Meet Promobot IR77, an artificial intelligence (AI) designed to have face-to-face interactions with humans. It looks cute, but this Russian-made robot had recently been "arrested," after making rounds in a political rally, recording voters' opinions about a candidate's team. It sounds fairly harmless, but Promobot seemed to have made enough trouble to make the local authorities ask policemen to apprehend and detain the robot. "Police asked to remove the robot away from the crowded area, and even tried to handcuff him," the Promobot spokesperson said. This isn't the first time that Promobot got itself in a fair amount of mischief--it's run away from its home laboratory before, twice. The mad run for freedom ended with a battery-drained robot blocking thickening traffic in the street; the programmers were left scratching their heads.

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. "Current and previous single-legged hopping robots are energetically tethered and lack portability. Here, we present the design and control of an untethered, energetically autonomous single-legged hopping robot. The thrust-producing mechanism of the robot's leg is an actuated prismatic joint, called a linear elastic actuator in parallel (LEAP). The LEAP mechanism comprises a voice coil actuator in parallel with two compression springs, which gives our robot passive compliance. An actuated gimbal hip joint is realized by two standard servomotors. To control the robot, we adapt Raibert's hopping controller, and find we can maintain balance roughly in-place for up to approx. If you have a robot that runs ROS and makes maps, you've likely been using GMapping, which gives you very GMapping-y results. Google has just released its own open source ROS-based real-time 2D/3D SLAM library called Cartographer, and it already has support for PR2, TurtleBot, Revo LDS (aka Neato's lidar), and even TRI's HSR: POW! For more details, read this 2016 ICRA paper. "Toyota Motor Corporation plans to launch sales of its compact and cuddlesome'Kirobo Mini' communication partner through Toyota vehicle dealers across Japan in 2017.

JOHANNESBURG – At first, the drone took some explaining. Anxious villagers buzzed with rumors of a new blood-sucking thing that would fly above their homes. The truth was more practical: A United Nations project would explore whether a small unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, could deliver HIV test samples more efficiently than land transport in rural Malawi. Once understanding dawned and work began, young students and their teachers would spill out of the nearby school, cheering, each time they heard the drone approaching. "It was very exciting," UNICEF official Judith Sherman said. As drones quickly pick up momentum around the world in everything from military strikes to pizza delivery, Africa, the continent with some of the most entrenched humanitarian crises, hopes the technology will bring progress.

Today, we're one month away from election day, and the race for the presidency is closing in on the home stretch. Newsrooms around the country are buzzing with activity: interviews, fact checking, reporting and, of course, combing through huge quantities of videos and recordings of both candidates, hunting for that juicy soundbite that might change public opinion and the course of the election. Now you can search through it just like you would with text. You get taken to the exact time when those terms were mentioned during his speech. Click the red timeline markers to jump through the video to hear each audio clip.

Like many of the students around them, robots at Carnegie Mellon University are constantly learning -- learning how to think, how to move, and how to be more like humans. "It's sort of this wonderland of innovation," says 60 Minutes producer Nichole Marks in the video above. "Everywhere you go, every corner of the campus, there are robots -- robots in the hallways, robots picking things up, robots talking to you." Marks and correspondent Charlie Rose visited the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh while reporting their two-part story on artificial intelligence, or A.I., for this week's episode of 60 Minutes. What they found in the old steel town was a glimpse into the future, says Rose.

The following script is from "Artificial Intelligence," which aired on Oct. 9, 2016. Charlie Rose is the correspondent. The search to improve and eventually perfect artificial intelligence is driving the research labs of some of the most advanced and best-known American corporations. They are investing billions of dollars and many of their best scientific minds in pursuit of that goal. All that money and manpower has begun to pay off. In the past few years, artificial intelligence -- or A.I. -- has taken a big leap -- making important strides in areas like medicine and military technology. What was once in the realm of science fiction has become day-to-day reality. You'll find A.I. routinely in your smart phone, in your car, in your household appliances and it is on the verge of changing everything. On 60 Minutes Overtime, Charlie Rose explores the labs at Carnegie Mellon on the cutting edge of A.I. See robots learning to go where humans can'... It was, for decades, primitive technology.

You might not be campaigning to be America's next president, or have any desire to hold such a demanding office (bless you, Hillary), but wouldn't it still be nice to be treated like POTUS when you travel? Or, at least spend a few days in the presidential suite feeling like one of the world's most … Election jokes are i Saturday Night Live' /i s bread and butter, so it should come as no surprise that the cast took aim at Donald Trump's hot mic scandal. But host Lin-Manuel Miranda also got a chance to shine in his opening monologue. Below, we've rounded up the must-see moments from last night's /b … Humans may live longer and longer, but eventually we all grow old and die. This leads to a simple question: Is there an intrinsic maximum limit to human lifespan or not?

The CIA claims to be able to predict social unrest days before it happens thanks to powerful super computers dubbed Siren Servers by the father of Virtual Reality, Jaron Lanier. CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Andrew Hallman announced that the agency has beefed-up its "anticipatory intelligence" through the use of deep learning and machine learning servers that can process an incredible amount of data. "We have, in some instances, been able to improve our forecast to the point of being able to anticipate the development of social unrest and societal instability some I think as near as three to five days out," said Hallman on Tuesday at the Federal Tech event, Fedstival. This Minority Report-type technology has been viewed skeptically by policymakers as the data crunching hasn't been perfected, and if policy were to be enacted based on faulty data, the results could be disastrous. The CIA deputy director said that it was "much harder to convey confidence for the policymaker who may make an important decision from advanced analytics with deep learning algorithms."

I run a small web archive for about twenty thousand people. Being invited to speak at the Library of Congress is like being a kid who glues paper fins to a cardboard tube and then gets asked to talk to NASA about rocket propulsion. As every speaker has correctly said, it is a signal honor to be here. It also feels strange to be speaking in D.C., at the seat of government. In most of the talks I give, the U.S. government is an adversary. But today I am at a government institution that champions not just freedom, but the fundamental right to privacy, and the dignity that that entails. During the panic that followed September 11, Carla Hayden, then head of the American Library Association, took a principled stand against provisions in the Patriot Act that required librarians to reveal what their patrons were reading. She did it in the face of ridicule from Attorney General Ashcroft and the administration. And of course just a few days ago, she became our new Librarian of Congress. It saddens me that those provisions in the Patriot Act, which seemed so threatening and un-American at the time, look almost quaint today. And this time it's not the government, but the commercial Internet that has worked so hard to dismantle privacy.

Launched by digital health and weight-loss platform Lose It!, the new feature of an already existing app proposes a simple solution to those who struggle to keep track of their caloric intake: Take a photo of your food, and Snap It will immediately display its calorie count Showing people the caloric value of their foods before they eat them can help modify their eating habits. Some studies have shown that keeping a food journal helps people stick to their diet. And in an effort to fight rising obesity rates, the FDA announced in 2014 that chain restaurants throughout the U.S. will have to post calorie information in their menus (the rule is set to go into effect sometime next year). But the FDA rules won't apply to all restaurants. And food diets are cumbersome, tending to go the way of new year's resolutions.