The current pandemic has made us befriend one technology which is often considered as our intellectual rival: robots. We have read several accounts of how robots have been resourceful in helping us fight the harrowing effects of COVID, like assisting us in our mission to find a cure drug and even sanitize public spaces. However, the crisis has also shown that robots can be our emotional support too. The scientists from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, have programmed robots to address the instances of loneliness caused due to social distancing and isolation that have become new normal and mandatory due to COVID. This is not the first time that researchers around the world have been experimenting with emotional AI for the greater good of humans.

Kids are not well known for their conflict resolution skills. That's part of being a kid, I guess, but they've got to learn these skills at some point, or they turn into teens without conflict resolution skills. And then you end up with adults that only know how to solve problems by throwing tantrums of one sort or another: We've all met people like that. It would be great if there was a way to teach children how to handle disagreements equitably, and there is: It's called teachers (or adults in general). But having adults around all the time gets expensive.

On a Friday morning nine (!) years ago, I published a post with just one video and one line of text on BotJunkie.com, That was the beginning of Video Friday. As more and more robot video content started showing up over the years, Video Friday turned into a way to keep you updated on everything that happened all week in one efficient (and hopefully entertaining) post. At one point Video Friday grew to include something like 30 videos (if we've crashed your browser, we're very sorry!). We've now toned it down to around 20 videos by being slightly more selective.

Developments in mechanical control and complex motion planning have enabled robots to become almost commonplace in situations requiring precise but menial, tedious, and repetitive tasks. Recent robotics research has targeted the mechanical and computational challenges inherent in performing a much broader range of tasks autonomously. These problems are less well-defined, requiring greater intelligence, commonsense reasoning, and oftentimes novel solutions. By most definitions, creativity (the generation of novel and useful ideas) is necessary for intelligence; thus research efforts focusing on robotics and creativity are also efforts toward artificial intelligence. As robots and computer physical systems become more capable, they are increasingly useful in the study of creativity itself.