Robohub Podcast

In this episode, Abate flew to Denver, Colorado, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the future of recycling with Joe Castagneri, the head of AI at Amp Robotics. With Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) processing a staggering 25 tons of trash per hour, robotic sorting is the clear long-term solution. Recycling is a for-profit industry. When the margins don't make sense, the items will not be recycled. This is why Amp's mission to use robotics and AI to bring down the cost of recycling and increase the number of items that can be sorted for recycling is so impactful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxiJLkFl7N0 Joe Castagneri Joe Castagneri graduated with his Master of Science in Applied Mathematics, with an undergrad degree in Physics. While still in university, he first joined the team at Amp Robotics in 2016 where he worked on Machine Learning models to identify recyclables in video streams of Trash in Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs). Today, he is the Head of AI at Amp Robotics where he is changing the economics of recycling through automation.

Nico, Emil, and Moritz founded ReRun with the mission of making powerful visualization tools free and easily accessible for roboticists. Nico and Emil talk about how these powerful tools help debug the complex problem scopes faced by roboticists. Tune in for more. Nikolaus West Co-Founder and CEO Niko is a second-time founder and software engineer with a computer vision background from Stanford. He's fanatic about bringing great computer vision and robotics products to the physical world. Emil Ernerfeldt Co-Founder and CTO Emil fell in love with coding over 20 years ago and hasn't looked back since. He's the creator of egui, an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust, that we're using to build Rerun. He brings a strong perspective from the gaming industry, with a focus on great and blazing fast tools. Links ReRun Download mp3 Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify Support us on Patreon

Conventional sheet metal manufacturing is highly inefficient for the low-volume production seen in the space industry. At Machina Labs, they developed a novel method of forming sheet metal using two robotic arms to bend the metal into different geometries. This method cuts down the time to produce large sheet metal parts from several months down to a few hours. Ed Mehr, Co-Founder and CEO of Machina Labs, explains this revolutionary manufacturing process. Ed Mehr Ed Mehr is the co-founder and CEO of Machina Labs. He has an engineering background in smart manufacturing and artificial intelligence. In his previous position at Relativity Space, he led a team in charge of developing the world's largest metal 3D printer. Relativity Space uses 3D printing to make rocket parts rapidly, and with the flexibility for multiple iterations. Ed previously was the CTO at Cloudwear (Now Averon), and has also worked at SpaceX, Google, and Microsoft. Links Machina Labs Download mp3 Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify Support us on Patreon

Joel Gibbard, co-founder of Open Bionics dives deep into their creative, imagination-capturing prosthetic limbs.

Dr. Tyler Reid, CTO of Xona Space Systems, discusses a new approach to global navigation satellite systems designed for self-driving cars.

Areeb, the co-founder of Glacier, gives some insight into the opaque recycling industry, and why it is unable to handle the volume of recyclable good Americans through out each year.

Deep Learning Indaba is an organization that empowers and builds communities around Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning across Africa. Benjamin Rosman dives into how Deep Learning Indaba is impacting these communities.

Prof Brendan Englot, from Stevens Institute of Technology, discusses the challenges in perception and decision making for underwater robots - especially in the field.

Brady Watkins gives insights into how a large company like Softbank Robotics approaches the Robotics market

Dr. Sihao Sun on his research for controlling a quadcopter after one of its rotors faces a sudden failure. His research takes in real-world assumptions where the quadcopter may already be in a compromised, difficult to correct orientation.

John McConnell discusses the research presented at ICRA 2022 to reduce drift in SLAM algorithms by incorporating overhead satellite imagery.

Sebastian Scherer from CMU's Airlab gives us a behind-the-scenes demo at ICRA of their Autonomous Flight Control AI. Their approach aims to cooperate with human pilots and act the way they would. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPsJ4ArdtTk The team took this approach to create a more natural, less intrusive process for co-habiting human and AI pilots at a single airport. They describe it as a Turing Test, where ideally the human pilot will be unable to distinguish an AI from a person operating the plane. Their communication system works parallel with a 6-camera hardware package based on the Nvidia AGX Dev Kit. This kit measures the angular speed of objects flying across the videos. In this world, high angular velocity means low risk -- since the object is flying at a fast speed perpendicular to the camera plane. Low angular velocity indicates high risk since the object could be flying directly at the plane, headed for a collision. Links Download mp3 (19.3 MB) Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify Support us on Patreon

Yu Sun, previous chair of the Robotics Grasping and Manipulation Competition, speaks on the value that this competition brought to the robotics community.

