Termites, in their roles as construction workers, are simple agents, using only local information, yet they can build complex structures such as termite mounds. Taking inspiration from such swarm systems in nature, Justin Werfel and colleagues have created TERMES robots that build three-dimensional structures without the need for any leader or prescribed roles. In Robots Podcast #153, Sabine speaks with Justin Werfel about this work, which is a project of the Self-organizing Systems Research Group, a core component of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University.
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In episode #152, Robots Podcast does a bit of catching up, combining three interviews relating to last November's EU Robotics Week. In this episode, interviewer Sabine Hauert speaks with Fiorella Operto, the National Coordinator of the EU Robotics Week in Italy and president of the School of Robotics, Douwe Dresscher, a graduate student in robotics and mechatronics at the University of Twente, who was involved in organizing his department's participation in the event, and Roko Tschakarow, Business Director of Mobile Gripping Systems at SCHUNK, who helped organize a robotics challenge for local high-school students as part of EU Robotics Week. (Sabine herself has just taken on a position as a lecturer in robotics at the University of Bristol.)
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As part of Robohub's focus series on Big Deals, in Robots Podcast #151 interviewer AJung Moon talks with Avner Levin, Chair of the Law and Business Department, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, and Director of the Privacy & Cyber Crime Institute. Their conversation ranges widely, but keeps coming back to recent acquisitions on the part of Google, in particular, and whether they represent something to be concerned about from perspective of customer privacy, or even the potential for cyber crime manifesting physically, via robotics. Levin discusses the nature of his own concern, the state of existing law and policy as regards privacy, and the need for government involvement and guidance in this fast-changing, highly competitive environment.
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Before Robohub there was Robots Podcast. Before Robots Podcast there was Talking Robots. Before Talking Robots there was Dario Floreano, a professor at EPFL, with an idea and a handful of graduate students eager to run with it. In episode #150, Robots Podcast goes back to its roots, repeating the combination from the first episode of Talking Robots, of Markus Waibel (now a senior researcher at ETH-Zurich and heavily involved in the RoboEarth project) interviewing Dario Floreano (now also Director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research for Robotics, in addition to being head of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL). All episodes of both Robots Podcast and Talking Robots are available directly from the Robots Podcast website as well as from the iTunes Store.
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In Robots Podcast #149 Per Sjöborg speaks with Rezia Molfino from the PMAR group at University of Genova about how all robots are service robots and some of the many interesting projects she is working on, ranging from challenging manufacturing problems in thin sheet machining (SwarmItFIX) and the textile industry (clopema), to assisted-living vehicles for use in an urban environment (PICAV) and do-it-yourself, practical equipment for demining war zones (Locastra).
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In Robots Podcast #148, Per Sjöborg speaks with Jan Westerhues, Investment Partner with Robert Bosch Venture Capital in Frankfurt, Germany, where he is responsible for robotic investments. Robert Bosch began as an automotive parts firm, but has branched out into other businesses and now has an R&D staff of 15,000 persons. The company's venture capital operation is not an angel investor, and only ever takes a minority position in the companies in which it invests, but, when approached by a company that has already completed the initial phases of identifying a market and defining a product, and has a prototype and a business plan, Westerhues will locate someone within Bosch's R&D staff with the competence to evaluate the prototype, whether it holds the potential to deliver what the company claims for it, and to ‘talk tech’ with the company's own designers and engineers. The ideal situation for Bosch is that in which their own industrial strength can be brought to bear, perhaps supplying parts for the products of the companies in which they invest, but this is not a requirement.
(I listened to this episode five or six times in preparation for this post, and suggest that anyone interested in venture capital funding do likewise.)
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In Robots Podcast #147, Per Sjöborg speaks with Giulio Sandini, director of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences (RBCS) at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), about how, having begun his career as a bioengineer working on how the brain controls the muscles which aim and focus the eye, he eventually came to work in robotics, about why interdisciplinary work is important to robotics, and about how diverse teams of engineers, biologists, psychologists, mathematicians, physicists, and medical doctors can learn from each other. Sandini illustrates the point using examples of successful interdisciplinary efforts at IIT, including the iCub and COMAN humanoid platforms, the HyQ quadruped, and their work in rehabilitation robotics.
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Lynne Parker is Professor and Associate Head in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). At UTK, she is the founder and director of the Distributed Intelligence Laboratory, which performs research in multi-robot systems, sensor networks, machine learning, and human-robot interaction. In this episode, Per Sjöborg speaks with Lynne Parker about her work with robot teams.
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In this episode, Sabine Hauert interviews Paul Oh, Director of the Drexel Autonomous Systems Lab at Drexel University. His team, spanning 10 universities, is competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) with the HUBO humanoid made by KAIST in South Korea.
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In this episode, AJung Moon talks with Julie Carpenter, who recently received her doctorate in Educational Psychology from the University of Washington, having written her dissertation on the interaction between military Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) personnel and the robots they use in investigating suspicious objects and rendering explosives harmless – primarily PackBots from iRobot and TALONS from QinetiQ. More generally, Julie is interested in emotional attachment issues in human-robot interaction, and how it affects user decision-making in collaborative, sometimes stressful, situations.
