Robohub.org
ep.

016

podcast
 

2008 New Year’s special with Dan Kara, Terry Fong, Dario Floreano, Steve Rainwater and Minoru Asada

         

by
02 January 2009



share this:

For our New Year’s episode, we’ll be giving you an overview of the trends in robotics for 2008 and an insight into next year’s developments with five experts in robotics from different backgrounds and continents. We speak with Dan Kara from Robotics Trends about the robot marketplace, Terry Fong from the NASA Ames Research Center, Dario Floreano from the EPFL, Steve Rainwater from robots.net and Minoru Asada from Osaka University.

Dan Kara

Dan Kara is the president and co-founder of Robotics Trends, a US based company specialized in the burgeoning personal, service and mobile robotics market. His company has been working over the years to compile a business image of robotics and inform through their webportal.

Terry Fong

Terry Fong is the Director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at the NASA Ames Research Center. 2008 was a busy year in space robotics with several missions sending back loads of scientific data from Mars.

Dario Floreano

Dario Floreano is the director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the EPFL in Lausanne Switzerland where he focuses on taking inspiration from biology to design swarming, evolving and flying robots as well as researching how biological societies can evolve to communicate and cooperate.

Steven Rainwater

Steven Rainwater is one of the founding editors of robots.net, and was previously featured in a Robots episode on the robot blogosphere. His specialty is hobbyist robotics, and he tells us about the latest products that you can find in your local hobby shop.

Minoru Asada

Minoru Asada is the director of the Asada Lab at Osaka University and the director of the Asada Synergistic Intelligence Project. He is also greatly involved in the Robotcup Federation.

Christmas Contest Winner

In our last episode, we asked you to guess what our WowWee Femisapien did on her first weekend in Switzerland for a chance to win one. Well, you most likely won’t be surprised to learn that she took advantage of the excellent snow in December to go down a few slopes with her newly learned ski moves and her personal coaches here at ROBOTS (video coming soon).

Congratulations to Erin at robotgrrl.com for her excellent animation and correct guess!

Links:


Latest News:

Instead of our traditional news item we made a short year-end review of the biggest news items of 2008 in our forum. Let us know what was your biggest news of 2008!

View and post comments on this episode in the forum



tags:


Podcast team The ROBOTS Podcast brings you the latest news and views in robotics through its bi-weekly interviews with leaders in the field.
Podcast team The ROBOTS Podcast brings you the latest news and views in robotics through its bi-weekly interviews with leaders in the field.

            AUAI is supported by:



Subscribe to Robohub newsletter on substack



Related posts :

What three days building a robot taught me

and   07 Oct 2026
The brief sounded simple: build a small autonomous robot, then make it survive increasingly difficult mazes. Simple... right? Until you actually have to build one.

Research could guide the future design of social robots

  05 Oct 2026
Giving robot companions animal-like or anime-style faces and voices could maximise their emotional appeal to users, according to new research which could help guide the growing field of social robotics.

Robot Talk Episode 164 – Accelerating robot learning, with Michelle Lu

  02 Oct 2026
In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Michelle Lu from Vsim Technology about using simulation and artificial intelligence to teach robots new skills.

Robotics and automation? Informal reflections on familiar terms

IEEE experts reflect on what is meant by the term "robotics and automation".

Small, medium or large, a robotic fish maintains its swimming ability

  28 Sep 2026
Researchers at EPFL and New York University have developed a robotic fish that can be made in various sizes for studying shallow creeks to open water.

Robot Talk Episode 163 – Robots helping people, with Aaron Edsinger

  25 Sep 2026
In the first episode of Robot Talk season 7, Claire chatted to Aaron Edsinger from Hello Robot about their Stretch robots that can help people with mobility issues live more independently.

An open source approach to physical AI from Intrinsic

  25 Sep 2026
Find out more about the capabilities of Intrinsic Core.

What’s coming up at #IROS2026?

  24 Sep 2026
Find out what the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems has in store.


↑


AUAI is supported by:







Subscribe to Robohub newsletter on substack




 















©2026.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence