Many of us became familiar with robots through science fiction — R2D2, C3PO, Rosie from the Jetsons, Marvin the Paranoid Android. In comparison, it can feel like the robots we actually interact with today fall a bit short of this imagined future.

In this episode we are joined by Dr Beth Singler, Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at Cambridge University, to discuss the invention and evolution of the robot, as well as the gap between our popular imagination and the technology scrambling to keep up.

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