NASA MAY HAVE equipped its Mars Curiosity rover with an impressive array of scientific instruments, but the robot attaché's size and $2.5-billion price tag give its operators ample reason to steer clear of terrain that could jeopardize its mission. Which is a shame, because much of Mars' craggy, cave-ridden, boulder-strewn landscape is so treacherous (planetary geologists literally call it chaos terrain), that big, expensive robots like Curiosity can't risk accessing it. That's why NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory built Puffer.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Tonight, we conclude our series War on the Brain. Special correspondent Soledad O'Brien reports on the efforts of researchers to find the cause of post-traumatic stress disorder. JACOB FADLEY, U.S. Army Veteran: Having PTSD is -- it's like being in a room where you have no control and everything's going wrong. Triggers are, for me, when I'm in traffic. SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Jacob Fadley served 12 years and four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last year, we learned about the remarkable scale of the FBI's facial-recognition technology, with its access to nearly 412 million photos--many originating from sources unrelated to crime, such as ID documents. The intelligence agency has been trying to create a system that can accurately identify criminals in, say, CCTV footage--though it wasn't then known how well the bureau's software worked, nor whether it actually improved investigations. Now, we have at least a little more insight into the program. The Guardian reports that a House oversight committee hearing last week revealed some interesting new details about the proliferation and abilities of the FBI's facial-recognition systems. First, there is a very good chance that you, as an American, appear within the database. Among those many millions of photos, it turns out, are the likenesses of around half the country's adult population.

As society enters an era where AI will take life or death decisions--spotting whether moles are cancerous and driving us to work--trusting these machines will become ever more important. The difficulty is that it's almost impossible for us to understand the inner workings of many modern AI systems that perform human-like tasks, such as recognizing real-life objects or understanding speech. The models produced by the deep-learning systems that have powered recent AI breakthroughs are largely opaque, functioning as black boxes that spit out a result but whose operation remains mysterious. This inscrutability stems from the complexity of the large neural networks that underpin deep-learning systems. These brain-inspired networks are interconnected layers of algorithms that feed data into each other and can be trained to carry out specific tasks.

An asteroid as big as a bus came closer to Earth than the moon last night. The object, dubbed 2017 FJ101, zoomed passed within 202,000 miles (325,087 km) of our planet. But the near-Earth asteroid posed no threat to our planet or the moon, scientists said. An asteroid as big as a bus came closer to Earth than the moon last night. According to an asteroid-impact simulator called'Impact Earth!' by Purdue University, if a porous rock asteroid of 111 feet (34 meters) long hit Earth at a 45-degree angle, the simulator found, it would have exploded as an air burst.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your 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. Festo's Bionic Learning Network prototypes for this year are a bit less crazy than we're used to, but they're also far more practical, with immediate potential applications, especially in collaborative robotics: Festo presents a bionic gripper called the OctopusGripper, which is derived from an octopus tentacle. Free-moving, intuitive to operate and safe when interacting with the user: the pneumatic lightweight robot is based on the human arm and has great potential as a sensitive helper for human–robot collaboration in the future.

If we're ever going to find alien life in outer space, we may have to dig deep -- into the thick ice of a another planet's surface. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has put together a bunch of robot prototypes that could traverse and bore through ice on moons in the farthest reaches of our solar system, ones that scientists believe may contain liquid oceans and thus potentially could be harboring extraterrestrial life. NASA is developing robots, including ones with robotic claws, that could take samples on icy moons in the outer solar system as part of Earth's search for alien life. JPL says those moons might include Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons and a favorite of some scientists because it has internal heat as well as an underground ocean. There's also Europa, a moon of Jupiter; and Saturn's largest moon, Titan, where there's so much static electricity that the sand particles on its surface stick together so tightly you wouldn't need water to build a sand castle.

The government's demand for drones and drone operators continues to soar. In fact, earlier this month the head of Air Education and Training Command said that the U.S. Air Force now has more jobs for MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones than any other type of pilot position. Now, a new initiative hopes to speed up the procurement process for smaller drones – saving time, money, and lives. It is part of a new mission for Customs and Border Protection: helping agents in the field see beyond their line of sight, and secure a wider area, without sacrificing safety. "They want to see what's over the next hill," explains Kevin McAleenan, CBP's acting commissioner.

Toronto's push to become a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) is finding support from all levels of government, academia and private businesses. The University of Toronto's newly unveiled Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence will be receiving $50 million in funding from the province of Ontario, in addition to $40-50 million over the next five years from the federal government and $80 million over 10 years from the private sector. "We're in a period of great transition in our economy with technology disrupting, challenging, and improving the way we live and work," Premier Kathleen Wynne told the crowd at the official launch of Vector's new headquarters in the MaRS Discovery District in downtown Toronto on Mar. 30. "When everything is changing as fast as it is, we have two options: follow or lead. With the launch of Vector, Ontario is choosing to lead the next great leap forward in technology, innovation and talent."

Because Jupiter's moon, Europa, has oceans lying beneath its surface, it said to be one of the most likely places in the solar system for life to thrive – researchers just have to burrow through miles of ice to find out. Now, NASA has unveiled a team of robotic prototypes equip with special tools to penetrate the frozen terrain and search for signs of living microbes. The squad of'icebots' includes a machine that tunnels through the icy surface, a folding boom arm, an ice gripping claw and a projectile launcher capable of grabbing samples up to 164 feet away. The team of'icebots' includes a machine that tunnels through the icy surface, a folding boom arm, an ice gripping claw (pictured) and a projectile launcher capable of grabbing samples up to 164 feet away NASA has unveiled a set of robotic prototypes that it said could one day travel to Europa. One prototype was inspired by so-called'melt probes' used here on Earth – dubbed the ice-gripping claw.