As part of the UK’s National Robotics Week, The University of Sheffield hosted the 17th Towards Autonomous Systems (TAROS) conference from 28-30 June. Among the papers and discussions on the development of autonomous robotics research, two sessions on the last day looked at robots in the public eye and exploring the issue of responsible research in robotics.

New videos from the Bristol Robotics Lab and KU Leuven. Have a holiday robot video of your own that you’d like to share? Send your submissions to info [at] robohub.org!

Bridging the gap between cutting-edge research in academia and the vibrant robotics startup ecosystem is no easy task. This Wednesday in the UK city of Bristol, a free public event titled “From Imagination to Market” — the centre piece of European Robotics Week 2015 — took on that challenge by bringing together leading innovators, researchers, startups and strategists. Below are the key moments and insights from the event.

A mouthwatering array of over 750 events has been taking place throughout Europe this week as the continent celebrates Robotics Week 2015. The festivities began with an eye-opening debate on “Robots and Society” in the UK city of Bristol on Tuesday, with experts versed in strategy, business, academia, law and policy. But, for many, the star of the show was Nao, in his guise as robot avatar.

Soft robots are versatile, often much safer, more energy-efficient, robust and resilient than their more rigid counterparts. But one of the biggest challenges facing soft robotics is control – often, classical approaches don’t apply. The answer may lie in morphological computation, an idea that stems from biological systems using their bodies to control basic actions.

James Bowles has been crowned UK champion following the first UK FPV drone racing national event organised by the British FPV drone racing association. The event was held at RAF Barkston Heath near Grantham, Lincolnshire, UK, last week.

In episode fourteen we talk with Nando de Freitas. He’s a professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a senior staff research scientist Google DeepMind. Right now he’s focusing on solving intelligence. (No biggie.)

In episode eleven we chat with Neil Lawrence from the University of Sheffield. We talk about the problems of privacy in the age of machine learning, and the responsibilities that come with using machine learning tools and making data more open. We learn about the Markov decision process (and what happens when you use it in the real world and it becomes a partially observable Markov decision process) and take a listener question about finding insights into features in the black boxes of deep learning.

In this video lecture, Massimiliano Zecca from the Healthcare Technology and Head of the Healthcare Technology group at Loughborough University discusses emotional robotics, musical robotics and wearable bio-instrumentation. He centers his research on robotic systems and technologies that assist those in need due to advanced age or illness.

Imagine a swarm of microscopic robots that we inject into the vascular system: the swarm swims to the source of the problem, then either delivers therapeutics or undertakes microsurgery directly. That was how I opened a short invited talk at the Royal Society of Medicine, at a meeting themed The Future of Robotics in Surgery.

The government-baked robocar projects in the UK are going full steam, with this press release from the UK government to accompany the unveiling of the prototype Lutz pod, which should ply the streets of Milton Keynes and Greenwich.

The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has announced updated rules that will give operators an annual permission to operate in built up areas.

No two countries see eye-to-eye when it comes to regulating drones; and every country seems to have different guidelines for determining who can deploy drones.

RE.WORK’s Future Robotics Forum – which took place in London on Tuesday – was an opportunity to hear the stories of key influencers and developers of transformative robotic services and devices, and to learn about the challenges involved in commercialisation.

Many governments have determined that robotics will play a significant role in contributing to their economy and have set up projects to fund bottlenecks to speed up the process.