Mel Torrie, is the founder and CEO of ASI, Autonomous Solutions Inc. He talks about how ASI develops a diversified portfolio of vehicle automation systems across multiple industries. Host: Per Sjöborg, Robots in Depth #7 supported by http://www.Aptomica.com

ASI often collaborates with OEM’s, leveraging already existing vehicles and adding their automation expertise. Mel also talks about his goal of growing a great company for the long haul and shares how they survived the 2008 crisis.

View the interview to find out how the Google self-driving car has helped ASI gain traction!

Andra Keay is the Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, non-profit industry group supporting innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. Andra is also founder of the Robot Launch global startup competition and a mentor, investor and advisor to startups, accelerators and think tanks, with a strong interest in commercializing socially positive robotics and AI.

Andra co-founded Robohub, the global robotics research news site, building on her background in film, television and media production, internet and computing technologies, with degrees in Interaction, Communication and Human/Robot Cultural Studies.

She also co-founded Robot Garden, a robotics makerspace and teaches Interaction Design and Theory. Andra has a particular interest in understanding diversity and representation in robotics and AI and started the Women in Robotics community.

In this podcast, Andra discusses opportunities and challenges for startups in robotics, and what is going on in the robotics community.

She talks to our host Per Sjöborg about how her organization Silicon Valley Robotics was formed and what they do. One example of networking events they organize is the annual Robot Block Party.

Andra also shares her views on the areas of robotics where we will see significant developments in the near future. Further, Andra and Per discuss how developments in for example agricultural robotics can feed improvements in other industries, including home robots.

Michael Rubenstein describes how he has taken his robotics research from theory into practice by building cheap and small robots, 1024 of them to be exact.

Michael is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering departments at Northwestern University.

His research interest is to advance the control and design of multi-robot systems, enabling their use instead of traditional single robots and to solve problems for which traditional robots are not suitable. Using these multi-robot systems can offer more parallelism, adaptability, and fault tolerance when compared to a traditional single robot. He is also interested in investigating how new technologies will allow for more capable multi-robot systems, and how these technologies impact the design of multi-robot algorithms, especially as these systems begin to number in the hundreds, thousands, or even millions of robots.

Michael received his PhD from the University of Southern California in Computer Science. After his PhD, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard University. He completed his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Purdue University.

Michael first talks to our host Per Sjöborg about his PhD research in algorithms for modular self-reconfigurable robots, at the University of Southern California for Dr. Wei-Min Shen.

He then shares his work on the Kilobot project and some of the challenges involved with building 1024 robots and how you can learn different things from actually building the robots than from a simulation. This project helped him fine-tune the algorithms from his earlier research.

By working on Kilobot, Michael also learned how to make cheap robots, which fits the educational market well. He talks about this and the robots he has created that can be programmed by school children at robotics summer camps.

The Kilobot work was done in the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard University. Michael is now faculty at Northwestern University

Valery Komissarova, Business Development Director at Grishin Robotics, talking about working at an investment company focused on consumer robotics.

In this episode of Robots in Depth, Valery describes why the timing for starting Grishin Robotics was just right and shares some of the initial feedback from different parts of the robotics community. She also talks about differences between the companies that get funded and the ones that don’t, what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur in robotics and the areas within consumer robotics where we are likely to see strong development in the next few years.

Tully Foote from the Open Source Robotics Foundation explains the benefits of open source in robotics and how ROS came to be an open standard.

In this episode of Robots in Depth Per Sjöborg interviews Tully Foote from the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

Tully explains the benefits of open source and how it helps make research and development more efficient. Both researchers and start-ups can focus on their added part, rather than starting from scratch. This is an advantage for the whole robotics community, enabling it to move forward much faster.

Tully also describes how developers can contribute directly to further developing the ROS standard, for the benefit of the robotics community.

Tully Foote is ROS Platform Manager at the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

Tully Foote is a computer programmer and ROS Platform Manager at the Open Source Robotics Foundation (ROS) which is widely used in the development of robots. A mechanical engineer by training, Foote is also the co-creator of the TurtleBot — an open source personal robot kit.

In this interview of Robots in Depth, the host Per Sjöborg speaks to professor of computer science at McGill University, Gregory Dudek about the field of robotics.

They discuss air, surface and underwater vehicles, reviewing challenges as well as how to best use these vehicles, both individually and as a collaborative team of robots.

Professor Dudek is Research Director of the McGill Mobile Robotics Lab. His research area's are autonomous navigation, robots that learn, mobile robotics, machine learning, robot localization, information summarization, human-robot interaction, sensor-based robotics, multi-robot systems, computer vision, marine robotics, self-driving vehicles, and recognition.

His research deals with sensing for robots and has included theoretical work on the complexity of robot localization and the development of underwater and amphibious robots. He has worked on the use of topological maps and the complexity of topological mapping, an abstract idealized form of robotics problem. He has also looked at robot position estimation using photographic data, and the automated detection of interesting images.

With his colleagues he produced the first formal proof of the complexity of global robot localization in a metric environment (i.e. how hard it is, in the worst possible case, for a robot to determine its position if it totally lost).

Gregory has a wide range of research interests that all have the common theme of robotics. He works with students in the Mobile Robotics Lab (MRL) at McGill on many problems involving aspects of artificial perception, robot navigation, sample theory (e.g. applications of the secretary problem to robotics and recommender systems.

Henrik Christensen shares his views on the impact of the robot revolution and stories from his life in European robotics research.

Henrik talks about how he got started in computer vision and how working with cameras on mobile platforms got him into robotics. We hear about him being part of early EU supported research projects and how that brought him to KTH in Stockholm and the Centre for Autonomous Systems

While at KTH, he worked on early autonomous vacuum cleaners together with Electrolux. This fits well with his desire to both do interesting research and to transform the results into useful applications in the real world.

Henrik also tells us how the European robotics network mailing list led to the creation of robotics roadmaps.

Henrik and Per discusss that when it comes to talking about the robot revolution with the general public, Hollywood is our worst enemy, because the image they portray is usually completely incorrect.

Henrik then shares his views on how the robot revolution will affect the labor market and the environment and also improve the life of the handicapped and elderly. It is a huge opportunity for all, and Per could not agree more.

Peter Corke is well known for his work in computer vision and has written one of the books that define the area. We get to hear about his long and interesting journey into giving robots eyes to see the world.

In this interview, Peter talks about how serendipity made him build a checkers playing robot and then move on to robotics and machine vision. We get to hear about how early experiments with “Blob Vision” got him interested in analyzing images and especially moving images.

The interview ends with Peter adding a new item to the CV, fashion model, when he shows us the ICRA 2018 T-shirt!

Peter Corke FAA is an Australian roboticist known for his work on Visual Servoing, field robotics, online education, the online Robot Academy and the Robotics Toolbox and Machine Vision Toolbox for MATLAB (matrix laboratory).

He is currently director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision, and a Distinguished Professor of Robotic Vision at Queensland University of Technology. His research is concerned with robotic vision, flying robots and robots for agriculture.

Corke is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Field Robotics, and a former member of the executive editorial board of The International Journal of Robotics Research.

Frank Tobe shares his experience from covering robotics in The Robot Report and creating the index Robo-Stox.

Frank Tobe is the owner and publisher of The Robot Report.

After selling his business and retiring from 25+ years as a provider of computer direct marketing and consulting to the Democratic National Committee, major presidential and other campaigns and initiatives, he has energetically pursued a new career in researching and investing in robotics. In 2013 he co-founded Robo-STOX™ LLC (renamed in 2015 to ROBO-Global) and developed a tracking index for the robotics industry: the ROBO-Global™ Robotics & Automation Index.

Frank talks about how and why he shifted to robotics and how looking for an investment opportunity in robotics lead him to start ROBO Global, a robotics focused index company.

Both companies have given Frank a unique perspective on the robotics scene as a whole, over a significant period of time, and we are pleased that he wanted to share some of his insights from that with us.

Spring Berman is an associate professor in at Arizona State University. In this podcast she talks about her extensive experience from research in the field of swarm robotics.

One of the underlying ideas of the area is designing robot controls similar to the ones used in nature by different types of swarms of animals, systems that work without having a leader. We get to hear how many robots can be used together to handle tasks that would not be possible using one or a small number of robots.

We also get introduced to the opportunities of mixing artificial animals with real ones.

Spring describes some of the challenges within swarm robotics, which can be as diverse as mathematical modelling and regulatory issues. She also comments on the next frontier of research and the different research areas that are relevant to advance this area.

This interview was recorded in 2016.