Jennie the artificial intelligence-powered robotic dog is designed to provide comfort and companionship to those with mental health challenges. U.S. robotics company Tombot has introduced Jennie, an innovative AI-powered robotic pet designed to provide comfort and companionship to those facing cognitive health challenges. This groundbreaking creation is set to transform the lives of millions struggling with dementia, mild cognitive impairment and various mental health issues. Jennie's inception stems from a personal tragedy experienced by Tombot CEO Tom Stevens. When his mother, Nancy, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the family had to make the heart-wrenching decision to rehome her beloved dog, Golden Bear.

As 2020 grinds into gear, CNET will be kick-starting a new decade with a trip to the Nevada desert for the annual tech bonanza CES. When we arrive in Las Vegas, we expect to be greeted by a bunch of new TVs, scores of eccentric gadgets and a whole gaggle of robots. We're still some years away from robots outnumbering humans at the show, but every year it does seem as though more bots are present on the show floor. In the past decade we've seen robots become more complex, more affordable and more diverse. The number of contexts in which they play a role in our lives -- from the home to the workplace and beyond -- have expanded to provide us with a vision of how humans and robots will coexist and collaborate in the future.

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. Humans are very good at object generalization--even when we're very young, it takes just a few samples from a class of objects for us to be able to identify other objects that fit into the same class. The amount of training data that it takes for a human to be able to identify (say) a previously unseen coffee mug based on their previous coffee mug experience is tiny.