I am happy to announce that Robots Podcast will be renamed to “Robohub Podcast“.
This name change is to avoid confusion about how the podcast and Robohub relate, a question we frequently get. The answer is that they are part of the same effort to connect the global robotics community to the world — and they were founded by many of the same people.
The podcast began in 2006 as “Talking Robots” and was launched by Dr. Dario Floreano at EPFL in Switzerland and his PhD students. Several of those PhD students then went on to launch the “Robots Podcast”, which will celebrate its 250th episode at the end of this year (make sure to check the whole playlist)! Robohub came a few years later as an effort to bring together all the communicators in robotics under one umbrella to provide free, high-quality information about robotics. Robohub has supported the podcast over the years by advising us, making connections for interviews, and sponsoring us to attend conferences.
Going forward, I am happy that our new name will show our close relationship to Robohub, and I look forward to many more interviews.
Happy listening!
Audrow Nash
Podcast Director, Robohub
Chris Gerdes is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, Director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) and Director of the Revs Program at Stanford. His laboratory studies how cars move, how humans drive cars and how to design future cars that work cooperatively with the driver or drive themselves. When not teaching on campus, he can often be found at the racetrack with students, instrumenting historic race cars or trying out their latest prototypes for the future. Vehicles in the lab include X1, an entirely student-built test vehicle, and Shelley, an Audi TT-S capable of turning a competitive lap time around the track without a human driver. Professor Gerdes and his team have been recognized with a number of awards including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Ralph Teetor award from SAE International and the Rudolf Kalman Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Katsu received his PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Tokyo in 2002. Following postdoctoral work at Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2003, he was a faculty member at University of Tokyo until he joined Disney Research, Pittsburgh, in October 2008. His main research area is humanoid robot control and motion synthesis, in particular methods involving human motion data and dynamic balancing. He is also interested in developing algorithms for creating character animation. He has always been fascinated by the way humans control their bodies, which led him to the research on biomechanical human modeling and simulation to understand human sensation and motor control.
Peter Corke is Professor of Robotics and Control at the Queensland University of Technology leading the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision in Australia. Previously he was a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the CSIRO ICT Centre where he founded and led the Autonomous Systems laboratory, the Sensors and Sensor Networks research theme and the Sensors and Sensor Networks Transformational Capability Platform. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation magazine; founding editor of the Journal of Field Robotics; member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Robotics Research, and the Springer STAR series. He has over 300 publications in the field and has held visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Institute, and Oxford University.
Sergey Levine is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on robotics and machine learning. In his PhD thesis, he developed a novel guided policy search algorithm for learning complex neural network control policies, which was later applied to enable a range of robotic tasks, including end-to-end training of policies for perception and control. He has also developed algorithms for learning from demonstration, inverse reinforcement learning, efficient training of stochastic neural networks, computer vision, and data-driven character animation.
Dr. Bradley Knox is the founder of bots_alive. He researched human-robot interaction, interactive machine learning, and artificial intelligence at the MIT Media Lab and at UT Austin. At MIT, he designed and taught Interactive Machine Learning. He has won two best paper awards at major robotics and AI conferences, was awarded best dissertation from UT Austin’s Computer Science Department, and was named to IEEE’s AI’s 10 to Watch in 2013.