About 4,000 companies - many of them start-ups - are arriving in town this weekend. Over the coming days, they will reveal new products, secure orders and hopefully provide a taste of the future at the trade fair. The event has its roots in consumer gadgets, but now sprawls into fields including artificial intelligence, automobiles, medicine, marketing and even agriculture. Most of the big technology brands in attendance will have something new to brag about. But increasingly, they hold flagship products back for stand-alone events.

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. You won't want to miss the 2028 Pan-Asian Deep Learning Conference in Kuala Lumpur: Call me a hater if you want, but at least for now, pretty sure that's fake. What's funny, though, is that those first five demos are straight out of the standardized humanoid robot demo handbook (which doesn't exist).

The Pentagon has launched a new competition for the design of laser-powered drones inspired by bats and insects. In an announcement this week, the Department of Defense revealed its new DESI pilot program is seeking proposals for a number of topics that currently stand as'defense challenges,' including highly maneuverable drones. The competition aims to pave the way for autonomous craft that can operate more efficiently with little intervention from a human pilot, and make swift decisions to change direction and avoid obstacles. Over the last decade, researchers have increasingly been working to mimic natural processes in robotic systems to improve efficiency, like Caltech's BatBot (pictured). High-tech weapons that the Secret Service is not trained to cope with pose a'grave threat' to the White House, a former agent has warned.

This story is part of our multi-part series looking at some of the big stories and bright ideas primed to make headlines in 2018. Moore's Law describes the exponential technological progress of computer chips. For the past 50 years, every 18 to 24 months, they have shrunk by about half in both size and cost. This enabled the creation of personal computers and cellphones--two devices that have become ubiquitous, which was unfathomable to the average person just 30 years ago. Rapid progress is being made in many fields, including robotics and artificial intelligence.

May I be the first to wish you a Happy New Year? For me anyway, 2017 seemed to fly by in the blink of an eye. I almost can't believe it's late December and we are about to put this one into the books. The pending start of a new year means that it's prediction season once again, where pundits and columnists make their calls about what they expect to see in the coming year. And unlike most others, I actually go back over my work and fact check everything at the end of each year, so I need to be careful with my predictions.

A young boy's outing in the waters of the Bahamas took on an unexpected thrill in December, as he was unknowingly surrounded by a school of sharks. Footage of the incident was captured by a drone, whose pilot was able to warn the boy in time for him to get out of the water and avoid anything dangerous happening, Inside Edition reported. In the video, we see an unidentified young boy jump into the shallow waters of a beach in the Bahamas before a school of four sharks appear to converge on him. According to Inside Edition, Tkachenko yelled at the boy to run, which adequately alerted the child and caused him to get out of the water. The sharks harmlessly swim away after that.

GoPro is laying off about 200 to 300 employees, largely from its Karma drone division, TechCrunch has reported. The company has informed the employees, who will remain on payroll for another six weeks, and will make a public announcement sometime soon. GoPro had already laid off around 270 people earlier this year, in part because of increasing competition in the action camera industry, and in part because of the disastrous launch of its Karma drone. GoPro was originally developing a drone with DJI, but elected to go it alone to develop the Karma. Shortly after it was released, however, buyers reported that it was dropping out of the sky, reportedly because its batteries were disconnecting. It also faced competition from DJI's Mavic Pro drone, which had features that the Karma lacked on release like a "follow me" mode.

While companies like Amazon pour considerable resources into finding ways of using drones to deliver such things as shoes and dog treats, Zipline has been saving lives in Rwanda since October 2016 with drones that deliver blood. Zipline's autonomous fixed-wing drones now form an integral part of Rwanda's medical-supply infrastructure, transporting blood products from a central distribution center to hospitals across the country. And in 2018, Zipline's East African operations will expand to include Tanzania, a much larger country. Delivering critical medical supplies in this region typically involves someone spending hours (or even days) driving a cooler full of life-saving medicine or blood along windy dirt roads. Such deliveries can become dangerous or even impossible to make if roads and bridges get washed out.

U.S. drone sales in 2017 topped $1 billion for the first time ever, but don't raise a glass too quickly if you're in New Jersey, where lawmakers on Thursday are poised to outlaw drunken droning. It is one of a wave of U.S. states moving to bring the unmanned aircrafts' high-flying fun back to earth. New Jersey's Assembly on Thursday is slated to vote on a Senate-approved bill to ban inebriated or drugged droning, as well as outlaw flying unmanned aircraft systems over prisons and in pursuit of wildlife. The bill would impose a punishment of up to six months prison and a $1,000 fine for'drunk droning'. New statistics set for release next week show 3.1 million drones were sold in the United States last year, up 28 percent from 2016, said Richard Kowalski, manager for Consumer Technology Association.

Some application domains highlight the importance of distributed continual planning concepts; coordinating teams of unmanned ground vehicles in dynamic environments is an example of such a domain. In this article, I illustrate the ideas in, and promises of, distributed continual planning by showing how acquiring and distributing operator intent among multiple semiautonomous vehicles supports ongoing, cooperative mission elaboration and revision. It is this longer-term view that motivates the use of planning such that an agent should decide between alternative anticipated sequences of activities; otherwise, the application might be better served with simpler reactive agents that only decide on their very next actions. Second, what the agent knows about the application domain, or what the agent's objectives are, or both, can change over time. Information about the domain could be revealed incrementally or could dynamically change in ways outside the agent's control, and thus, the agent should continually reevaluate its ongoing plans and revise or elaborate them to accommodate the changes.