Bill Smart, one fo the early ICRA Competition Chairs, dives into the high-level decisions involved with creating a meaningful competition.

Dr. Liam Paull, cofounder of the Duckietown competition talks about the only robotics competition where Rubber Duckies are the passengers on an autonomous driving track.

Dr. Carolyn Matl, Research Scientist at Toyota Research Institute, explains why Interactive Perception and soft tactile sensors are critical for manipulating challenging objects such as liquids, grains, and dough.

Joe Speed, VP of Product at ApexAI, dives into the current multi-year development process of bringing a car to market, and how ApexAI will transform this process into the shorter development time we see with modern technology.

Rob Telson dives into the Akida Neural Processor from BrainChip, which is mimicking the five senses from the human brain on a low-powered chip.

Davide Scaramuzza deep dives into Event Cameras, a fundamentally new approach to capturing visual data

Suma Reddy discusses crop transportation with autonomous mobile robots made by Future Acres.

Oleg Shipitko discusses Evocargo's approach to transform the way we transport goods within facilities such as ports and warehouses.

Jakob Foerster, an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, dives into his work on multi-agent reinforcement learning.

Torrey Smith discusses a robot you swallow that livestreams your digestive system for medical procedures such as endoscopies.

Brad Bogolea discusses the innovation behind Tally, the autonomous robot from Simbe Robotics. Tally collects real-time analytics inside retail stores to improve the customer shopping experience, as well as the efficiency of managing the store.

Amit Goel, Director of Product Management for Autonomous Machines at NVIDIA, discusses the new collaboration between Open Robotics and NVIDIA. The collaboration will dramatically improve the way ROS and NVIDIA's line of products such as Isaac SIM and the Jetson line of embedded boards operate together.

Robohub Podcast · Public Transit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgstBxWFFZQ [space] In this episode, our interviewer Lilly speaks to Alex Wallar, co-founder and CTO of The Routing Company. Wallar shares his background in multi-robot path-planning and optimization, and his research on scheduling and routing algorithms for high-capacity ride-sharing. They discuss how The Routing Company helps cities meet the needs of their people, the technical ins and outs of their dispatcher and assignment system, and the importance of public transit to cities and their economics.

Alex Wallar on an algorithmic solution to public transit's limited reach and inefficiency.

Chris Lee on optimal deployment of passenger robots.

Robohub Podcast · Marsupial Robots Lilly interviews Chris Lee, a graduate student at Oregon State University. Lee explains his research on marsupial robots, or carrier-passenger pairs of heterogeneous robot systems. They discuss the possible applications of marsupial robots including the DARPA Subterranean Competition, and some of the technical challenges including optimal deployment formulated as a stochastic assignment problem.

Robohub Podcast · Autonomously Mapping the Seafloor Anthony DiMare and Charles Chiau deep dive into how Bedrock Ocean is innovating in the world of Marine Surveys. At Bedrock Ocean, they are developing an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that is able to map the seafloor autonomously and at a high resolution. They are also developing a data platform to access, process, and visualize data captured from other companies at the seafloor. Bedrock Ocean is solving two problems in the industry of Marine Surveying. 1. The vast majority of the seafloor is completely unmapped 2. The data that is captured from the seafloor is not standardized or centralized. Seafloor data conducted by two different companies with the same or different hardware to capture the data can vary significantly in the calculated seafloor profile Anthony DiMare Anthony previously founded Nautilus Labs, a leading maritime technology company advancing the efficiency of ocean commerce through artificial intelligence. While at Nautilus, Anthony helped global companies solve challenges with distributed, siloed maritime data systems and built the early team that launched Nautilus Platform into large publicly listed shipping companies. Charles Chiau Charles, Bedrock's CTO, was previously at SpaceX where he helped design the avionics systems for Crew Dragon. He also was a system integration engineer at Reliable Robotics working on their autonomous aviation system and was the CTO of DeepFlight where he worked on manned submersibles including ones for Tom Perkins, Richard Branson, and Steve Fossett. Links Download mp3 (48.0 MB) Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify Support us on Patreon

Bedrock Ocean discusses how they are building an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle to map the seafloor, as well as a data platform to standardize the processing and access of seafloor data to be used by the surveying industry at large.

