An autonomous drone delivery network will deliver blood across Switzerland starting next month in a world first. The permanent network will see flying robot couriers shuttling blood and pathology samples between hospital labs and clinics. The drones will launch from stations that automatically replace the batteries and cargo, which is boxed by humans before flight and retrieved using a smartphone. Medical samples can be delivered to urban hospitals within 30 minutes, Matternet, the company behind the networks, claims. An autonomous drone delivery network will deliver blood across Switzerland starting next month in a world first.

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 two 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. This video shows some impressively robust autonomous rough-terrain locomotion from ANYmal, but it's mostly worth watching for the epic ANYmal back massage (!) at the end: We present an architecture for rough-terrain locomotion with quadrupedal robots. All sensing, state estimation, mapping, control, and planning runs in real-time onboard the robot.