The prosaically named Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project, a planned observatory to be built on Mauna Kea, the Big Island, in Hawaii, is huge in every way: a reported US 1.4 billion dollar budget, a giant mirror composed of 492 smaller mirror segments, and a goal of investigating not just the stars in our Milky Way but galaxies forming at the very edge of the observable universe. Though this project is backed by the governments of China, Japan, Canada, and India, as well as the United States, it may never be built. For its location is considered sacred by some Hawaiians, whose protests have been heard all the way to the State Supreme Court of Hawaii, which in December 2015 invalidated TMT's previously granted building permit. With the project suspended for over a year, involved scientist and construction companies can only keep their fingers crossed that the contested case will go their way. In the meantime, Mitsubishi Electric, which has developed the main structure of TMT, announced this week the completion of a prototype robot for a segmented-handling system (SHS) to install and replace the mirror segments.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your stigmergic Automaton bloggers. We're 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. "Academy Award -nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The Google Lunar XPRIZE is the largest prize competition of all time with a reward of 30 million and aims to incentivize entrepreneurs to create a new era of affordable access to the Moon and beyond, while inspiring the next generation of scientists, engineers, and explorers." "DARPA's Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) program seeks to provide innovative cross-pollination between fixed-wing and rotary-wing technologies and by developing and integrating novel subsystems to enable radical improvements in vertical and cruising flight capabilities.

Scientists at Duke University have demonstrated a wireless brain-machine interface (BMI) that allows monkeys to navigate a robotic wheelchair using their thoughts. This is the first long-term wireless BMI implant that has given high-quality signals to precisely control a wheelchair's movements in real time. "This is the first wireless brain-machine interface for whole-body locomotion," says Miguel Nicolelis, professor of neuroscience at Duke who led the work published in the journal Scientific Reports. "Even severely disabled patients who cannot move any part of their body could be placed on a wheelchair and be able to use this device for mobility." Nicolelis and his colleagues pioneered brain-machine interfaces in a 1999 study on rats.

It's coming, it's really coming, and it's going to be huuuuugggge! That was the message of the tech company executives keynoting the annual Open Compute Project Summit, held this week in San Jose, Calif. They were talking about data. More data than anybody--even in an era in which 300 hours of video is posted to YouTube every minute--has yet seen. They boasted that it is leading to a far more adaptable and efficient infrastracture than would have been possible in an era of proprietary systems.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your mysophobic 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. XDog is a small electric quadruped designed and built by Xing Wang, a graduate student at Shanghai University, with support from his adviser Jia Wenchuan. The robot has 12 motors (each leg has 3 DoF), and uses force sensors on each foot, IMU, and joint-angle sensors for control.

AlphaGo, a largely self-taught Go-playing AI, last night won the fifth and final game in a match held in Seoul, South Korea, against that country's Lee Sedol. Sedol is one of the greatest modern players of the ancient Chinese game. The final score was 4 games to 1. Thus falls the last and computationally hardest game that programmers have taken as a test of machine intelligence. Chess, AI's original touchstone, fell to the machines 19 years ago, but Go had been expected to last for many years to come. The sweeping victory means far more than the US 1 million prize, which Google's London-based acquisition, DeepMind, says it will give to charity.

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. What is AI and what is not AI is, to some extent, a matter of definition. There is no denying that AlphaGo, the Go-playing artificial intelligence designed by Google DeepMind that recently beat world champion Lee Sedol, and similar deep learning approaches have managed to solve quite hard computational problems in recent years. But is it going to get us to full AI, in the sense of an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, machine? Not quite, and here is why.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your starving 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. Domino's in New Zealand (or Australia, we're not sure) has developed this pizza-delivery robot and I can't tell if they're serious or not: The New Zealand government at least, is taking them seriously, according to Stuff.co.nz: Transport Minister Simon Bridges said Domino's had made contact "a few weeks ago" to inform the Government about DRU and see if New Zealand was interested in hosting trials.

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.

"This is one more incident that could have brought down an airliner, and it's completely unacceptable," she said in a statement. Operators also must keep their drones away from other aircraft and groups of people. The FAA has received at least 42 reports of drones flying unsafely near LAX, the nation's second-busiest airport, since April 2014, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis last fall of federal data released by Feinstein. The data shows nearly 200 pilot reports of close encounters involving drones in California alone during the past two years, the most of any state, according to the Times. In a 2014 letter to the FAA, Feinstein cited three instances in which drones flew dangerously close to passenger planes near major airports -- two on the same day in May of that year at New York City's LaGuardia Airport and LAX, and another at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York in March 2013.