Most of the world's robots are about as charismatic as a coffeemaker. Nexi is baby-faced and blue-eyed, and Leonardo has been described variously as a squirrel, a furry alien, and a giant Furby. After years of making emotionally engaging machines with her students at the MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group, Breazeal thinks the time has finally come for a personal robot to inhabit our homes and help us live our lives. To pursue that goal, she founded Jibo, a Boston startup that has raised US 38.6 million to produce a friendly robo-assistant to families. Equipped with cameras and microphones, the robot, also called Jibo, is a little taller than a toaster and shaped like a desk fan.

UPDATED 12/23/15: More robot holiday videos added! This week, we've collected a whole bunch of holiday-themed robot videos from around the Internet. If we missed yours, send it to us, or post a comment and we'll add it. We're going to take some time off over the next week, but we'll be back in force with January, with in-depth coverage of whatever robots happen to show up at the Consumer Electronics Show, which kicks off the first week of 2016. We'll also take a look back at 2015, and let you know what our plans are for the next year.

Toyota revealed more details about its ambitious AI and robotics effort yesterday at CES in Las Vegas. Dr. Gill Pratt, who leads the effort as CEO of the newly formed Toyota Research Institute (TRI), announced an impressive line-up of engineers and executives to head its technical leadership team and advisory board. Among the hires is James Kuffner, who until recently led Google's robotics program and will focus on cloud computing at TRI. The advisers include notable technologists like Rodney Brooks from Rethink Robotics and Marc Benioff from Salesforce. Late last year, Toyota unveiled a US 1 billion program to advance AI and robotics, hoping to make cars safer and smarter, and also develop useful, reliable home robots to assist people.

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. Science fiction authors love the robot sidekick. R2-D2, Commander Data, and KITT--just to name a few--defined "Star Wars," "Star Trek," and "Knight Rider," respectively, just as much as their human actors. While science has brought us many of the inventions dreamed of in sci-fi shows, one major human activity has remained low tech and a huge source of frustration: household chores.

Last week was a holiday, and we're at CES this week, but nothing can stop the robot videos. Things should be back to normal around here next week (we hope). Let us know if you have videos or events to suggest, and enjoy today's Video Friday selection! Teaching robots how to avoid destruction and despise humanity at the same time is never a good idea. The world's most advanced bat robot now has membrane wings, just like real bats: A microprocessor-based onboard computer, a 6 DOF IMU sensor package, five DC motors with encoder feedback for flapping and wing articulation (asymmetric wing folding and leg/tail control), power/comm electronics, carbon-fiber frame, 3D printed parts, and silicone based membrane wings -- all at 92 grams.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your weaponized 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. Intel's 100-drone performance was quite a spectacle: It's worth clicking through to Intel's page on this to see all the pretty pictures. To navigate snowy roads, Ford autonomous vehicles are equipped with high-resolution 3D maps – complete with information about the road and what's above it, including road markings, signs, geography, landmarks and topography.

It is the year 2023, and for the first time, a self-driving car navigating city streets strikes and kills a pedestrian. A lawsuit is sure to follow. But exactly what laws will apply? Today, the law is scrambling to keep up with the technology, which is moving forward at a breakneck pace, thanks to efforts by Apple, Audi, BMW, Ford [pdf], General Motors, Google, Honda, Mercedes, Nissan, Nvidia, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen. Google's prototype self-driving cars, with test drivers always ready to take control, are already on city streets in Mountain View, Calif., and Austin, Texas. In the second half of 2015, Tesla Motors began allowing owners (not just test drivers) to switch on its Autopilot mode.

On tap at the brewpub. A nice dark red color with a nice head that left a lot of lace on the glass. Aroma is of raspberries and chocolate. Not much depth to speak of despite consisting of raspberries. The bourbon is pretty subtle as well. I really don't know that find a flavor this beer tastes like. I would prefer a little more carbonization to come through. It's pretty drinkable, but I wouldn't mind if this beer was available.

Neural networks learn to recognize objects in images and perform other artificial intelligence tasks with a very low error rate. But they're typically too complex to run on a smartphone, where, you have to admit, they'd be pretty useful. At the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, MIT engineers presented a chip designed to use run sophisticated image-processing neural network software on a smartphone's power budget. The great performance of neural networks doesn't come free. In image processing, for example, neural networks like AlexNet work so well because they put an image through a huge number of filters, first finding image edges, then identifying objects, then figuring out what's happening in a scene.

Do you have any idea how much time and money it would take to even figure out how much time and money it would take to buy a robot and get it to do what you want it to do? I don't, because I don't have that kind of time or money, and unless you're at a major research institution, taxpayer-funded government agency, or multinational corporation, you probably don't either. The reality of robotics may be expensive and messy, but in simulation, everything is fast(ish) and easy(ish) and comes with both "reset" and "undo" buttons that don't cost anything to push. One of the best robotics simulators named after a polygonal garden structure just got a major update that adds a bunch of new features and makes it even more user friendly. Friendly Graphical Model Editor: Instead of trying to get your robot model into Gazebo by typing in numbers and stuff into an XML file, you can now use a graphical ("normal person") system instead.