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

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.