People have been exploring the Earth since ancient times--traversing deserts, climbing mountains, and trekking through forests. But there is one ecological realm that hasn't yet been well explored: the oceans. To date, just 5 percent of Earth's oceans have been seen by human eyes or by human-controlled robots.

Cassie is an advanced legged mobility robot. Created by Oregon State University spin-off, Agility Robotics, Cassie's engineering team has big plans for this robot to assist rescuers in disaster relief and go the extra mile when delivering packages right to our doors, potentially helping to revolutionise the retail market. If bipedal robots are not especially efficient why do we keep trying to build them? Simply put, these types of robots are useful in navigating around in human-created environments. Just watching the, albeit, slightly hilarious, compilation video from the DARPA competition makes you realise that creating efficient mobility in robotics is incredibly difficult; indeed, it's nowhere near good enough.

Waymo, set up by Google owner Alphabet, is taking legal action against Otto, Uber's self-driving vehicle unit that it bought last year for $700m. The lawsuit argues that former Waymo manager Anthony Levandowski took information when he left to co-found a venture that became Otto.

Dogtooth Technologies, a start-up company based near Cambridge, is developing autonomous robots designed to harvest soft fruits such as strawberries. The company tested its first prototype robot in the field in the summer of 2016, and is already working on an improved version. Five of these second generation robots are due to be operating on a farm this summer.

Robotics undoubtedly has the potential to improve lives in the developing world. However, with limited budgets and expertise on the ground, putting this technology in place is no small task. Step forwards WeRobotics, a new Swiss/American NGO dedicated to meeting this goal through the creation of in-country'flying labs'. Co-founder Adam Klaptocz explains all. Let's start with this: what is WeRobotics?

Drones are emerging as one of the asymmetrical threats in the battle for Mosul. A series of Islamic State drone attacks on Iraqi forces fighting to retake the northern Iraqi city have resulted in casualties and a heightened state of alert as ISIS fighters supplement deadly car-bomb attacks with harassing drone strikes using off-the-shelf quad-copters rigged to drop munitions.

Humans and other vertebrates run fastest by minimising their contact with the ground. But the same isn't true of six-limbed insects, which run fastest when they have three legs on the ground at once, like a tripod.

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is a collection of short stories by American writer Raymond Carver. In his collection, he doesn't provide a direct definition of love but instead lets the perception of the nature of love form in the minds of the reader through narrating a series of short stories. This idea of perception leads me to my point. In my previous post, I highlighted the widespread reproducibility issues still haunting robotics research. These issues need to be fixed if we want to talk about Robotics as a science.

Telecommunications firm Verizon has acquired Skyward, a drone operations management company. Skyward develops software for drone operators to manage flight tracking and logging, maintenance scheduling, and contract management. The drone startup will join Verizon's Internet of Things portfolio. Kenya's government has implemented regulations for commercial drone use. The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority will begin allowing businesses to import and use drones for a range of operations.

Ocado, the world's largest online-only supermarket, has been evaluating the feasibility of robotic picking and packing of shopping orders in its highly-automated warehouses through the SoMa project, a Horizon 2020 framework programme for research and innovation funded by the European Union. One of the main challenges of robotic manipulation has been the handling of easily damageable and unpredictably shaped objects such as fruit and vegetable groceries. These products have unique shapes and should be handled in a way that does not cause damage or bruising. To avoid damaging sensitive items, the project uses a compliant gripper (i.e. one that possesses spring-like properties) in conjunction with an industrial robot arm. The variation in shape of the target objects imposes another set of constraints on the design of a suitable gripper.