Claire chatted to Kirstin Petersen from Cornell University about how robots can work together to achieve complex behaviours.

Kirstin Petersen is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Her lab, the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab, is focused on design and coordination of robot collectives able to achieve complex behaviors beyond the reach of an individual, and corresponding studies on how social insects do so in nature.  Petersen did her postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and her PhD at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

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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.

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I 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Check out the fascinating documentary about Terradepth's mission to chart the deep ocean. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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