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. Humanoid robots spend a lot of time failing at not falling over. Humans are slightly better, because we cheat, by bracing ourselves against things when our balance starts to go wonky.

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 wrote about HAMR back in February, and it's now grown some cute lil' footpads that allow it to walk on water, and also sink (on purpose). In nature, cockroaches can survive underwater for up to 30 minutes.

A team of British engineers are building lifelike robots that can dance, talk in several languages and even scare London pub-goers. Engineering Arts is developing the automatons in a sleepy Cornish seaside town. Photos taken at the firm's factory reveal the inner-workings of how the company combines prosthetics, robotics and artistry. A team of British engineers are building lifelike robots that can dance, talk in several languages and even scare London pub-goers. This robot, described as'indistinguishable from humans', was created as part of a stunt to promote TV Series Westworld Founded in 2004, the company operating from an industrial unit in Penryn, near Falmouth, is a world leader in life sized commercially available humanoid robots.

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. PAL Robotics' StockBot and I share the same holiday party strategy: Find a corner to stand in, and slowly rotate. At the Autonomous Systems Lab, the Robotic Systems Lab, and the Vision for Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich, sometimes robots do everything to fulfill a child's dream, even if that dream is of some freaky unicorn monster thing.

Note: All TEDx Truro photos courtesy of Verity Westcott. Earlier in the year, our director Will Jackson was approached by TEDx Truro. For those who don't know, TED's philosophy is to present engaging and intelligent talks from leaders in their respective fields, for approx 15 minutes. When approached, we were (and still are) elbow-deep in our busiest year ever. Even taking a day to go and do a talk in Truro (10 miles drive) for Will was a very big ask.

When science fiction critics Eric S. Rabkin and Robert E. Scholes argued in the 1970s that "no one would go through the trouble of building and maintaining a robot to hand wash clothes or pick up the telephone receiver," they were apparently unaware that Japanese researchers had already made a long-term commitment to develop humanoid robots that could do exactly that. The goal was to care for the elderly in the 21st century. To this end, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, industrial giants Honda, Mitsubishi, and Toyota, as well as university research labs around the world, began demonstrating humanoid prototypes. More recently, the desire to operate in disaster sites like Fukushima has motivated even more researchers to explore humanoid designs. But the dream of humanoid robots goes back much further than the 1970s.

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. I don't know much about this powered partial exoskeleton called KOMA, except that the company behind it (ATOUN, from Japan) says that it's designed to help you carry very heavy objects in a way that won't interfere with your natural movements. Jiří Zemánek and Martin Gurtner from the Czech Technical University in Prague won first place in the IEEE CSS video contest (awarded at the IEEE CCTA 2017 conference) for their video demonstrating numerical optimal control on a "flying ball in a hoop" system: The IEEE CCTA Conference, incidentally, was held on the Kohala Coast in Hawaii, where as far as I know we have not had a major robotics conference recently.

In a poignant play traveling throughout the UK, a robot is co-star and companion to the wife of the (now deceased) robot builder, with the wife developing early Alzheimer's. The play explores very human themes about love, death, and disease, all handled extremely sensitively with RoboThespian playing a large role. All of his life he builds robots, but he develops degenerative illness in mid-life and realizes he's not going to live to remain a companion to his wife. His wife, by now, is developing early Alzheimer's, so he builds his final creation, his final robot to be a companion to his wife." The robot is from Engineered Arts, a 12-year-old UK company that develops an ever expanding range of humanoid and semi-humanoid robots featuring natural human-like movement and advanced social behaviours. RoboThespian, Socibot and Byrun are their most prominent robot creations. "We have pre-programmed every single thing the robot says and every single thing the robot does -- all the moves.

When Judy Norman walks on stage for the play'Spillikin', she performs beside a somewhat different cast member - a humanoid robot. The robot can talk, make facial expressions, blink its eyes, move its hand and turn its head. It has even been described as'affectionate' by leading lady Norman, who works closely with the robot throughout the performance. When Judy Norman (right) walks on stage for the play'Spillikin', she performs beside a somewhat different cast member - a humanoid robot (left). RoboThespian is the creation of Cornish engineer Will Jackson who had an idea to develop an artistic robot that could react with its audiences. Six years ago he embarked on a project to create a robot that would save tour guides from tediously repeating the same script each day.