Author Archives

Follow @robotspodcast
Transcript below.
In this episode, Ron Vanderkley interviews James Underwood from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. Underwood discusses his work on an autonomous vegetable harvesting robot, Ladybird.
Transcript below.
In this episode, we celebrate our 200th episode! That’s over 6000 minutes of robot goodness and nearly 8 years releasing interviews with your favorite roboticists. The podcast is all volunteer run, a special thanks to everyone on the team who’s made this possible! And thanks to all of you for listening in all these years.
To celebrate, our president Audrow Nash has invited a team of old-timers from the podcast team, and one of our favorite recurring guests, Rodney Brooks from Rethink Robotics.
In this episode, we talk to Justin Werfel from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University about their latest paper published in Science on “Designing Collective Behavior in a Termite-Inspired Robot Construction Team”.
The European Robotics Week 2013 featured 334 robotics related events in 24 countries and attracted more than 55’000 participants spanning all ages. To give us a snapshot of the event, we talk to three organizers of robotics activities including Fiorella Operto in Italy, Roko Tschakarow in Germany, and Douwe Dresscher in the Netherlands.
Did you know that Robohub started right here, with the podcast? This is our 150th podcast episode, and to celebrate we brought together the original team to reenact our very first interview with Dario Floreano back in 2006. Floreano, who is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL and of the Swiss NCCR Robotics tells us about the latest in Swiss robotics, his work in adaptive morphologies and flying robots, and his predictions for the future of robotics.
In this episode, we speak with Jonathan Roberts, research director of the Autonomous Systems Lab at the CSIRO ICT Centre in Brisbane Australia. Roberts leads a team of more than 45 scientists and engineers in wide variety of robotics and automation projects that feature flying, ground and underwater robots.
In today’s episode we speak with Martin Adams from the University of Chile about using robots in the mining industry. Mining is a dangerous job that would strongly benefit from robotic helpers. To drive this effort, the mining industry funded the Advanced Mining Technology Centre (AMTC). As the principal investigator there, Adams explores the use of robotic technologies such as mapping and SLAM that would be essential in mining automation. He also tells us why he chose to do robotics in South America.
In this episode we meet with Tom Green, editor in chief of the Robotics Business Review, to discuss current trends in robotics. Robotics Business Review is a global robotics news and information resource headquartered in metro Boston (USA).
Green shares his view on how the focus within the robotics community differs in different parts of the world, and what impact public funding has on this. According to him, it is not technology but people that hold development up at the moment. We also hear about some success stories, that show how robotics make a difference in people’s lives.
In the episode, we speak with Eric Stackpole and David Lang from the OpenROV project about their challenge in developing Eric’s idea to find an easy way to explore a cave that was rumored to contain a sunken treasure near his home.
In this episode, we speak with Ramon Pericet and Michal Dobrzynski from EPFL about their Curved Artificial Compound Eye (CurvACE) published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Inspired by the fly’s vision system, their sensor can enable a large range of applications that require motion detection using a small plug-and-play device. As shown in the video below, you could use these sensors to control small robots navigating an environment, even in the dark, or equip a small autonomous flying robot with limited payload. Other applications include home automation, surveillance, medical instruments, prosthetic devices, and smart clothing.
In this episode we hear from researchers at the Harvard Microrobotics Lab about the Science paper published today reporting on the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot. The amazing high-speed video below shows the robot taking off, hovering in place and steering left and right. This work is part of the Robobees project that aims to make swarms of insect robots.
In this episode we hear how the Spanish robotic startup Adele is creating a marketplace for robotics software. Through their platform, robot developers can buy software components for their robots, and software developers can sell their code, in a practical way. Examples of the software components, Adele calls them sparks, are speech recognition, synthetic speech, vision systems and user interface components. Their flagship project FIONA (Framework for Interactive-services Over Natural-conversational Agents) allows users to create intelligent and interactive virtual avatars.
In this episode, we talk with Kate Darling from the MIT Media Lab, about giving rights to social robots. She tells us about a recent Pleo torture session she organized at the LIFT conference and the class she taught at Harvard Law School on “Robot Rights”.
In today’s episode we cover the EU Robotics Week that took place during the last week of November and featured robotics related activities across Europe for the general public, highlighting growing importance of robotics in a wide variety of application areas.
- Ladybird
- 200th Episode Special
- Termite-Inspired Construction
- EU Robotics Week
- 150th Episode Special
- Outdoor autonomous systems
- Mining Automation
- Robotics Business Review
- The OpenROV project
- Curved Artificial Compound Eye
- Audio interviews about the controlled flight of insect robots
- Software marketplace
- International standards
- Giving rights to robots
- EU Robotics Week
- Robolution Capital
- Curious & creative
- Autonomous Solutions
- The Wambots Team
- Digital cultures
- Grishin Robotics
- Space business
- Rethink Robotics
- BEAM Robotics
- Future cities
- Robotics festival
- Field robotics
- JPL Open House 2012
- Launching startups
- Knowledge engineering
- Swiss robotics
- Robotic fish and mannequins
- The future of robot companions
- Robopocalypse
- Bringing them to market
- History and outlook
- Dynamic systems
- Dexterous manipulation and morphogenesis
- Self-organizing systems
- Senseable robots
- Advances in bipedal locomotion
- From research to industry in the AUV market
- Best of 2011
- Turning robots into products
- Robotics roadmaps – USA
- Made in Brazil
- Demonstrations at IROS
- IROS exhibit hall
- Educational robotics
- Robot art (Part 3)
- Robot art (Part 2)
- Robot art (Part 1)
- Our favorite robots
- Demining and defusing
- The Mind Machine Project
- Schunk manipulators
- The Bilibot Project
- Blended reality
- European robotics (Part 2)
- European robotics (Part 1)
- Robotic arts
- Mind control
- Future manipulators
- Telepresence
- Robotics roadmaps – Japan
- Odor source localization
- Robots Podcast: Harvest automation
- Multi-robot teams
- Robots Podcast: Science fiction (Part 2)
- Personal helpers
- Dependable swarms
- Robots Podcast: Autonomous vehicles
- Amateur UAVs
- Futurama
- Robots Podcast: Olfaction
- The law
- Programmable matter
- Distributed flight array
- Science fiction (Part 1)
- Nanosystems
- R&D at iRobot
- Modeling biology
- Online human-robot interactions
- The Nao Humanoid
- 50 years of robotics (Part 2)
- 50 years of robotics (Part 1)
- URBI software platform
- Chaos control
- The future of artificial intelligence
- Swarming satellites
- AUV missions
- Quadrotors
- Deep-sea exploration
- New year’s special
- Weight-loss coach
- Planetary exploration
- Learning
- Stroke rehabilitation
- Slithering creatures
- Active touch
- Emergent communication
- Celebrating invention
- Robot-assisted surgery
- Brain-machine interfaces
- Robots Podcast: Smart homes