In this extended chat with Niamh Donnelly, the award-winning entrepreneur and co-founder of Akara Robotics, we learned even more about the challenges of building robots that can work with humans and went through an extensive breakdown of various robots on the market today, from Roombas to robot dogs to creepy humanoids. We also got Niamh to reveal her favourite robot, exclusively for our HeadStuff+ Community listeners. You're welcome!

Jump to 17:15 for all the stuff that wasn’t in the main episode.

And check out these robots:

— Paro, the ‘therapeutic’ baby seal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJq5PQZHU-I

— The incredible realistic robots are Ameca, from Engineered Arts, and Sophia from Hanson Robotics

— And then there’s Digit, from Agility Robotics

— Here’s the story about the robots who formed a Happy Birthday chorus: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/robot-lawnmowers-sing-happy-birthday-mars-curiosity-rover

— And the one about the pizza-making failure: https://www.outkick.com/robot-pizza-start-up-shuts-down-because-they-couldnt-keep-cheese-from-sliding-off/

— And you may also like to listen back to our sex-tech episode, which did mention a very specific type of robot… https://pod.fo/e/18563d

You can find us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice or let us know what you think via [email protected].

We hope you enjoy this discussion with Niamh as much as we did, and be sure to come back next week for an all-new episode.

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