All posts by Robot Talk

Claire chatted to Keenan Wyrobek from Zipline about drones for delivering life-saving medicine to remote locations.

Keenan Wyrobek is co-founder and head of product and engineering at Zipline, the world’s first drone delivery service whose focus is delivering life-saving medicine to the most difficult to reach places on earth. Prior to Zipline, Keenan was a co-founder and director of the Personal Robotics Program at Willow Garage. He was involved in launching the Robot Operating System (ROS) and shipping PR2, the first personal robot for software R&D. Keenan has spent years delivering high tech products to market across a range of fields including consumer electronics and medical robotics.

Claire chatted to Isabella Fiorello from the University of Freiburg about plant-inspired robots made from living materials.

Isabella Fiorello is a Junior Group Leader and Principal Investigator of the Bioinspired Plant-hybrid Materials group at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She has a Master’s Degree in Industrial Biotechnology from the University of Turin in Italy and a PhD in Biorobotics from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy. Her research focusses on the development of biologically-inspired microfabricated living materials able to precisely interact with complex unstructured surfaces for applications in precision agriculture, smart fabrics, space, and soft robotics.

Claire chatted to Christos Bergeles from King’s College London about micro-surgical robots to deliver therapies deep inside the body.

Christos Bergeles received his PhD in Robotics from ETH Zurich in Switzerland in 2011. As a Professor at King’s College London, he directs the “Robotics and Vision in Medicine Lab” whose mission is to develop micro-surgical robots that deliver regenerative therapies deep inside the human body. He holds funding for the development of instrumentation that delivers stem cells to diseased retinal layers in the eye. He and his team are very active in public engagement and patient involvement activities, such as New Scientist Live and the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.

Claire chatted to Mini Rai from Orbit Rise about orbital and planetary robots.

Mini Rai is the founding Director of Orbit Rise Ltd and an honorary Professor at the University of Lincoln. Previously, she was the Global Chair in Robotic Engineering at the University of Lincoln and an Associate Professor at the Surrey Space Centre. Mini has over 27 years of research and innovation experience in Space Engineering and Technology. With deep-rooted expertise in robotics, automation, control and systems engineering, she has led a large and diverse portfolio of national and international programmes on space robotic missions, spanning orbital and planetary robotics.

Claire chatted to Joe Wolfel from Terradepth about autonomous submersible robots for collecting ocean data.

Joe Wolfel is the CEO and founder of Terradepth. He is passionate about helping people make better and faster decisions regarding what we do (and don’t do) in the ocean. Terradepth designs and builds ocean-going robots at scale, deploys them, and delivers data through an ocean data platform tailored for the maritime community. Prior to Terradepth, Joe has helped start a couple other companies, worked as a management consultant, and served as a US Navy SEAL officer with deployments throughout the Middle East and Africa. Joe was educated at the US Naval Academy.

Claire chatted to Gabriella Pizzuto from the University of Liverpool about intelligent robotic manipulators for laboratory automation.

Gabriella Pizzuto is a Lecturer in Robotics and Chemistry Automation at the University of Liverpool. She is also a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow and ECR Co-Chair on the EPSRC AI Hub in Chemistry. She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, where she was also a Marie-Sklodowska Curie early stage researcher and a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh and Italian Institute of Technology. She was then a postdoctoral research associate at the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, prior to joining the University of Liverpool.

Claire chatted to Pratap Tokekar from the University of Maryland about how teams of robots with different capabilities can work together.

Pratap Tokekar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, and an Amazon Scholar. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the GRASP lab of University of Pennsylvania and later, an Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech. He has a degree in Electronics and Telecommunication from the College of Engineering Pune in India and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. He received the Amazon Research Award in 2022, and the NSF CAREER award in 2020.

Claire chatted to Maria Elena Giannaccini from the University of Aberdeen about soft and bioinspired robotics for healthcare and beyond.

Maria Elena Giannaccini has a degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Università di Pisa in Italy. She conducted her Master’s thesis at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna as part of the EU-funded OCTOPUS project. In 2015, she obtained her PhD in Robotics at the Bristol Robotics, where she focussed on developing safe, variable stiffness robotic devices. She worked at the University of Bristol on the soft, bioinspired Tactip sensor and a soft robotics artificial larynx. In 2019, Elena was appointed as a Lecturer in Robotics at the University of Aberdeen where she pioneered research in soft robotics.

Claire chatted to Jonathan Walker from Innovate UK about translating robotics research into the commercial sector.

