Google made headlines earlier this month when it pulled out of the U.S. Defense Department's flagship artificial intelligence program known as Project Maven, which leverages sophisticated algorithms to analyze drone footage. Until then, the project had been so secretive that few people knew Google was involved -- not even the former executive chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet, who now sits on the Defense Department's Innovation Advisory Board -- let alone what it actually is. But Google's decision not to seek another contract for the AI project has thrust it into the spotlight as tech companies face a wave of protests over government contracts. "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war," more than 3,000 Google employees wrote in an April letter to company CEO Sundar Pichai that prompted the move. The growing resistance from Silicon Valley to working with the government, particularly the Pentagon, raises questions about the viability of Defense Secretary James Mattis's ambitious plans to leverage cutting-edge commercial technology for military purposes.

Every day in Australia, 30 people are rescued from drowning. And saving lives is about to get easier. Later this year, during the Southern Hemisphere summer, drones will be used to help rescue stranded swimmers and to spot sharks that might be getting a little too close for comfort.

Google will not seek to extend its contract next year with the Defense Department for artificial intelligence used to analyze drone video, squashing a controversial alliance that had raised alarms over the technological buildup between Silicon Valley and the military. The tech giant will stop working on its piece of the military's AI endeavor known as Project Maven when its 18-month contract expires in March, a person familiar with Google's thinking told The Washington Post. Diane Greene, the chief executive of Google's cloud-computing business, told employees of the decision at an internal meeting Friday, first reported by Gizmodo. Google, which declined to comment, has faced widespread public backlash and employee resignations for helping develop technological tools that could aid in warfighting. The person said Google will soon release new company principles related to the ethical uses of AI.

Automated surveillance is going to become increasingly common as companies and researchers find new ways to use machine learning to analyze live video footage. A new project from scientists in the UK and India shows one possible use for this technology: identifying violent behavior in crowds with the help of camera-equipped drones. In a paper titled "Eye in the Sky," the researchers describe their system. It uses a simple Parrot AR quadcopter (which costs around $200) to transmit video footage over a mobile internet connection for real-time analysis. An algorithm trained using deep learning estimates the poses of humans in the video and matches them to postures the researchers have designated as "violent."

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 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. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these same properties in order to create resilient machines. The nature of soft materials, however, presents considerable challenges to aspects of design, construction, and control -- and up until now, the vast majority of gaits for soft robots have been hand-designed through empirical trial-and-error.

Kamikaze drones fired from bazooka-like launchers are helping the US military hunt down and destroy lethal enemy drones with deadly precision. The interceptor craft crash into drones to take them down mid-flight and may even carry an explosive charge to bolster their destructive power. They form part of a new weapon system presented at the Pentagon earlier this month that deals specifically with the threat of attacks using shop-bought drones. The system, which can be mounted to an off-road vehicle, also features advanced radar technology and a computer-powered machine-gun. Kamikaze drones fired from bazooka-like launchers could help the US military hunt down and destroy enemy drones.

A curious robot is heading to the ISS aboard the next SpaceX resupply mission. It's shaped like a ball with a flattened surface where its face is drawn on a screen -- plus, it can speak, respond to spoken commands and fly. The machine called CIMON, which is short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, is pretty much a flying IBM-developed brain with a body and flight mechanism created by Airbus. It's the companies' joint project with the German Aerospace Center and was created to be a hands-free assistant that can make astronauts' tasks easier. It was designed to display repair instructions on screen with just a voice command to keep an astronaut's hands free to fix what needs to be fixed, for instance.

How comfortable are we leaving life and death decisions up to robots? While machines can crunch all the data, they must be programmed by humans to use that data. That means we as humans need to grapple with these scenarios to instruct machines on how to make decisions regarding life and death matters. From autonomous cars to drones deciding what targets to hit to robotic doctors, we're at the point where many are contemplating the life and death decisions AI robots will have to make. At first, the decisions we imagine machines needing to make don't seem that troubling.

The Air Force is advancing plans to retire its Predator drone by transitioning pilots to the larger Reaper drone – and widening the mission scope of Reapers to include more weapons integration, attack options and ISR possibilities. The retirement and transition from the Predator to expanded Reaper use will finish by the end of this year, Air Force officials said. "The MQ-1 Predator paved the way through 24 years of service and adaptation leading to expanded capabilities of the MQ-9 Reaper. The mission set doesn't change. The capabilities to fulfill those multi-role missions are expanded by the MQ-9 Reaper," Maj.

The US is going to start taking rogue drones out of the air… by launching its own drones to smash into them. Attacks using consumer drones are on the rise. In 2017, ISIS forces in Mosul attacked US-backed Iraqi troops with dozens of consumer drones dropping grenades, and earlier this year a swarm of small drones attacked a Russian airbase in Syria. Such attacks are difficult to counter with existing weapons.