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. We were at the 2018 Human Robot Interaction conference all this week, and on Wednesday, there was a special video session. The audience, who was provided with popcorn, voted by applause, and here are the top three videos.

And then there's Facebook's self-taught chatbots, which fall on a slightly different scale of self-taught abilities. The two A.I. agents, Bob and Alice, started out speaking in English but then...developed their own language to speak in. "Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves," said Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook A.I. Research, in an interview with FastCo Design. While this got a lot of blowback in the press ("creepy" was a common headline descriptor), it's actually a fairly common occurrence. A.I. systems evolve using a rewards-based system, and if there's no benefit from a particular course of action, they'll try something else instead.