Our first guest in the Industrial AI series is Ilia Baranov, engineering manager at Clearpath Robotics. Ilia is responsible for setting the engineering direction for all of Clearpath’s research platforms. Ilia likes to describe his role at the company as “both enabling and preventing the robot revolution.” He’s a longtime contributor to the Open Source Robotics Community and ROS, an open source robotic operating system. He is the also the managing engineer of the PR2 support team at Clearpath and leads the technical demonstration group. In our conversation we cover a lot of ground, including what it really means to field autonomous robots, the use of autonomous robots in research and industrial environments, the different approaches and challenges to achieving autonomy, and much more! The notes for this show are available at twimlai.com/talk/27, and for more information on the Industrial AI Series, visit twimlai.com/IndustrialAI.