Linda Thayer is a unicorn among intellectual property attorneys—a blend of experienced litigator and patent portfolio strategist, with deep knowledge in both patent law and multiple complex technologies. Linda excels at guiding high tech clients in developing strong intellectual property portfolios and defending their patent assets before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and in federal courts.

David Johan Christensen is the CEO & Co Founder at Shape Robotics, creator of the Fable robot- an educational modular robot system for teaching STEM and 21st century skills to students ranging from 3nd grade to university.

Davis is a researcher and entrepreneur within the area of robotics. Based on years of research, I co-founded Shape Robotics with the vision to develop the world's best educational robotics system.

His research within the area of modular and distributed robotics for playful interaction, self-reconfiguration, adaptive locomotion, education, neurorehabilitation and underwater inspection. On the practical side, he has developed control strategies for self-reconfiguration, locomotion and learning. On the theoretical side, he has explored basic issues regarding scalability and morphology design.

His research interests include: modular robots, self-reconfigurable robots, self-assembly, robot locomotion, rapid robot prototyping, distributed control, self-organizing and emergent control, bio-inspired control, evolutionary algorithms, artificial neural networks, reinforcement learning, learning by demonstration, programming by building, stochastic optimization, central pattern generators, behavioral adaptation, morphological adaptation, scalability, complexity, swarm robotics, human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence and artificial life.

Franziska Kirstein is a human-robot interaction expert at Blue Ocean Robotics ApS in Odense, Denmark. Her responsibilities are execution of EU-funded projects, in particular projects with relation to Human-Robot Interaction. She's also involved in development projects in user studies, user needs analysis and user testing.

Justin Werfel is a senior research scientist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where he works on topics in complex and emergent systems, including swarm robotics, termite behavior, engineered molecular nanosystems, and evolutionary theory. He lead s the Designing Emergence Laboratory, and works closely with a number of other collaborating labs.

Jana Tumova is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Robotics, Perception, and Learning (RPL) at the School of Computer Science and Communication at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Aseem Prakash is a global futurist whose work focuses on AI and the concept of coexisting with robots. Prakash works at the Center for Innovating the Future, and has worked on numerous projects internationally.

Erin Bishop has worked in companies developing telepresence robots, indoor mobile robots, and robotic picking in warehouses. One of these companies, Industrial Perception, Inc., was acquired by Google in 2013. She oversees the business development, product management, and go-to-market strategy.

Erin has a broad understanding of the robot product discovery stack: including machine learning, user experience, human-robot interaction, industrial design, mechanical design, design for manufacturing, and systems.

Dan Kara is Vice President at WTWH Media, a media company that serves engineering, business and investment professionals through 40+ web sites, 5 print publications, along with many other technical and business events.

The network includes The Robot Report, an online technical, business and investment news and information portal focused on robotics and intelligent systems, as well as the Robotics Summit Conference and Exposition, which addresses the technical issues involved with the design, development, manufacture and delivery of commercial robotics and intelligent systems products and services.

Dan talks about how a trip to Japan made him start Robotics Trends & RoboBusiness. He also shares his views on what is going on in robotics.

Like many others, Dan found robotics early in science fiction. When he was looking for a new challenge, having left the IT industry, a trip to Robodex in Japan inspired him to start Robotics Trends & RoboBusiness.

We hear how the focus has shifted from military applications in the early 2000s to more and more consumer focused progress.

Agility in production is also discussed as consumer demand pushes manufacturers to refocus from large scale production of similar items to more customer focused production.

Daniel Lofaro talks about how he works hard to make things easier and how co-robotics are the way forward, and how bringing cost down cost and better AI is critical for this.

He talks about how robotics needs a “killer app”, something that makes it compelling enough for the customer to take the step of welcoming a robot into the business or home.

Daniel also discusses creating an ecosystem of robots and apps, and how competitions can help do this.

Craig Schlenoff talks about ontologies and the significance of formalized knowledge for agile robotics systems that can quickly and even automatically adapt to new scenarios. Host: Per Sjöborg, Robots in Depth #9 supported by http://www.aptomica.com.

To make robotics systems more agile and easily adaptable to new tasks is very important for robotics to expand beyond large manufacturing settings. Small organizations using robots have new and different needs. They need the robots they use to more easily adapt to their quickly changing needs. Good ontologies and formalized knowledge makes this possible. It might even make it possible to automate the automation.