Jonathan Walker is the Innovation Lead for Robotics and Sensors at Innovate UK. He is working with government, universities, businesses and cross-sector teams to accelerate the development and uptake of robotics in the UK. Areas of particular interest are the built environment, circular economy, and helping people live independently for longer. Jonathan wants to support these themes through cluster development, funded collaborative R&D, skills programs from school outreach, apprenticeships and T-levels to CDTs, business support and leveraging private investment.

Claire chatted to Esyin Chew from Cardiff Metropolitan University about service and social humanoid robots in healthcare and education.

Esyin Chew is the Director of the EUREKA Robotics Centre, one of 11 specialist robotics centres in the UK, impacting underprivileged communities with over 120 humanoid robots. She has led million-pound government or industrial-funded global projects across the UK, EU, Australia, Malaysia, China and Indonesia, including the British Council award-winning Global PIE programme for Women in STEAM-H. Esyin has impacted numerous underprivileged communities, particularly girls and women in education and healthcare sectors, refugees and Orang Asli (Indigenous people).

Claire chatted to Matt Beane from the University of California, Santa Barbara about how humans can learn to work with intelligent machines.

Matt Beane conducts field research on robots and AI in the workplace, focusing on positive exceptions applicable to the broader world of work. He has published his award-winning research in top management journals and presented on the TED stage. He’s been recognized as a Human-Robot Interaction Pioneer and named to the Thinkers50 Radar list. Matt is an assistant professor in the Technology Management department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Digital Fellow with Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Claire chatted to Gisela Reyes-Cruz from the University of Nottingham about how humans interact with, trust and accept robots.

Gisela Reyes-Cruz investigates human-computer and human-robot interaction to understand everyday life interactions with technologies, as well as trust in them and public acceptance. These technologies include autonomous and robotic systems: from mobile apps that have, or may have, a component that works autonomously, to robots that can navigate a physical space on their own, such as telepresence robots. The goal of Gisela’s work is to inform responsible system design and design practices.

Claire chatted to John Leonard from Massachusetts Institute of Technology about autonomous navigation for underwater vehicles and self-driving cars.

John Leonard is a Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous underwater vehicles, self-driving vehicles, and other types of mobile robots. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania and PhD in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford. He is a Technical Advisor at Toyota Research Institute.

Robotics is helping to rehabilitate and increase human abilities in areas like mobility and stamina. Innovations in robotic devices, exoskeletons, and wearable tech aim to offer disabled people different perspectives and new experiences, as well as supporting humans more widely to access, inhabit and work safely in dangerous and extreme conditions. What does the future hold for these technologies and the people they will become a part of?

In this special live recording at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of the Great Exhibition Road Festival, Claire chatted to Milia Helena Hasbani (Imperial College London), Benjamin Metcalfe (University of Bath) and Dani Clode (Cambridge University) about robotic prosthetics and human augmentation.

Milia Helena Hasbani is a researcher in assistive technology at Imperial College London. She is passionate about improving people’s lives through innovation in healthcare and technology in multi-disciplinary environments interfacing with engineers, clinicians, and patients. Her research focuses on the control of active prosthetic arms, combining user intention for wrist movements with a computer vision system for dynamically selecting the grasp type to be used. Benjamin Metcalfe is a biomedical engineer who specialises in neural interfaces and implanted devices. He is Head of the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering at the University of Bath and Deputy Director of the Bath Institute for the Augmented Human. He is also Vice-President (Academic) of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine. His interests explore the collision between technology and biology and the extent to which engineering can be used to augment and enhance human performance. Dani Clode is an augmentation and prosthetics designer. She is the Senior Technical Specialist at the Plasticity Lab at Cambridge University and a collaborator of the Alternative Limb Project. Dani’s work investigates the future architecture of our bodies, challenging the perception and boundaries of extending the human form. Her main project the ‘Third Thumb’ is currently being utilised in collaboration with neuroscientists at Cambridge University, investigating the brain’s ability to adapt to human augmentation.

Claire chatted to Simone Schuerle from ETH Zürich all about microrobots, medicine and science.

Simone Schuerle is Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, where she heads the Responsive Biomedical System Lab. With her team, she develops diagnostic and therapeutic systems at the nano- and microscale with the aim of tackling a range of challenging problems in medicine. One major focus of her current research is addressing limitations in drug delivery through scalable magnetically enhanced drug transport. In 2014, she co-founded the spin-off MagnebotiX that offers electromagnetic control systems for wireless micromanipulation.