Talking Robots - The Podcast On Robotics And Artificial Intelligence

Thanks for tuning in to Talking Robots! This podcast is now finished so take some time to listen to the shows you might have missed and don't forget to subscribe to "Robots", the new podcast for news and views on robotics at www.robotspodcast.com.

With 45 interviews with high profile people in robotics, nearly 200'000 downloads and a good insight on today's and tomorrow's robotics, here we are now with the final episode of Talking Robots dedicated to what people really think about robots. In addition we'll be speaking with Dario Floreano, the initiator and director of the Talking Robots podcast and the director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, at the EPFL in Switzerland. He'll be concluding this series with a retrospective on these two past years and a note on the future. Future which will include Robots, your podcast for news, interviews and discussions on all aspects of robotics (http://www.robotspodcast.com).

In this episode of Talking Robots we speak with Henry Markram who is the director of the Blue Brain Project, director of the Center for Neuroscience and Technology and co-director of EPFL's Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland. While most roboticists have been working on abstracting the brain, the Blue Brain project has been painting the whole picture of a rat neocortical column (NCC) from the bottom up; starting with the cells, neurons, and finally pulling the connections which generate the jungle of the mind. It seems that modeling our grey matter as a whole might result in emergent features such as consciousness or self representation and provide necessary tools for the study of brain disorders such as Alzheimer's or Autism. Finally, robots embedded with such in-silico replication of the brain might not only be more efficient in communicating, showing emotions and planning, they will also serve as essential testbeds to better understand what's happening in our head.

In this episode of Talking Robots we speak with Yoky Matsuoka who is the director of the Neurobotics Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Boosted by her nomination as MacArthur Fellow she has been recognized as a leader in the emerging field of neurobotics. With her team, she's been focused on understanding how the central nervous system coordinates musculoskeletal action and how robotic technology can enhance the mobility of people with manipulation disabilities.

In this episode of Talking Robots we talk to Cynthia Breazeal who is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at the Media Lab. With her creaturoids, animoids, humanoids and robotized objects, Breazeal has been working to make robots and humans team up in a human-centric way, work together as peers, and learn from one another. Breazeal's work includes personal robots such as the very expressive Kismet, the Huggable™ robot teddy, Leonardo the social creature and the MDS (Mobile/ Dextourous/Social ) humanoid robot.

In this episode we interview Kerstin Dautenhahn who is Research Professor in the School of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences at University of Hertfordshire in the UK, where she is a coordinator of the Adaptive Systems Research Group. Autism is a developmental disorder affecting around 91 people in every 10,000, mainly causing difficulties in social interactions, communication and imagination. Using therapy robots in the AuRoRA project, Dautenhahn has been pushing autistic children to learn essential social skills such as turn taking, joint attention and imitation. Armed with a lot of patience and zeal, her team has been adapting their robots and therapy sessions to each individual child, whether it's about playing with wheeled robots or Dautenhahn's toddler-sized Kaspar humanoid. She also presents her new project on Interactive RObotic social MEdiators as Companions (IROMEC) which looks at how autistic children can learn to cooperate and interact with each other through the

In this episode we interview Frederic Kaplan. After ten years of research at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, he is now researcher at the CRAFT at the EPFL in Lausanne Switzerland where he supervises a new team focusing on interactive furniture and robotic objects. From curious AIBO robots to interactive robot computers and furniture, he has been exploring technologies permitting to endow objects with a personal history so that they become different as we interact with them and to learn from one another, thus creating an ecosystem in perpetual evolution.

In this episode we interview Brad Nelson who is the Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zürich. At the root of BioMicroRobotics, Nelson has designed microrobots for retinal surgery applications. Pushing the principle of "embodiment" to the extreme, he's by embedding the intelligence of his robot within their physical body. In the end, their shape, material and physical properties allow them to interact with the environment and subsequently harvest energy, perform sensing, and navigate through the human body. Using similar principles, Nelson's lab won the 2007 RoboCup Nanogram Competition, the first year the event was held. The goal was to use autonomous microrobots smaller than 300μm to perform a series of soccer related tasks.

In this episode we interview Inman Harvey who is researcher at the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex and faculty of the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group at the same university. With his background in Philosophy and Robotics, he has been tackling fundamental questions on how not to design Good Old Fashion Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (GOFAIR), addressing issues such as the need for representation or embodiment. He emphasizes the influence of the philosophical position of roboticists when designing autonomous robots and discusses the lack of meaning or motivation to survive in today's robots. Finally, he presents artificial evolution as an approach to the design of complex systems following his own “philosophy of the mind”.

