Julien Bourgeois talks about self-reconfiguring modular robotics and how he is developing millimeter sized robots called Claytronics. Julien started out as a computer scientist. He was always interested in robotics privately but then had the opportunity to get into micro robots when his lab was merged into the FEMTO-ST Institute. He later worked with Seth Copen Goldstein at Carnegie Mellon on the Claytronics project. He tells us how he works on creating a world built with programmable material that would allow objects to change their form and function automatically by running a program. This w ..read more

Achim  talks about rescue robotics and how he is working with integrating sensors that can work and be useful in this challenging application like gas sensors.  Achim got in to robotics from working in physics when the team hid did his PhD worked on gas sensors and he saw an opportunity to contribute based on his background in physics. He also talks about a strong personal reason for developing gas sensors as a family member was killed in a gas explosion when he was a kid. We also hear more about the challenges in using commercial senors that are intended for lab use and not for fiel ..read more

Cristina talks about the impact off the ever growing set of tasks that robots can perform and that they can start taking taking decisions like humans do.  In 2013 she organized events in Finland during European robotics week and found that many people was very interested but that there was also a big lack of knowledge. She calls of more visions on how we can use robotics to address the challenges society face today. She is especially interested in three areas, Demography, many countries are facing a big change in the numbers of working to non working. Sh ..read more

Michael talks about his work in computer vision for field use in agriculture and recycling.  He started out in computer vision in the agriculture space doing machine vision and 3D reconstruction of plants. He then moved to the Danish Technological Institute when they expanded their work on machine vision for field use in agriculture. Michael worked with a fusion of sensors like stereo vision, thermography, radar, lidar and high frame rate cameras, merging multiple images for high dynamic range. All this to be able to navigate the tricky situation in a farm field where you need to navigate ..read more

Nicole  talks about game theory and how she feels that it is her way to understand the world around her.  Nicole talks about game theory, a way to understand how intelligent agents, humans or machines, interact and optimize their outcome in a particular context. Nicole discusses how this process can be used to create user interactions that are understandable and can be used efficiently. We also hear about how dynamic games apply to robotics and how robots deal with the ever-changing world they act in. Nicole then talks about a trend in market design where large amounts of data about ..read more

Gabriel Skantze talks about how he works with human robot communication, and about how the social robot revolution makes it necessary to communicate with humans in a human ways through speech and facial expressions. This is necessary as we expand the number of people that interact with robots as well as the types of interaction. Gabriel gives us more insight into the many challenges of implementing spoken communication for co-bots, where robots and humans work closely together. They need to communicate about the world, the objects in it and how to handle them. We also get to hear how having an ..read more

Lars Dalgaard shares his experiences developing robots in many different contexts. We hear about Lars’ early work with large mobile robotics in a commercial nursery garden handling the transfer of plants from the greenhouse to the field. He also speaks about the Hydra project a self re-configuring modular robotics project that developed several different modular robotics systems including the Atron system. Lars felt that there was a problem with the process used to introduce robotics and automation into society. Commercialization was hard and unreliable mostly because there was no focus on des ..read more

Harri talks about AI and how he aims to mimic human decision making with algorithms. Harri has done a lot of AI for computer games to create opponents that are entertaining to play against. It is easy to develop a very bad or a very good opponent, but designing an opponent that behaves like a human, is entertaining to play against and that you can beat is quite hard. He talks about how AI in computer games is a very important story telling tool and an important part of making a game entertaining to play. This work led him into other parts of the AI field. Harri thinks that we sometimes have a ..read more

Christian talks about AI and wanting to understand intelligence enough to recreate it. Christian discusses building systems that can interact with humans beyond regular computer interfaces. He started working with computers early, too early for advanced AI. He studied broadly, including philosophy, ethics as well as synthetic and biological neural networks. Christian has found a lot of inspiration in the old papers by Alan Turing and others. He sometimes envies them their opportunity to think big, as they did when they founded the areas of computer science and artificial intelligence. Christia ..read more

Federico talks about AI and how the computer decides what to do and when to do it. Federico finds many interesting research problems combining AI and robotics. Being out in the real world challenges the AI algorithms and makes real physical tasks possible. Federico talks about working on AI and service robotics. In this area he has worked on planning, especially focusing on why a particular goal is the one that the robot should work on. To make robots as useful and user friendly as possible, he works on inferring the goal from the robot’s environment so that the user does not have to tell the ..read more