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. Don't panic, but Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro has a new very (but not completely) lifelike robot child, which is supposed to be around 10 years old. Okay, panic if you want to.

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. Since its epic landing on Mars in 2012, rappelling down to the surface like a robot commando, the Curiosity Mars rover has been one of our favorite robots of all time, and space. Not only it's an impressive piece of engineering, it's also an amazing exploration tool to help humanity answer questions we've been asking ourselves for a very long time, including: Are we alone?

Engineers at Lockheed Martin's research lab took inspiration from maple seeds that whirl through the air as they drop. The Samarai Flyer weighs less than half a pound and is 16 inches long -- ideal for stuffing in a backpack and launching by hand. It can take off from the ground with its mini-spy camera or possibly an armament package. It's mechanically simple with only two moving parts, and was built using 3-D printing technology for its maiden public flight in August. Bill Borgia, leader of Lockheed Martin's intelligent robotics laboratory, says the camera spins at the same rate as the body, but special stop-motion video software cancels out the rotation and allows the operator to get a steady stream of images. "You could take this out of your backpack, throw it like a boomerang and see around a corner of a building or over outside a window and see if there are any bad guys inside," Borgia said.

If you want a vision of what naval battles could look like in the near future, you just got it. DARPA has tested a parasailing radar array (part of its Towed Airborne Lift of Naval Systems project, or TALONS) using its robotic ACTUV boat as a nest. The array flew up to 1,000 feet, where its sensors were far more effective than they'd be at ship level. Its surface tracking radar had six times the range, and even a handheld radio covered three times its usual distance. The combination could lead to unmanned warships that not only travel for months on end, but can easily detect potential threats before they're in firing range.

Two self-sailing ships have been travelling across the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska. The boats are operated by Saildrone, a company that is creating robotic sailboats that can travel without sailors for up to eight months. These autonomous vessels can collect details on water temperature, salinity and ecosystem information that would be difficult and expensive to collect by person. Saildrone is a company creating robotic self-driving sailboats that can travel without sailors for up to eight months. The Saildrone boats have been used by scientists and engineers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to collect valuable information about the Alaskan coast.