Typically, you've got an artist on stage singing songs and stuff, and then a bunch of spotlights beaming columns of color through some fake smoke. But something new is on the horizon, and it's equal parts creepy and futuristic. Swarms of artificially intelligent drones are starting to show up on stages around the world. Some, like the ones on Drake's latest tour, of are tiny flying lights that float above the stage. Others, like a recent Cirque du Soleil experience, featured more complex aircraft outfitted with lampshades that produced an almost ghostly effect.

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. What has the ability to move and show its colors, is made only of silicone rubber and manufactured at the millimeter scale? Researchers have combined three different manufacturing techniques to create a novel origami-inspired soft material microfabrication process that goes beyond what existing approaches can achieve at this small scale.

Verity Studios' Lucie drones alone completed more than 20,000 autonomous flights. A Synthetic Swarm of 99 Lucie micro drones started touring with Metallica (the tour is ongoing and was just announced the 5th highest grossing tour worldwide for 2017). Micro drones are now performing at Madison Square Garden as part of each New York Knicks home game -- the first resident drone show in a full-scale arena setting. Since early 2017, a drone swarm has been performing weekly on a first cruise ship. And micro drones performed thousands of flights at Changi Airport Singapore as part of its 2017 Christmas show.

Metallica's European WorldWired tour, which opened to an ecstatic crowd of 15,000 in Copenhagen's sold-out Royal Arena this Saturday, features a swarm of micro drones flying above the band. Shortly after the band breaks into their hit single "Moth Into Flame", dozens of micro drones start emerging from the stage, forming a large rotating circle above the stage. As the music builds, more and more drones emerge and join the formation, creating increasingly complex patterns, culminating in a choreography of three interlocking rings that rotate in position. This show's debut marks the world's first autonomous drone swarm performance in a major touring act. Unlike previous drone shows, this performance features indoor drones, flying above performers and right next to throngs of concert viewers in a live event setting.

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.

For the first time on Broadway human and drone performances fuse to create a new form of artistic expression. The magic happened in Cirque du Soleil's first musical on Broadway: 'Paramour' at the Lyric Theatre. The show is themed on the Golden Age of Hollywood and follows the life of a poet who is forced to choose between love and art. The contributions of the technology firm Verity Studios include the choreography of the drone show segment, the frame and lighting design of the drone costumes, and all underlying drone technologies. The system was operated by the show's automation team, with Verity Studios providing maintenance services twice per year.

This article has been reposted from Robohub.org Flying robots perform 100th show on Broadway, using new localization technology and algorithms designed and created by Verity Studios of Zurich in collaboration with Cirque du Soleil for their new show PARAMOUR. Since April, a troupe of eight flying machines has been performing in a Cirque du Soleil Broadway show called PARAMOUR. This group of quadcopters has completed its first 100 shows in front of a live theater audience, without a single incident. Given the string of recent safety incidents with drones (there's more), this begs the question: How was this accomplished? The Paramour quadcopters were designed and created by Verity Studios of Zurich and were transformed into flying lampshades in collaboration with Cirque du Soleil.