Robotics podcasts

Ming-Yu Liu, NVIDIA vice president of research and head of the Cosmos Lab, joins Practical AI hosts Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson to discuss AI systems that interact with the physical world. The conversation examines open models, world models and simulation as foundations for robotics and autonomous vehicles, and how research and deployment can advance physical AI. Published 1 October 2026; publisher runtime 47 minutes 19 seconds.

Hosted by Daniel Whitenack, Chris Benson

Andrew Glester explores how drones, robotics and machine learning support wildlife research and conservation. Blair Costelloe discusses the WildDrone and WildBotics networks and the Mara Elephant Project; Camille Rondeau Saint-Jean describes real-time animal monitoring; William Njoroge explains how Ol Pejeta Conservancy combines drones with established conservation methods. The episode considers population data, field constraints, regulation and collaboration across disciplines.

Hosted by Andrew Glester

Chris Smith investigates autonomous transport through a ride on a self-driving bus in Cambridge. In collaboration with the Royal Institute of Navigation, the programme discusses the engineering, operation and navigation of driverless vehicles. Contributors include Nick Bailey, Daniel Clarke, Jamie Wilson, Jim Hutchinson, Ramsey Faragher and Edward Cameron, representing the test service, local transport partnership, vehicle manufacturer, automation supplier and navigation community.

Hosted by Chris Smith

Justin Johnson joins Sam Charrington to discuss world models and spatial artificial intelligence. Topics include representations of three-dimensional environments, simulation and the role of such models in enabling systems to reason about and act within the physical world.

Hosted by Sam Charrington

Luca Pellegrino and Gabriele Intermite discuss a light-responsive synthetic skin inspired by cephalopod camouflage and specialised polymers used in protective clothing. Leonardo Maccari interviews Ion Turcanu about digital twins for autonomous and remote driving, connecting materials research with an applied technology discussion.

Hosted by Luca Pellegrino, Gabriele Intermite

Dhruv Batra connects embodied AI research with browser agents at Yutori. He explains why navigation from pixels to actions links virtual robots and web interaction, then discusses reinforcement learning on live websites, simulation-to-reality gaps and teleoperation. The conversation also examines competing views of intelligence, claims about scaling and the implications of agent-mediated browsing for the web. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.

Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush

Paul Middlebrooks and Patryk Laurent examine how principles drawn from brains could help artificial intelligence learn from the real world. Laurent connects experience in neuroscience and AI with questions about perception, action, prediction and generalization. The conversation considers learning from continuous video, what embodied robotic systems reveal about intelligence, the relationship between language models and other forms of learning, and which biological details may matter when developing more capable AI.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Heinrich Jaeger explains how granular jamming can turn a soft bag of particles into a rigid gripper capable of grasping objects with different shapes. The discussion connects the physics of interacting grains with the design of compliant robots and a universal gripper developed by an interdisciplinary research team. Andrzej Grzesiak then describes a bio-inspired manipulator developed with Festo: additive manufacturing, an elephant-trunk-like arm and a fish-fin-inspired gripping mechanism provide alternatives to conventional rigid industrial manipulators.