Robotics podcasts

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

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

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.