For three days, experts in the field of robotics and unmanned systems from all over the world gathered in the Netherlands.

To incorporate drones in our lives in a good and safe way, we need anti-drone instruments. On 4 December the TU Delft Micro Air Vehicle Lab (MAVLab) will host the first ever anti-drone competition: DroneClash. During this competition, participants use their own drone(s) to take down as many other drones as possible. They also need to avoid a whole series of anti-drone interventions.

In Darmstadt, Germany, European Space Agency (ESA) teams are scrambling to confirm contact with the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module (EDM), Schiaparelli—the spectre of Philae still haunting the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC). Whether or not ESA ever speak to Schiaparelli again, the risky business of space robotics is once more laid bare.

Editors note: Since this article was written, ESA are attempting to decode a partial signal from the EDM

During an experiment performed on board of the International Space Station (ISS) a small drone successfully learned by itself to see distances using only one eye, reported scientists at the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Transcript below.

In this episode, Abate De Mey interviews Guido De Croon about Evolutionary Robotics and its use to design behaviors for flying robots.

From the Smithsonian comes news – and a must-see fascinating video – about a painting created using data from more than 168,000 fragments of Rembrandt’s work, trained to paint in Rembrandt’s signature style.

Google’s AI machine won 4 out of 5 games in a $1.3 million contest against South Korean Lee Sedol, rated as the world’s best Go player.

In episode five of season two, Ryan walks us through variational inference. We put some listener questions about Go and how to play it to Andy Okun, president of the American Go Association (who is in Seoul, South Korea, watching the Lee Sedol/AlphaGo games). Plus, we hear from Suchi Saria of Johns Hopkins about applying machine learning to understanding health care data.

Google-backed DeepMind created an AI sophisticated enough to beat a human champion in the Chinese board game Go, marking another milestone of development and progress in AI research. What will be next as we raise the bar?

Two years after the small London-based startup DeepMind published their pioneering work on “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, they have become one of the leaders in the chase for Artificial General Intelligence. In our previous article, we took a thorough peek inside their technology. In our latest research, we ask: what happens when multiple AI agents are competing or collaborating in the same environment?

New research published today in the Journal of Bioinspiration and Biomimetics shows that an insect-inspired vision strategy can help indoor flying drones to perceive distances with a single camera – a key requirement for controlled and safe landing. With indoor drones no longer needing to bear the weight of additional sonar equipment, the strategy should hasten the miniaturization of indoor autonomous drones.

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.)

The second phase of an ambitious project to gather valuable information on ocean processes and marine life using a fleet of innovative marine robots has just reached its conclusion. Co-ordinated by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), the Exploring Ocean Fronts project took place off southwest England and saw the largest deployment of robotic vehicles ever attempted in UK waters . 

We asked Alan Winfield what the first successful landing on a comet means for the future of space mining. Find out his answer below.

UPDATE: ESA’s Rosetta mission has soft-landed its Philae probe on to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The signal confirming the successful touchdown arrived on Earth at 16:03 GMT (17:03 CET), it’s the first time in history that such an extraordinary feat has been achieved and it’s a great milestone for space exploration and Europe.