In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Jaime Fernández Fisac, a PhD student at University of California, Berkeley, in Anca Dragan’s InterACT Lab. Fisac is interested in ensuring that autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, delivery drones, and home robots can operate and learn in the world—while satisfying safety constraints. Towards this goal, Fisac discusses different examples of his work with unmanned aerial vehicles and talks about safe robot learning in general; including, the curse of dimensionality and how it impacts control problems (including how some systems can be decomposed into simpler control problems), how simulation can be leveraged before trying learning on a physical robot, safe sets, and how a robot can modify its behavior based on how confident it is that its model is correct.
Presented work at IROS 2018 (Part 3 of 3), with Pauline Pounds, Philippe Morere and Yujung Liu
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Caitlyn Clabaugh, PhD Candidate at the University of Southern California, about lessons learned about putting robots in people’s homes for human-robot interaction research. Clabaugh speaks about her work to date, the expectations in human-subjects research, and gives general advice for PhD students.
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Patrick Tresset, a London based artist, on robots that draw people using a pen and paper in a way that is similar to the drawing process for humans. Tresset discusses his background in painting and programming, how his robot artists work, how he creates an experience for the person being drawn by the robots, about art history with robots, and about his future direction with robot artists.
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Robert Williamson, a Professor at the Australian National University, who speaks about a mathematical approach to ethics. This approach can get us started implementing robots that behave ethically. Williamson goes through his logical derivation of a mathematical formulation of ethics and then talks about the cost of fairness. In making his derivation, he relates bureaucracy to an algorithm. He wraps up by talking about how to work ethically.
In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Amruta Moktali, VP of Product Management at Salesforce Analytics, about Salesforce Analytics’ analytic and artificial intelligence software. Moktali discusses the data-pipeline, how data is processed (e.g., noise), and how insights are identified. She also talks about how dimensions in the data can be controlled for (such as race, gender, or zip-code) to avoid bias and how other dimensions can be selected as actionable so Salesforce can make recommendations—and how they use interpretable methods so that these recommendations can be explained. Moktali also tells about her professional path, including going from computer engineering and computer science to product management and her experience with intrapreneurship (that is, starting an endeavor within a large organization).
In this episode, Audrow Nash interview Magnus Egerstedt, Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, about a way for anyone interested in swarm robotics to test their ideas on hardware, called the Robotarium. The Robotarium is a 725-square-foot lab at the the Georgia Institute of Technology that houses nearly 100 rolling and flying robots. To test their ideas, people can write their own programs, upload them to the Robotarium, and then watch the machines carry out their commands.
In this interview, Egerstedt speaks about the kinds of robots used in the Robotarium, design decisions in making the Robotarium, the differences between doing research in simulation and on hardware, and about lessons learnt and the challenges of building the Robotarium.
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Chris McCool and Chris Lehnert about different projects that relate to agriculture at the Queensland University of Technology. McCool speaks about a large robot for weed management in fields. The robot uses Real-time kinematic GPS (very accurate) and a camera with deep learning to recognize various types of plants. Lehnert speaks about a robot to harvest sweet peppers. The robot first grabs on to the sweet pepper with a suction cup and then uses a small saw to cut the fruit from the bush. Chris speaks about using their method for other crops, how their robot does in terms of deployment, and the future of agriculture.
In this episode, Marwa ElDiwiny interview Peer Fisher, a Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Stuttgart and the Director of the Micro Nano and Molecular Systems Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Fischer discusses micro robots that has been designed to move inside of environments similar to the human body called, “micro swimmers.” He talks about how they are fabricated, powered, and how they can move with light or “nano propellers.” Fischer also discusses simulating human tissue and the future of micro and nano robots, including how they could be a replacement for certain surgeries.
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Shuo Yang about DJI’s RoboMaster first-person shooter (FPS) competition, a competition designed to get people excited about robotics. For the competition, university teams build and program a robot to go against DJI’s robots in a shooting battle. Each robot has a way of propelling marble-sized plastic balls and pressure sensors on their sides to register if they’ve been hit by an opponent’s projectile. Shuo speaks about the goals of the competition, the teams that are involved, what strategies the teams use, the difficulties the team had in making their robot’s good competitors, the future of the challenge, and how people can get involved.
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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