In this episode, Lilly interviews Afshin Doust, CEO of Advanced Intelligent Systems. Doust explains the company’s modular, robots-as-a-service subscription business model. They discuss robotic solutions for the agricultural industry, disinfecting robots to combat COVID19, and other exciting new developments at AIS.
Kate speaks with Anni Kern, Head of Communication, strategy, and teams at Cybathlon for over four years. She describes the motivation and concepts for the Cybathlon organizations to develop a common platform to remove barriers between people with disabilities, technology developers, and the public. Anni also describes the specifics of Cybathlon competitions and the organization and planning.
Lilly interviews Bernhard Thomaszewski, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montréal and research scientist at ETH Zurich. Thomaszewski discusses his background in animation at Disney, his current work on mechanical metamaterials and digital fabrication, and how physics-based modeling has connected the dots.
In this episode, Abate follows up with Benjamin Pietro Filardo, founder of Pliant Energy Systems and NACROM, the North American Consortium for Responsible Ocean Mining. Pietro talks about the deep sea mining industry, an untapped market with a massive potential for growth. Pietro discusses the current proposed solutions for deep sea mining which are environmentally destructive, and he offers an alternative solution using swarm robots which could mine the depths of the ocean while creating minimal disturbance to this mysterious habitat.
Abate interviews Benjamin “Pietro” Filardo, CEO and founder of Pliant Energy Systems. At PES, they developed a novel form of actuation using two undulating fins on a robot. These fins present multiple benefits over traditional propeller systems including excellent energy efficiency, low water turbulence, and an ability to maneuver in water, land, and ice. Aside from its benefits on a robot, Pietro also talks about its advantages for harnessing energy from moving water.
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In this episode, our interviewer Lauren Klein speaks with Kim Baraka about his PhD research to enable robots to engage in social interactions, including interactions with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Baraka discusses how robots can plan their actions across multiple modalities when interacting with humans, and how models from psychology can inform this process. He also tells us about his passion for dance, and how dance may serve as a testbed for embodied intelligence within Human-Robot Interaction.
In this episode, Shihan Lu interviews Jivko Sinapov, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University, about his work on behavior-grounded multisensory perception and exploration in robotics. Dr. Sinapov discusses several perspectives on multisensory perception in robotics, including data collection, data fusion, and robot control and planning. He also shares his experience about using robotics for K-12 education.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
In this episode, Lilly interviews Jonathan Sauder, the Principal Investigator of a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts project to design a rover for the surface of Venus. Sauder explains why exploring Venus is important and why previous surface missions have only lasted a few hours. They discuss his innovative wheeled-robot concept, a hybrid automaton rover which would be mostly mechanical and powered by wind.
In this episode, Abate interviews Josh Lessing, co-founder and CEO of Root AI. At Root AI they are developing a system that tracks data on the farm and autonomously harvests crops using delicate grippers and computer vision. Lessing talks about the path they took to build a product with good market fit and how they brought a venture capital backed startup to market.
In this episode, Lilly Clark interviews Kris Zacny, the Vice President of Exploration Technologies at Honeybee Robotics. They discuss two focuses of development at Honeybee: technology for finding extinct extraterrestrial life and technology for in-situ resource utilization. Zacny speaks about the design and operation of current flight projects, and why drilling technology is key to these missions.
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Eric Diller, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, on wireless micro-scale robots that could eventually be used in human surgery. Diller speaks about the design, control, and manufacture of micro-scale surgical robotic devices, as well as when we might see this technology in the operating room.
In this episode, Lauren Klein interviews Ayanna Howard, Professor and Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Professor Howard describes her wide range of work in robotics, from robots that assist children with special needs to trust in autonomous systems. She also discusses her path through the field of robotics in both academia and business, and the importance of conducting in-the-wild robotics research.
In this episode, Lilly interviews Nathan Michael, Professor and Director of the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab at the Robotics Institute within Carnegie Mellon University. They discuss introspection, adaptation, and evolvement in robotics. Michael speaks about topics in state estimation and distributed perception, and other challenges in control, perception, and cognition for both single and multi-robot systems.
Robohub Podcast is a non-profit robotics podcast where we interview experts in robotics, including researchers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and venture capitalists. Our interviewers are researchers, entrepreneurs, and engineers involved in robotics. Our interviews are technical and, often, get into the details of what we are discussing, but we make an effort to have our interviews understandable to a general audience.
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