I feel sorry for Tom Cruise. The next Top Gun movie will probably star an Apple chip designer and a ... [ ] team of LISP programmers. In August this year, eight teams gathered for the three-day final of DARPA's AlphaDogfight trials. The teams had developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) pilots to control F-16 fighter aircraft in simulated dogfights. The winner beat the human USAF pilot in five dogfights out of five.

A robot pilot is learning to fly. It has passed its pilot's test and flown its first plane, but it has also had its first mishap too. Unlike a traditional autopilot, the ROBOpilot Unmanned Aircraft Conversion System literally takes the controls, pressing on foot pedals and handling the yoke using robotic arms. It reads the dials and meters with a computer vision system. The robot can take off, follow a flight plan and land without human intervention. ROBOpilot is a drop-in system meaning that the pilot's seat is removed and replaced with the robot.

In the future, you could fly a plane piloted by robots. The US military invented a robot arm that can fly commercial airplanes using AI. The robot pilot was developed by engineers at DARPA, the Pentagon's research unit. Last year, the robot flew and landed a simulated 737 and has successfully flown an array of small planes. The combination of machine learning with the robotic arm means the robot can act much more like a human pilot than existing autopilot software.

A new video shows an autonomous'robot pilot' successfully flying and landing a Boeing 737 in a simulator. The creepy robotic arm shifts around the cockpit as it rhythmically changes the air speed, adjusts the wing flaps and fires up the thrusters in preparation for landing. The project has been masterminded by the US Department of Defence's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). The successful test takes the technology one step closer to transforming military planes and helicopters into autonomous flying machines. But the Alias robot goes a step further. For example, an array of cameras allows the robot to see all the cockpit instruments and read the gauges.

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. As part of DARPA's ALIAS program, this robot arm was able to help land a Boeing 737 in a simulator: The only reason this works at all is because of how heavily automated the aircraft already is. It makes me wonder what the point of the robot arm is at all: Why not just build this stuff into the existing autopilot already, you know?

Think of it as the airborne cousin to the self-driving car: a robot in the cockpit to help human pilots fly passengers and cargo -- and eventually even replace them. The government and industry are collaborating on a program that seeks to replace the second human pilot in two-person flight crews with a robot co-pilot that never tires, gets bored, feels stressed out or gets distracted. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's arm for development of emerging technologies, and run by Aurora Flight Sciences, a private contractor. With both the military and airlines struggling with shortages of trained pilots, officials say they see an advantage to reducing the number of pilots required to fly large aircraft while at the same time increasing safety and efficiency by having a robot pick up the mundane tasks of flying. The idea is to have the robot free the human pilot, especially in emergencies and demanding situations, to think strategically.

MANASSAS, VIRGINIA – Think of it as the airborne cousin to the self-driving car: a robot in the cockpit to help human pilots fly passengers and cargo -- and eventually even replace them. The government and industry are collaborating on a program that seeks to replace the second human pilot in two-person flight crews with a robot co-pilot that never tires, gets bored, feels stressed out or gets distracted. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's arm for development of emerging technologies, and run by Aurora Flight Sciences, a private contractor. With both the military and airlines struggling with shortages of trained pilots, officials say they see an advantage to reducing the number of pilots required to fly large aircraft while at the same time increasing safety and efficiency by having a robot pick up the mundane tasks of flying. The idea is to have the robot free the human pilot, especially in emergencies and demanding situations, to think strategically.