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David Dorhout is a graduate of Iowa State University. He has always been interested in robotics and 14 years of experience in agriculture and the biotech industry. He is the founder of Dorhout R&D LLC which is a research and development business designing and building novel robotic systems and interactive consumer electronic devices. In this episode, Ron Vanderkley speaks with David about his robots that include Prospero the robot farmer and Aquarius the greenhouse watering robot. This episode of Robots Podcast is part of Robohub's focus series on agricultural robotics.
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Howdy, robot fans, I'm back and have a ton of robot news waiting to roll out! So what better way to start than with a quick news roundup? Here we go...
Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. Don't forget to follow us on twitter and Facebook. And now you can add us to your Google+ circles too.
“In this episode Sabine Hauert speaks with Jorge Heraud, CEO of California-based startup Blue River Technology which brings together computer vision and robotics to automate agriculture. Their first robot LettuceBot targets the state’s #1 vegetable crop. Its task is to thin rows of lettuce in fields. This involves selectively removing some of the plants by spraying excess fertilizer on them, thereby avoiding overcrowding while fertilizing nearby plants. The tractor-mounted robot is already being rented out to farms across the state.” (This podcast episode is part of Robohub's focus series on agricultural robotics.)
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Kendra Kerrisk, a member of the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the The University of Sydney, developed a strong interest in the dairy industry while a student at Massey University in New Zealand, an interest which she continued to pursue during her doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne. Following that, she worked for Dexcel (formerly Dairying Research Corporation and now merged with Dairy InSight as DairyNZ), in New Zealand, on the world’s first pasture-based automatic milking system (AMS) research farm. She has contributed significantly to the body of knowledge regarding automatic milking systems in a pasture-fed diary context. As AMS Research Leader within the FutureDairy program, she has also contributed to the development of the world's first robotic rotary (Automatic Milking Rotary).
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In this episode interviewer Sabine talks with Nils Napp from the Self-organizing Systems Research Group at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. Napp tells us about his project to create robots that can reliably build structures in uncertain, unstructured terrain. Just as termites can build complex structures using shapeless materials like mud, his robots build structures out of foam, toothpicks or bags of sand. As a first example, he’s been working on ramp building in chaotic environments remnant of disaster scenarios.
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Diana Saraceni is a venture capitalist at 360 Capital Partners. In this interview she talks with Per about her first robotics investment, 3 years ago in Invendo Medical, and her views on how the market has changed since then. Hardware is now perceived as less risky, even though it is more challenging to scale than software. Recent success stories have further helped promote VC funding in robotics. Saraceni discusses the importance of the founding team, as well as their advisors, for the success of a company. Finally, she shares her view on open source vs. proprietary technology from a venture capitalist’s perspective.
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In episode #136, Sabine speaks with Matthew Schroyer, founder of the Professional Society of Drone Journalists (PSDJ) and co-founder of Drones for Good. Matthew has a Master’s in journalism from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he works on the National Science Foundation grant called EnLiST, which offers entrepreneurial leadership training and professional development for K-12 STEM teachers. For EnLiST he has initiated the “Drones for Schools” program, which teaches core science and engineering concepts behind unmanned aerial systems.
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“As Director of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory in CSIRO's ICT Centre [Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Information and Communication Technologies], Dr. Roberts leads more than 45 scientists and engineers. Research in this laboratory spans robotics, computer vision and pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks. Dr. Roberts' particular research interest is in robot guidance systems so robots – including flying robots – can operate autonomously in unstructured and dynamic outdoor environments.” (From Dr. Roberts' page on the ICT website) Dr. Roberts was interviewed by Ron Vanderkley.
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Scientists have long pondered the question of how and where the brain stores episodic memories, complex associations of objects, space and time. MIT research led by Susumu Tonegawa reveals new details of the location of both actual memories and artificially induced false memories within the hippocampus of a mouse brain. The image above shows the mouse's memory traces in red. Not surprisingly, the brain demonstrated exactly the same neural mechanisms for storage of real and false memories. So how are the memory associations made?
These associations are encoded by chemical and physical changes in neurons, as well as by modifications to the connections between the neurons. Compared to most studies that treat the brain as a black box while trying to access it from the outside in, this is like we are trying to study the brain from the inside out. The technology we developed for this study allows us to fine-dissect and even potentially tinker with the memory process by directly controlling the brain cells.
It has been suspected that memories were located in the temporal lobe since the 1940s when researchers discovered that electrical stimulation of the region caused patients to spontaneously recall past events. But proof of this theory had to wait until it was possible to demonstrate that the activation of specific hippocampal cells was sufficient to produce memories. The MIT researchers are using a new technique called Optogenetics to do just that. Understanding how biological memory works may lead to new breakthroughs in machine learning. Unfortunately the MIT paper is pay-walled but the abstract is available.