In this podcast we interview Robin Murphy who is a founder and international leader in both rescue robotics and human-robot interaction, and was recognized by TIME Magazine in 2004 as an innovator in artificial intelligence. As the Director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) at the University of South Florida she was the first to introduce ground, air, and sea robots to disaster response, participating in the World Trade Center disaster (2001), La Conchita, CA, mudslides (2005), Hurricanes Charley (2004), Dennis (2005), Katrina (2005), and Wilma (2005), and the Newmont Midas (2007) and Crandall Canyon (2007) mine disasters.

In this interview we talk to Roland Siegwart who is Full Professor at the Autonomous Systems Lab at the ETH Zurich. Based on his experience with the 18 robots he's created, he shares his know-how on autonomous robotics and the research which is being done on robot navigation/localization and mapping.

In this interview we talk to Gianmarco Veruggio who founded the association Scuola di Robotica in Genova (Italy) to study the complex relationship between Robotics and Society. This led him to coin the term and propose the concept of Roboethics, or the field of Ethics applied to robotics. He discusses topics such as the use of robots in our everyday environments, the lethality and benefits of medical robots or military robots, augmented humans and robots as human-like artifacts. Should we start thinking like Asimov, deriving laws and limits to apply for the peaceful cohabitation of humans and robots?

In this episode we talk to José Halloy who is researcher at the Unit of Social Ecology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He presents the work done in the scope of the LEURRE project on the self-organization of hybrid groups of animals and artificial artifacts. Recently presented in one of the most renowned journals "Science", Halloy describes how insect-like robots can influence a group of cockroaches into collectively selecting a light shelter instead of the dark one they usually crave. A splash of perfume and a good behavioral model is what it takes to interact with what Maeterlinck called the "mind of the hive" or in this case, the collective intelligence of the cockroach society.

In today's episode we talk to Tandy Trower, a 26-year Microsoft veteran who is now the General Manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group. In this year's January edition of Scientific American, Bill Gates predicted a "Robot in Every Home" after having told Tandy Trower "to go on an extended fact-finding mission and to speak with people across the robotics community". As a result, Microsoft launched their "Robotics Studio" in 2006 without losing a split second. Tandy Trower tells what it's all about, why Microsoft is interested in robotics, if we'll ever see anything close to open source and if we are we really going towards a robot in every home.

In this interview we talk to Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman who is director of The Neurosciences Institute in California and professor at The Scripps Research Institute. He presents his theory of Neural Darwinism and the brain-based devices that are working away to prove its consistency through demonstrations of learning and episodic memory. What’s the next big step? The implementation of conscious artifacts, thanks to the study of the underlying biological process.

In this episode we talk to Henrik Lund who is the director of the AdapTronics Group at the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute at the University of Southern Denmark. He just recently launched the Center for Playware in the same institute which has recently received wide media attention (Wired, NewScientistTech, CNN) for motivating kids and adults to play on his interactive playgrounds and therapy tiles. Henrik also explains how he is inspiring Tanzanian children to become inventors and engineers with the AfroBot project.

In this episode we talk to Ron Fearing who is the director of the Biomimetic Millisystem Laboratory at UC Berkeley in California. He presents the state of the art in aerial insect-size flapping robots with the Micromechanical Flying Insect (MFI) project and the challenges in designing millisystems, from autonomy and control in turbulent environments to hardware. Thanks to his know-how with the “tiny” he's also been designing tools and kits for the rapid-prototyping of miniature robots of all types which might one-day be used in high-school science classes, or is it art?

In this episode we talk to Michael Arbib who is the Fletcher Jones professor of computer science, as well as a professor of biological sciences, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, neuroscience and psychology at the University of Southern California where he is also the director of the USC Brain Project. He's been inspiring roboticists around the world with his research in neuroscience especially on mirror systems. He gives us insight as to why we cry at the movies and how imitation and language acquisition might have came about in humans or monkeys. From the neurons to the machines and from "faked" emotions to real ones, he gives us his view on robots today and tomorrow.

In this episode we interview Rudolf Bannasch from the Technical University in Berlin, Germany. Thanks to his background in biology, his many trips to the poles and his know-how in engineering, he's been able to pinpoint the principles found in nature which can provide the basis for novel solutions to everyday technical problems. With his bio-inspiration as a drive, he's creating new products through his startup Evologics and encouraging bionic design through European networks.

In this episode we interview Sebastian Thrun who is the director of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) in California. He tells us how he won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge along with the Stanford Racing Team and Stanley the robot car using his secret ingredient, probabilistic robotics. He prepares us for a future where autonomous cars zigzag through traffic, bringing children, the elderly and workers to their destination in a safe and efficient manner.