Robohub Podcast

#263: ICRA 2018 Exhibition, with Juxi Leitner, Nicholas Panitz, Ben Wilson and James Brett

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Juxi Leitner, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at QUT; and Nicholas Panitz, Ben Wilson, and James Brett, from CSIRO. Leitner speaks about the Amazon Picking challenge, a challenge to advance the state of robotic grasping, and their robot which won the challenge in 2017. Their robot is similar to a cartesian 3D printer in form and uses either a suction cup or a pinch gripper for grabbing objects. Their robot has a depth camera and uses a digital scale to determine if an object has been picked up successfully. Leitner discusses what their team did differently from other teams that helped them win the competition. Panitz, Wilson, and Brett speak about their hexapod robots. Their hexapods are for several purposes, such as environmental monitoring and remote inspection. They choose to use hexapods because they are statically stable. They discuss the design of their hexapods and how research works at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO.

#262: Cassie, a Bipedal Robot for Research and Development, with Jonathan W. Hurst

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Jonathan W. Hurst, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State University and CTO and co-founder of Agility Robotics, about legged locomotion, about a bipedal robot, called "Cassie." Hurst discusses Cassie's design, what types of research questions Cassie should allow, and applications of walking robots, including package delivery. 

#261: Cozmo, by Anki, with Andrew Neil Stein

In this episode, Abate interviews Andrew Stein from Anki. At Anki they developed an engaging robot called Cozmo which packs sophisticated robotic software inside a lifelike, palm sized, robot. Cozmo recognizes people and objects around him and plays games with them. Cozmo is unique in that a large amount of development has been implemented to make his animations and behavior feel natural, in addition to focusing on classical robotic elements such as computer vision and object manipulation.

In this interview, Audrow Nash speaks with Sangin Park, Senior Research Engineer at Hyundai, about exoskeletons. Park describes three exoskeleton prototypes: one for helping workers reduce back pain, one for assisting a person with paraplegia, and an exoskeleton for soldiers. Park discusses the sensors and actuators of each exoskeleton, as well as Hyundai's exoskeleton ambitions.

#260: Hyundai’s Exoskeletons, with Sangin Park

In this episode Andrew Vaziri speaks with Nicolas Economou, CEO of the eDiscovery company H5 and co-founder and chair of the Science, Law and Society Initiative at The Future Society, a 501c3 think tank incubated at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Economou discusses how AI is applied in the legal system, as well as some of the key points from the recent “Global Governance of AI Roundtable”. The roundtable, hosted by the government of the UAE, brought together a diverse group of leaders from tech companies, governments, and academia to discuss the societal implications of AI.

#259: AI and the Law, with Nicolas Economou

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Michael Laskey, PhD student at UC Berkeley, about a method for robust imitation learning, called DART. Laskey discusses how DART relates to previous imitation learning methods, how this approach has been used for folding bed sheets, and on the importance of robotics leveraging theory in other disciplines.

#258: DART: Noise injection for robust imitation learning, with Michael Laskey

In this interview, Audrow speaks with Andrea Bajcsy and Dylan P. Losey about a method that allows robots to infer a human’s objective through physical interaction. They discuss their approach, the challenges of learning complex tasks, and their experience collaborating between different universities.

#257: Learning Robot Objectives from Physical Human Interaction, with Andrea Bajcsy and Dylan P. Losey

#256: Socially Assistive Robots, with Maja Matarić