An engineer in Poland has taken the age-old potato clock experiment to the next level. Marek Baczynski has revealed what he says is the world's first self-driving potato, and it runs on its own electricity. On YouTube, the inventor explains how an energy harvester and a capacitor can be used to store the'minuscule' energy generated by the potato, eventually powering it enough to drive – and, with a simple script, he granted it'the gift of freedom.' The potato takes about 15 minutes to charge, which will carry it just a few inches at a time. According to Baczynski, it can travel about seven and a half meters (24.6 feet) over the course of an entire day Potatoes are able to conduct electricity thanks to the presence of electrolytes.

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. At the Queensland University of Technology, in Australia, roboticists have spent the last 14 years honing a robot navigation system modeled on the brains of rats. This biologically inspired approach, they hope, could help robots navigate dynamic environments without requiring advanced, costly sensors and computationally intensive algorithms.