC firm DFJ. "I was told that this is the only Spot (their latest robot) in civilian hands," Jurvetson told IEEE Spectrum. Jurvetson was really impressed by the robot's "lifelike movement."