If we want to create smart, adaptable robots, the first thing they need to be able to do is to sense and understand the world around them.

In this episode, I explore how robots sense and perceive the world around them with help from Matt Watson (Opteran Technologies), Dr Perla Maiolino (University of Oxford) and Dr Dimitrios Kanoulas (University College London).

Matthew T. Watson received a Masters in electronic engineering and a PhD in robotics from the University of Sheffield. In 2019 he joined Opteran Technologies as a senior engineer, helping to advance and bring to market Opteran’s natural intelligence technologies. His research interests include autonomous mobile robot and UAV trajectory planning and tracking, dynamically stable robot locomotion systems, and computationally efficient approaches to combined robot perception and control.

Dr Perla Maiolino is currently Associate Professor at the Engineering Science Department of the University of Oxford and director of the Soft Robotics lab at The Oxford Robotics Institute. She worked at the development of CySkin Technology, an artificial skin for providing robot with sense of touch. This technology has been shown at the Robots exhibition at London Science Museum in 2017. Her research includes the development of tactile sensing technologies for robots, tactile perception and soft robotics.

Dr Dimitrios Kanoulas is a Lecturer in Robotics and Computation at the University College London (UCL), Department of Computer Science, member of the UCL Robotics Institute, and the PI of the Robot Perception and Learning (RPL) lab. His research aims to apply perception and learning in robotics. In particular, he is developing new estimation and planning algorithms for articulated robots that locomote and manipulate in uncertain environments, including real-time methods for sensing, map building, and self/environment modelling.