Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by a society of mindful 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. Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer and MIT professor, died on Sunday in Boston. Dr. Minsky, an IEEE Life Fellow, made numerous seminal contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics, exploring, among other things, how a better understanding of human cognition could lead to advances in machine intelligence, and vice versa.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your AI-enhanced 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. A video went around last week of a kid in Russia being pulled along on a snowboard by a drone. The title of the vid is "first droneboarding," and here it is in all its underwhelming glory: Now, here's a much more exciting video (using a much bigger quadrotor), also posted last week: "EPFL scientists have invented a new soft gripper that uses electroadhesion: flexible electrode flaps that act like a thumb-index gripper. It can pick up fragile objects of arbitrary shape and stiffness, like an egg, a water balloon or paper."

Everybody knows that anthropomorphic robots that try to look and act like people are creepy. There's been a bunch of research into just what it is about such androids that we don't like (watch the video below to get an idea of what we're talking about), and many researchers think that we get uncomfortable when we begin to lose the ability to confidently distinguish between what's human and what's not. This is why zombies are often placed at the very bottom of the Uncanny Valley: in many respects, they directly straddle that line, which is why they freak us out so much. The tricky part about robots, however, is that they can manifest "human-ness" in ways that are more than just physical. When robots start acting like humans, as opposed to just looking like them, things can get much more complicated.

For the unlucky 3 percent of children diagnosed with scoliosis--a condition that causes an abnormal curve in the spine--treatment has traditionally meant spending years inside a rigid, plastic corrective brace. But researchers at Columbia's School of Engineering are hoping to replace this low-tech cast with a smart exoskeleton. Their prototype bends and moves with the patient's body, while still exerting targeted force on the affected areas of the spine. This could make it possible for a patient to get the benefits of bracing, even as she bends, twists and participates in a variety of activities. The brace comes with another big advantage: data.

In the 2015 film "Creed," aged boxing legend Rocky Balboa stares up at the sky in confusion after his young protege tells him a smartphone picture has been saved in the cloud. Rocky might feel even more befuddled if he heard about Microsoft's experiment in putting the cloud's computer servers under the sea. As crzay as it sounds, the underwater data center initiative, called Project Natick, could revolutionize the way companies Internet services such as streaming video, music, or games. Microsoft's first underwater test involved a car-sized capsule that weighs more than 17,236 kilograms and has a computing power equivalent to 300 desktop computers. That's tiny compared with existing data centers.

Last Friday, we posted a bunch of videos from the AAAI Video Competition. There are lots of good videos (really, they're all good), and we didn't want to play favorites or otherwise influence your votes, so we didn't add much in the way of commentary or anything like that. But it's been almost a week, and a few of those videos are certainly worth taking a closer look at. First, we have a video accompanying "Evolution of Collective Behaviors for a Real Swarm of Aquatic Surface Robots," by Miguel Duarte, Vasco Costa, Jorge Gomes, Tiago Rodrigues, Fernando Silva, Sancho Moura Oliveira, and Anders Lyhne Christensen, from the BioMachines Lab and Institute of Telecommunications, in Lisbon, Portugal. This video is fantastic because, among other reasons, I HAD THAT EXACT SAME PLAYMOBIL PIRATE SHIP WHEN I WAS A KID.

Scatterings of completed buildings, sporting new plantings of drought-tolerant grasses, are already occupied; other buildings are going up quickly, including a new fire station. There's Nissan's new Silicon Valley research center, a well-financed medical device startup called Spiracur, a digital cash startup called Quisk, and a biotech startup incubator. And there is Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab--my destination along this dusty road crowded with construction vehicles. It's good to spend time in a new research lab; there's not only fresh paint and hip decor--like living walls of plants--there are fresh, excited faces, and empty desks waiting to be filled. In mid-2014, I spent a morning on just the other side of nearby Moffett Field watching a far more somber group of researchers moving out of a suddenly closed division of Microsoft Research.

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. The DARPA Robotics Challenge this past summer showcased how far humanoid robots have come--but also how far they have yet to go before they can tackle real-world practical applications. Even the best of the DRC behemoths stumbled and fell down, proving, as IEEE Spectrum noted at the time, that "not walking is a big advantage." There is, in fact, a new not-walking way for robots to perform many kinds of tasks better and faster: the dexterous drone.

The U.S. highway safety agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has determined that a computer system can qualify as the legal driver of a car, Reuters reports. The opinion is expressed in a letter, dated 4 February, from NHTSA Chief Counsel Paul A. Hemmersbaugh to Chris Urmson, head of Google's self-driving car project. The letter, which appears on NHTSA's Web site, comes in response to Urmson's request three months earlier that the government allow for the possibility of a car that truly drives itself. "As a foundational starting point for the interpretations below, NHTSA will interpret'driver' in the context of Google's described motor vehicle design as referring to the SDS [self-driving system], and not to any of the vehicle occupants," Hemmersbaugh writes. "We agree with Google its [self-driving vehicle] will not have a'driver' in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than 100 years."

Last July, we wrote about a pair of papers from UC Berkeley that explored what happens when you put rigid shells on top of the skittery little legged robots that they've been working on over there for like a decade now. As it turned out, the shells offered some environmental protection, while also enabling the robots to autonomously negotiate obstacles that they'd have gotten stuck on otherwise. But real insects use their exoskeletons for much more, and by taking inspiration from that most noble of beasts, the mighty cockroach, UC Berkeley has developed a legged robot that can flatten itself out to slide through the narrowest of gaps. In a paper published in PNAS, Kaushik Jayaram (from Robert Full's lab at UC Berkeley) discusses how cockroaches are the ideal mix of firm outsides and soft, chewy insides. Their exoskeletons are flexible and segmented, allowing them to squish down to squeeze through narrow gaps, which explains why you probably have a whole bunch of them (or similar structured insects) living in your house RIGHT NOW despite your best efforts to keep them out.