Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your soft-bodied 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. He is currently a visiting researcher in the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Lab (Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, USA) under the supervision of Prof. Josh Bongard. He wrote in to share some of his latest publications and videos, and it's fascinating.

Airships, which are distinct from blimps by being much more rigid and sounding much less silly, are one of those unusual technologies that has been undergoing a resurgence recently after falling out of favor half a century ago. Airships have potential to be a very practical and cost effective way to move massive amounts of stuff from one place to another place, especially if the another place is low on infrastructure and has a reasonable amount of patience. Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works has been developing a particular kind of airship called a hybrid airship, which uses a combination of aerodynamics and lifting gas to get airborne, for the last decade or so. The P-791 technology demonstrator first flew in 2006, and a company called Hybrid Enterprises is taking Lockheed's airship technology to commercialization. Their LMH-1 will be able to carry over 20,000 kilograms of whatever you want, along with 19 passengers, up to 2,500 kilometers, and it's going to be a real thing: Hybrid Airships recently closed a US 480 million contract to built 12 of them for cargo delivery.

Creating a successful robot company based around providing commercial services is not easy, although as of just the last few years, advances in robotics technology has at least made it possible. Companies like Savioke have shown that robotics has reached a point where autonomous platforms can operate in semi-structured environments, doing useful tasks reliably and cost effectively enough to make a compelling business case. Luvozo, a startup founded in 2013 and based in College Park, Md., is bringing autonomous robots to semi-structured environments with an enormous amount of potential: skilled nursing facilities for seniors. They're introducing a "robot concierge" called SAM, designed to "provide frequent check-ins and non-medical care for residents in long-term care settings" through autonomous navigation, telepresence, and an innovative fall hazard detection system. The potential market here is enormous, and to find out more, we stopped by Luvozo and spoke with CEO and co-founder David Pietrocola.

Every chance we get, we post videos highlighting the adventures of MARLO, the University of Michigan's blissfully unaware bipedal robot. MARLO is totally "blind," without cameras, lidar, or anything else to show it where it's going. But the robot is still able to walk dynamically over a range of terrain that I think would be appropriate to call staggering. Varied terrain does indeed stagger MARLO on a regular basis, and it's probably fallen over more times on video than any robot we've ever seen. Professor Jessy Grizzle and his students have been challenging MARLO with increasingly difficult terrain, most recently at a location on the beautiful Ann Arbor campus called the "Wave Field," an "earth sculpture" created by artist Maya Lin.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the authors and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Light detection and ranging, or lidar, is a sensing technology based on laser light. It's similar to radar, but can have a higher resolution, since the wavelength of light is about 100,000 times smaller than radio wavelengths. For robots, this is very important: Since radar cannot accurately image small features, a robot equipped with only a radar module would have a hard time grasping a complex object.

Scientists and engineers led by Duke University neuroscientist Miguel A. Nicolelis report that a group of spinal-cord-injury patients who trained to walk using a brain computer interface (BCI) in combination with an Occulus Rift virtual reality device and with a robotic exoskeleton have regained the ability to voluntarily move their leg muscles and to feel touch and pain in their paralyzed limbs. The study, the results of 12 months of training, is the first long-term BCI experiment to show significant recovery from such severe injuries, the researchers say. The researchers reported their results today in the journal Scientific Reports. A non-invasive electroencephelogram-based brain computer interface was central to the therapies. During the virtual reality excercises, patients were told to imagine walking through a virtual scene.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your baby-loving 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. We got a teaser about the Omnicopter during Raff D'Andrea's most recent TED Talk, but this dedicated video shows it off much better: Like all the coolest robots, the things it can do look like CGI, right? On July 27, 2016, Michigan-based Vayu, Inc., in collaboration with the Stony Brook University Global Health Institute completed the first ever series of long-range, fully autonomous drone delivery flights with blood and stool samples, setting records in the process.

Hello my AI enthusiasts, I heard a lot about Deep learning, machine learning,... in the news. I already have some programming skills (mostly Java, Python tho) and I guess I am not a complete newb to tech and the interwebs. Anyway, you all know that there is one problem with all the information on the Internet: There is too much of them. And that's why I ask you. Is there a guide / tutorial to machine learning?

Plenty of people still like to read their comics on paper, but increasingly, phones and tablets are the devices of choice for keeping up with the Justice League. Last year, Google introduced a new reading experience for comics in its Play Books store for Android that makes it easier to follow along with the story. Today, the company is launching yet another update to the comics reading experience -- this time with a focus on making the speech bubbles in comics more readable on small devices. As Google's Head of Product for Play Books Greg Hartrell told me, the team looked at the feedback it got from the last update. While readers liked the new reading experience, they complained that it was still too hard to read the text on a small screen.

Just a few short years ago, artificial intelligence was seen as nothing more than a villain in sci-fi movies. This revolutionary technology was used to insist that innovating too fast can lead to a future of robot overlords and murderous machines. From Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Skynet in Terminator, artificial intelligence was in need of a good public relations person to change it's image. Fortunately, the tech community has been happy to oblige and AI technology has taken off like a self-landing rocket. According to data from CB Insights, investments in artificial intelligence have been through the roof in recent years. While investments hovered around 700 million in 2013, they have reached astronomical levels at nearly 2.4 billion in just a few short years.