Mitchell Weiss has a long and distinguished career in the field of robotics with special attention to the field of manufacturing systems and mobile robots and is currently the COO of Piaggio Fast Forward. He is Co-author of Industrial Robotics: Technology, Programming and Applications (1986) and Instructor of automation and robotics courses at the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania State University, and of engineering design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On this episode of the PFF Podcast, he provides an overview of what has changed and what hasn't over the course of three decades and calls special attention to the challenges presented by the development of robots, like PFF's own gita®, that operate in unstructured environments like towns and cities.