Robots - The Podcast for News and Views on Robotics

In this episode, MeiXing Dong talks with Leon Kuperman, CTO of CUJO, about cybersecurity threats and how to guard against them. They discuss how CUJO, a smart hardware firewall, helps protect the home against online threats.

In this episode, Jack Rasiel speaks with Kostas Bekris, who introduces us to tensegrity robotics: a striking robotic design which straddles the boundary between hard and soft robotics. A structure uses tensegrity if it is made of a number of isolated rigid elements which are held in compression by a network of elements that are in tension. Bekris, an Associate Professor of Computer Science, draws from a diverse set of problems to find innovative new ways to control tensegrity robots.

In this episode, MeiXing Dong interviews Matthias Vanoni, co-founder and CEO of Biowatch. Vanoni speaks about Biowatch, a wrist-veins biometric reader that functions as a security solution for mobile payments and smart devices. They discuss the technical challenges of building a miniaturized wrist-vein reader and how this device changes the usual user authentication process.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Peter Corke, Professor of Robotics at the Queensland University of Technology and Director of the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, about Robot Academy. Robot Academy is an online platform that provides free-to-use undergraduate-level learning resources for robotics and robotic vision.

In this episode, MeiXing Dong conducts interviews at the 2017 Midwest Speech and Language Days workshop in Chicago. She talks with Michael White of Ohio State University about question interpretation in a dialogue system; Dmitriy Dligach of Loyola University Chicago about extracting patient timelines from doctor’s notes; and Denis Newman-Griffiths of Ohio State University about connecting words and phrases to relevant medical topics.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Sergey Levine, assistant professor at UC Berkeley, about deep learning on robotics. Levine explains what deep learning is and he discusses the challenges of using deep learning in robotics. Lastly, Levine speaks about his collaboration with Google and some of the surprising behavior that emerged from his deep learning approach (how the system grasps soft objects). In addition to the main interview, Audrow interviewed Levine about his professional path. They spoke about what questions motivate him, why his PhD experience was different to what he had expected, the value of self-directed learning,  work-life balance, and what he wishes he’d known in graduate school.

In this episode, Audrow Nash and Christina Brester conduct interviews at the 2016 International Association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation conference in Moscow, Russia. They speak with Vadim Kotenev of Rehabot and Motorica about prosthetic hands and rehabilatative devices; and Vagan Martirosyan, CEO of TryFit, a company that uses robotic sensors to help people find shoes that fit them well.

In this episode, Abate De Mey speaks with Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics, about warehouse automation with collaborative robots. At Locus Robotics, they increase the productivity of workers in e-commerce warehouses by using robot helpers to transport items that are passed to them by the workers. The lightweight autonomous robots move at a similar pace to their co-workers, use LIDAR and computer vision to detect people and avoid collisions. This allows people to share the warehouse floor with the robots. The collaborative robotic system is lightweight and can be adapted to existing warehouses with minimal alterations.

In this episode, Audrow Nash and Christina Brester conduct interviews at the 2016 International Association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation conference in Moscow, Russia. They speak with Roman Luchin, CEO of CyberTech Labs., about a robotics development platform called Trik. Trik is intended to be an intermediate step when learning about robotics between Lego Mindstorms and programming on an embedded platform. Trik allows users to program with a graphical interface by ordering blocks. These blocks contain code in several common programming languages (python, F#, Pascal, etc.) and the code can be modified directly. This is the second of three interviews from the conference.

Transcript Below. In this episode, Jack Rasiel speaks with Kostas Daniilidis, Professor of Computer and Information at the University of Pennsylvania, about new developments in computer vision and robotics. Daniilidis’ research team is pioneering new approaches to understanding the 3D structure of the world from simple and ubiquitous 2D images. They are also investigating how these techniques can be used to improve robots’ ability to understand and manipulate objects in their environment. Daniilidis puts this in the context of current trends in robot learning and perception, and speculates how it will help bring more robots from the lab to the “real world”.  How does bleeding edge research become a viable product? Daniilidis speaks to this from personal experience, as an advisor to startups spun out from the GRASP Lab and Penn’s Pennovation incubator.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Roland Siegwart and Matthias Hüni about Kickstart Accelerator, a Swiss Startup Accelerator. Siegwart leads the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zürich and is one of the initiators of Kickstart Accelerator. Hüni is the vertical lead of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at Kickstart Accelerator and is involved in the program’s operations. Kickstart Accelerator seeks to provide international entrepreneurs with an inlet to the Swiss ecosystem, including connections to industry and academia.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Torsten Oelkes, Executive Chairman of CUBE, about the CUBE Tech Fair. The CUBE Tech Fair is a conference that takes place in Berlin in May that seeks to facilitate connections between companies. The Tech Fair also features a start up competition where the winner will be awarded €1,000,000 without exchange of equity or debt. In this interview, Toresten talks about CUBE’s business model, the robotic companies they’re affiliated with, the CUBE Tech Fair, and the €1,000,000 prize.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Bradley Knox, founder of bots_alive. Knox speaks about an add-on to a Hexbug, a six-legged robotic toy, that makes the bot behave more like a character. They discuss the novel way Knox uses machine learning to create a sense character. They also discuss the limitation of technology to emulate living creatures, and how the bots_alive robot was built within these limitations.

In this episode, Audrow Nash and Christina Brester conduct interviews at the 2016 International Association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation conference in Moscow, Russia. They speak with Albert Efimov, Chief Roboticist at Skolkovo, about creating an innovation cluster for robotics companies; Anastasia Uryasheva, CEO of Tsuru, about a waterproof unmanned aerial vehicle; and Borris Rozman, General Director of GNOM, about underwater vehicles. This is the first of three interviews from the conference.

In this episode, Ron Vanderkley spoke to Dr Moritz Tenorth, head of software development at Magazino, a Munich-based startup developing mobile pick-and-place robots for item-specific logistics. They discussed his work on the Toru robot and what it means to the warehouse industry today and in the future.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Domenico Prattichizzo, Professor of Robotics at the University of Siena and Senior Scientist at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genova in Italy, about a device for assisting people who have lost the use of one of their hands, for example by a stroke. The device is an extra finger that functions to press an object into the paralyzed hand so that it can be grasped.

In this episode, Christina Brester interviews Vladimir Stanovov, PhD student and researcher at the Siberian State Aerospace University (Krasnoyarsk, Russia). Stanovov speaks about a speech-controlled wheelchair, which seeks to provide people that are quadriplegic, that is people with partial or total loss of use of their limbs and torso, with the possibility to control their wheelchairs through voice commands. In this interview Stanovov discusses the basic parts of the speech-controlled wheelchair, the fuzzy controller he created, and the trials they had in the medical center.

In this episode, Abate De Mey interviews Edward Neff, founder of SMAC Corporation. Mr. Neff discusses how breakthroughs in his company have allowed them to develop linear actuators compact enough to be used to actuate robotic fingers. Companies like Apple and Samsung push for the development of robotic fingers to perform lifelike tests on their phones.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Dieter Fox, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, about the 100/100 Computer Vision Tracking Challenge. This is a self-imposed challenge to understand 100% of the pixels in an image 100% of the time in video footage; this includes understanding semantic information. Such understanding would allow robots to assist humans more naturally in environments like a home kitchen, wet lab, or in disaster response. To accomplish this challenge, Fox discusses challenges which include modeling, tracking, and detecting articulated objects.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Hasier Larrea, Founder and CEO of Ori Systems and MSc candidate at the MIT Media Lab, about robotics used to transform personal spaces. Larrea discusses how the world is urbanizing and how new space paradigms are needed to accommodate this shift. He proposes robotic furniture that allows for what is not being used to be hidden, such as a desk or a bed. Larrea discusses the robotic systems, how these systems will be integrated into existing infrastructure, and the future or Ori Systems.