The Animal-AI Olympics, which will begin this June, aims to "benchmark the current level of various AIs against different animal species using a range of established animal cognition tasks." At stake are bragging rights and US $10,000 in prizes. The project, a partnership between the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and GoodAI, a research institution based in Prague, is a new way to evaluate the progress of AI systems toward what researchers call artificial general intelligence. Such an assessment is necessary, the organizers say, because recent benchmarks are somewhat deceiving. While AI systems have bested human grandmasters in a host of challenging competitions, including the board game Go and the video game StarCraft, these matchups only proved that the AIs were astoundingly good at those particular games.

In 2014, IBM opened swanky new headquarters for its artificial intelligence division, known as IBM Watson. Inside the glassy tower in lower Manhattan, IBMers can bring prospective clients and visiting journalists into the "immersion room," which resembles a miniature planetarium. There, in the darkened space, visitors sit on swiveling stools while fancy graphics flash around the curved screens covering the walls. It's the closest you can get, IBMers sometimes say, to being inside Watson's electronic brain. One dazzling 2014 demonstration of Watson's brainpower showed off its potential to transform medicine using AI--a goal that IBM CEO Virginia Rometty often calls the company's moon shot. In the demo, Watson took a bizarre collection of patient symptoms and came up with a list of possible diagnoses, each annotated with Watson's confidence level and links to supporting medical literature. Within the comfortable confines of the dome, Watson never failed to impress: Its memory banks held knowledge of every rare disease, and its processors weren't susceptible to the kind of cognitive bias that can throw off doctors. It could crack a tough case in mere seconds. If Watson could bring that instant expertise to hospitals and clinics all around the world, it seemed possible that the AI could reduce diagnosis errors, optimize treatments, and even alleviate doctor shortages--not by replacing doctors but by helping them do their jobs faster and better.

If you haven't seen the latest Boston Dynamics video, released last week, it shows an upgraded version of the company's Handle robot moving boxes in a warehouse. Handle is a mobile manipulator that integrates both legs and wheels, and the new version features a swinging "tail" that serves as a counterweight and allows the robot to balance and move in a dynamic fashion--just as you'd expect from the company that created such nimble machines as Atlas, Spot, and BigDog. Boston Dynamics, which SoftBank bought from Google in 2017, is showing off Handle toiling in a warehouse for a reason: The company is officially entering the logistics market, with plans to offer robots for material-handling applications. As part of that strategy, it is announcing today the acquisition of Kinema Systems, a startup based in Menlo Park, Calif., that develops vision sensors and deep-learning software to enable industrial robot arms to locate and move boxes. Boston Dynamics founder and CEO Marc Raibert says the two Handle robots seen in the video aren't moving as fast as they could, and one of the factors limiting their performance is their vision systems.

The history of AI is often told as the story of machines getting smarter over time. What's lost is the human element in the narrative, how intelligent machines are designed, trained, and powered by human minds and bodies. In this six-part series, we explore that human history of AI--how innovators, thinkers, workers, and sometimes hucksters have created algorithms that can replicate human thought and behavior (or at least appear to). While it can be exciting to be swept up by the idea of super-intelligent computers that have no need for human input, the true history of smart machines shows that our AI is only as good as we are. In 1950, at the dawn of the digital age, Alan Turing published what was to be become his most well-known article, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in which he poses the question, "Can machines think?"

Conventional six-axis industrial robots typically run a series of cables along the outside of the robotic arm to control power consumption, movement and other dynamic functions. These cables are usually housed in a plastic or rubber tube or tied together using materials as rudimentary as rubber bands or duct tape. As the robotic arm twists, turns and bends, the cables themselves can get tied up in knots or even fray or snap from the force of the machine's movement. Automotive industry experts estimate that it takes an average of five hours to replace a standard corrugated hose at an estimated cost of $10,000 a minute to the manufacturer. This problem of keeping cable movement static while attached to a dynamic robotic device has been a vexing one for engineers -- but what if the cables could move with the robot, making the same twisting and bending motions without twisting and bending themselves?

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. NASA is sending a small helicopter to Mars in 2020, and it managed to get airborne in a simulated Martian atmosphere without crashing or exploding. I really want to get excited about this thing, and from a technology perspective, I am.

President Donald Trump and his top U.S. military adviser met with Google's CEO about concerns that Silicon Valley's AI collaborations in China may benefit the Chinese military. Such worries reflect awareness of how certain technologies developed for civilian purposes can also provide military advantages in the strategic competition playing out between the United States and China. The meeting comes after General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, leveled pointed criticism at Google for pursuing technological collaborations with Chinese partners, during his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on 14 March. The spotlight's glare on Google grew harsher when President Trump followed up on Twitter: "Google is helping China and their military, but not the U.S. Terrible!" But beyond the focus on Google, the Pentagon seems more broadly concerned about U.S. tech companies inadvertently giving China a leg up in developing AI applications with military and national security implications.

I am honestly not sure whether fish have any concept of bees. I am equally unsure whether bees have any concept of fish. I am even more unsure whether bees and fish could be friends, if they knew that the other existed. But thanks to robots, it turns out that the answer is definitely yes. The video really doesn't communicate a whole lot about what's going on here, but the central question is whether robots can usefully mediate communications between groups of very different animals in such a way that long distance interspecies collective behavior becomes possible. The answer appears to be yes, which isn't a total surprise: We've known for a while that robots can communicate with both bees and zebra fish, in the sense that the actions of a robot that mimics the behavior of an animal can, in turn, predictably and interactively alter the animals' behavior.

For a pilot, there really is no substitute for knowing what's in front of you. In a drone, that capability is known as detect and avoid, and so far, no drone has cleared the bar. Sabrewing, a startup in Camarillo, Calif., may well be the first to do it. It's working on a cargo-carrying drone that's due to begin test flights in 2020. "Even the military does it only in a kind of rudimentary way, say with a camera system; our system has to provide a way for the aircraft to autonomously avoid obstacles," says Ed De Reyes, the chief executive of Sabrewing.

As anyone who's ever tried to learn how to throw something properly can attest to, it takes a lot of practice to be able to get it right. Once you have it down, though, it makes you much more efficient at a variety of weird tasks: Want to pass an orange ball through a hoop that's inconveniently far off of the ground? Want to knock some small sticks placed on top of large sticks with a ball? Want to move a telephone pole in Scotland? Most humans, unfortunately, aren't talented enough for the skills we've developed at throwing things for strange reasons to translate well to everyday practical tasks.