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.





Related posts :



Robot Talk Episode 132 – Collaborating with industrial robots, with Anthony Jules

  07 Nov 2025
In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Anthony Jules from Robust.AI about their autonomous warehouse robots that work alongside humans.

Teaching robots to map large environments

  05 Nov 2025
A new approach could help a search-and-rescue robot navigate an unpredictable environment by rapidly generating an accurate map of its surroundings.

Robot Talk Episode 131 – Empowering game-changing robotics research, with Edith-Clare Hall

  31 Oct 2025
In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Edith-Clare Hall from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency about accelerating scientific and technological breakthroughs.

A flexible lens controlled by light-activated artificial muscles promises to let soft machines see

  30 Oct 2025
Researchers have designed an adaptive lens made of soft, light-responsive, tissue-like materials.

Social media round-up from #IROS2025

  27 Oct 2025
Take a look at what participants got up to at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

Using generative AI to diversify virtual training grounds for robots

  24 Oct 2025
New tool from MIT CSAIL creates realistic virtual kitchens and living rooms where simulated robots can interact with models of real-world objects, scaling up training data for robot foundation models.

Robot Talk Episode 130 – Robots learning from humans, with Chad Jenkins

  24 Oct 2025
In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Chad Jenkins from University of Michigan about how robots can learn from people and assist us in our daily lives.

Robot Talk at the Smart City Robotics Competition

  22 Oct 2025
In a special bonus episode of the podcast, Claire chatted to competitors, exhibitors, and attendees at the Smart City Robotics Competition in Milton Keynes.



 

Robohub is supported by:




Would you like to learn how to tell impactful stories about your robot or AI system?


scicomm
training the next generation of science communicators in robotics & AI


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence