Robohub Podcast

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 obj...

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 we...

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...

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...

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...

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 se...

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...

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 th...

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, G...

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...

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 vo...

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 rob...

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. Larre...

In this episode, Abate De Mey interviews Jeff Sprenger, founder of the startup Xemory in Vermont, USA. At Xemory they are developing a robot simulation game called Xemo, where players learn to animate virtual robots. Complex motion at each joint is broken down into its more fundamental components, called degrees of freedom. Players are faced with the challenge of controlling the several degrees of...

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Edson Prestes, Professor at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and an organizer of the Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technology Challenge (HRATC) 2016 competition. The HRATC competition challenges teams around the world to develop methods of controlling robots to detect land mines in large open environments.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews several researchers presenting their work at the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2016 conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In this episode, Ron Vanderkley interviews Jürgen "Juxi" Leitner, a researcher at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Robots Vision in the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Leitner speaks about a system being developed for the Google Lunar XPrize, called LunaRoo.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Ekaterina Bereziy, Founder and CEO of ExoAtlet, about exoskeletons for the disabled and for rehabilitation. Transcript below.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Hugh Herr, Director of the Biomechatronics Group at MIT. Herr talks about the accident that led to the amputation of both of his legs below the knee and how this shaped his rock climbing and academic career. Herr also discusses orthoses and exoskeletons developed by his research group, as well as the future of bionic technology. Transcript below.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Fredrik Gustafsson, Professor in Sensor Informatics at Department of Electrical Engineering in Linköping University, about an initiative to reduce poaching in a rhino sanctuary in Ngulia, Kenya. Gustafsson discusses how he first became involved in this project, how he has worked with the rangers to develop solutions, and the future of this work.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Emo Todorov, Director of Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington, about a physics-based optimization method for controlling robots. Todorov describes how his physics-based method can be used to solve problems and discusses results in simulation and on hardware.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Karl Iagnemma, a Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the CEO of nuTonomy, about autonomous vehicles in urban environments. Iagnemma discusses the market for autonomous cars, why nuTonomy is being developed and, at least initially, deployed in Singapore, and the technology of autonomous cars.

This is the second of two episodes where Audrow Nash interviews several companies at the International Conference for Robotics and Automation (ICRA). ICRA is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s biggest conference and one of the leading international forums for robotics researchers to present their work. The 2016 conference was May 16-21 in Stockholm, Sweden.