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.

The Bedford, Mass.-based company, which has sold millions of its disc-shaped Roomba vacuums, is expanding its family of cleaning automatons. The new robot is the Braava jet, a small, shiny white robotic mop designed to clean hard floors, especially in bathrooms and kitchens. And did we say it's square? But perhaps the biggest surprise about the Braava jet is not its shape; it's the price: US 200. This is iRobot's most affordable cleaning bot ever.

Recently I looked a project being undertaken by a British team from Lancaster and Manchester universities respectively. The team were looking at how robotics could be better deployed to help in the aftermath of a nuclear accident. It's part of a growing trend that is seeing robots deployed in extremely hazardous environments, such as this German project that is using robots in bomb detection and disposal situations. A common feature of most of these projects is that human beings remain in control of the robots, which can create issues regarding the agility of the robots and their responsiveness to circumstances on the ground. A British team are attempting to rectify this with a new system that uses telepresence to allow for a more adaptive means of controlling the robot.

A US government agency claims it has battery technology that could outdo anything dreamt up by the likes of Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) – a branch of the Department of Energy – says it has several next-generation battery storage projects in the works. While the organisation won't go into details about its technology, it says it has found the'holy grail of batteries' could transform the US electrical grid within five to 10 years. Ellen Williams (right), director of Arpa-E, said her agency has helped kickstart a dozen high-risk projects based on newer technologies that could soon outperform Elon Musk's (left) Tesla batteries The battery division of Musk's Tesla Motors turned a profit in the fourth quarter. This came after the first shipments of its rechargeable products helped to reduce losses from the company's auto business.

Battery technology has been accused of falling behind technology, with everything from phones to drones hit by it. Now a new fuel cell could change the way we charge and let you talk, text and WhatsApp for a week on a single charge - and keep drones airborne for an hour. The tiny solid oxide fuel cell is just 1.95 millimeters in diameter that combines porous stainless steel and a thin-film electrolyte and electrodes, and has shown'enhanced thermal robustness'. From irrigating crops to disaster relief to delivering pizza, the capabilities of drones are growing but small battery capacity limits flight time to less than an hour. Researchers developed a new technology that combines porous stainless steel, which is thermally and mechanically strong and highly stable to oxidation/reduction reactions, with thin-film electrolyte and electrodes of minimal heat capacity.

During Chevron Corporation's (NYSE:CVX) Security Analyst meeting on March 8, several big pieces of news came out. A day before the meeting, Chevron issued a press release stating that its 54 billion Gorgon LNG facility in Australia had just started producing LNG (liquefied natural gas) and condensate. After originally estimated to be operational by the end of 2014 for under 30 billion USD, the project was delayed as costs skyrocketed. As the operator with a 47.3% stake, Chevron lost a lot of credibility due to the massive cost of its mishaps, as did its partners ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) and Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDS.A) (NYSE:RDS.B), who each own 25% of the venture. The first cargo of LNG is expected to be shipped out very soon, potentially marking the beginning of a strong source of growth after all the headaches it took to get here.

We consider the problem of packing node-disjoint directed paths in a directed graph. We consider a variant of this problem where each path starts within a fixed subset of root nodes, subject to a given bound on the length of paths. This problem is motivated by the so-called kidney exchange problem, but has potential other applications and is interesting in its own right. We propose a new algorithm for this problem based on the message passing/belief propagation technique. A priori this problem does not have an associated graphical model, so in order to apply a belief propagation algorithm we provide a novel representation of the problem as a graphical model. Standard belief propagation on this model has poor scaling behavior, so we provide an efficient implementation that significantly decreases the complexity. We provide numerical results comparing the performance of our algorithm on both artificially created graphs and real world networks to several alternative algorithms, including algorithms based on integer programming (IP) techniques. These comparisons show that our algorithm scales better to large instances than IP-based algorithms and often finds better solutions than a simple algorithm that greedily selects the longest path from each root node. In some cases it also finds better solutions than the ones found by IP-based algorithms even when the latter are allowed to run significantly longer than our algorithm.

Traditional theories of social models conceptualize teams as distributed processors, disregarding the interdependence necessary to multi-task. Yet, interdependence characterizes social behavior. Instead, traditional theory favor cooperation, a state of least entropy production (LEP), without understanding the causes, limits or consequences of cooperation. As a simple example of interdependence, foraging prey overgraze forests free of predators. In our model, interdependence creates uncertainty, tradeoffs and signals (e.g., prices, coordination, innovation). Unlike individuals, the ability of teams to multitask reflects a quantum-like entanglement that represents maximum entropy production (MEP) when solving the problems signaled by society to improve its welfare. Our model supports findings that evolution in nature is driven by the MEP from making intelligent choices. Exploiting interdependence improves team intelligence, improves performance and reduces the risk of human error; forced cooperation disorganizes it by increasing the risk of error; e.g., if team cooperation improves teamwork, widespread forced cooperation in an autocracy or bureaucracy reduces social intelligence by adding unnecessary noise to signals. In our model, competition between teams self-organizes outsiders willing to sort through the noise for signals of the choices that improve social welfare (e.g., teams in courtrooms; science; entertainment; sports; businesses). Social systems organized around competition (e.g., stronger signals from robust checks and balances) better control a society by more correctly sizing teams to solve problems with fewer errors compared to autocracies or bureaucracies. Overall, we predict, the density of MEP directed at solving problems in a society with the constraints imposed from strong checks and balances, yet able to freely self-organize its labor and capital within those constraints, is denser.

As autonomous systems are becoming more and more pervasive, they often have to make decisions concerning moral and ethical values. There are many approaches to incorporating moral values in autonomous decision-making that are based on some sort of logical deduction. However, we argue here, in order for decision-making to seem persuasive to humans, it needs to reflect human values and judgments. Employing some insights from our ongoing researchusing features of the blackboard architecture for a context-aware recommender system, and a legal decision-making system that incorporates supra-legal aspects, we aim to explore if this architecture can also be adapted to implement a moral decision-making system that generates rationales that are persuasive to humans. Our vision is that such a system can be used as an advisory system to consider a situation from different moral perspectives, and generate ethical pros and cons of taking a particular course of action in a given context.