Travis Schneider discusses the human-in-the-loop operation of robotics being developed at RE2 Robotics to operate in rugged outdoor environments.

Robohub Podcast · Mobile Outdoor Manipulation with RE2 Robotics In this episode, Shihan Lu interviews Travis Schneider, Business Development Manager at RE2 Robotics, focusing on their work on mobile outdoor manipulation. Travis introduces several robotic products and services of RE2, including RE2 Sapien robotic arms and human-centered system integration, and how they can be used to help rather than replace workers. He also shares his thoughts about challenges in human-robot collaboration.

Maxime Gariel, CTO of Xwing, discusses the development of an autonomous aircraft for shipping goods on domestic flights.

Robohub Podcast · Autonomous Aircraft Abate talks to Maxime Gariel, CTO of Xwing about the autonomous flight technology they are developing. At Xwing, they are converting traditional aircraft into remotely operated aircraft. They do this by retrofitting planes with multiple sensors including cameras, radar, and lidar, and by developing sensor fusion algorithms to allow their planes to understand the world around them, using highly accurate perception algorithms. Xwing's autonomous flight technology allows a plane to taxi in the airport, takeoff, fly to a destination, avoid airborne and ground threats, and land, all without any human input. This technology not only enables autonomous flight but may also enhance the safety of manned aircraft by improving a plane's ability to understand its surroundings.

Joel Hagberg from Intel RealSense discusses how they built a tightly integrated hardware and software platform to enable robotics companies to get off the ground running with stereo vision.

Robohub Podcast · Intel RealSense Enabling Computer Vision and Machine Learning At The Edge Intel RealSense is known in the robotics community for its plug-and-play stereo cameras. These cameras make gathering 3D depth data a seamless process, with easy integrations into ROS to simplify the software development for your robots. From the RealSense team, Joel Hagberg talks about how they built this product, which allows roboticists to perform computer vision and machine learning at the edge.

Matt Bilksy discusses the FLX BOT, a small customizable and affordable snake-like robot used to maneuver and perform tasks in hard-to-reach places.

Robohub Podcast · Snake-like Robot as a Worker Companion - FLX BOT Matt Bilsky, founder and CEO of FLX Solutions, discusses the snake-like robot he invented called the FLX BOT. The FLX BOT consists of modular links, each with a joint that can extend and rotate to get into tight spaces. Each link includes sensors including inertial measurement units and a camera. The robot is used to navigate and work in challenging environments, such as above ceilings and within walls. Matt discusses the key innovations of his product as well as his academic and entrepreneurial journey that led him to the FLX BOT.

Robohub Podcast · Swarms in Space In this episode, Lilly interviews Giovanni Beltrame, Professor of Computer and Software Engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal where he directs the Making Innovative Space Technology (MIST) lab. Beltrame highlights the technical challenges of exploring another planet with a swarm of robots controlled by an astronaut operator. They discuss minimizing cognitive load for the operator, analog missions to volcanic lava tubes on Earth, and spherical hopping robots for the moon.

Giovanni Beltrame on exploring other planets with a swarm of robots.

Amanda Prorok on multi-robot systems, learned coordination policies, and explainability.

Robohub Podcast · Multi-Robot Learning In this episode, Lilly interviews Amanda Prorok, Professor of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. Prorok discusses her research on multi-robot and multi-agent systems and learning coordination policies via Graph Neural Networks. They dig into her recent work on self-interested robots and finding explainability in emergent behavior.

Tessa Lau discusses the robot from Dusty Robotics that automates the laying of floor plans on the floors in construction sites.

Robohub Podcast · Construction Site Automation Abate interviews Tessa Lau on her startup Dusty Robotics which is innovating in the field of construction. At Dusty Robotics, they developed a robot to automate the laying of floor plans on the floors in construction sites. Typically, this is done manually using a tape measure and reading printed out plans. This difficult task can often take a team of two a week to complete. Time-consuming tasks like this are incredibly expensive on a construction site where multiple different teams are waiting on this task to complete. Any errors in this process are even more time-consuming to fix. By using a robot to automatically convert 3d models of building plans into markings on the floors, the amount of time and errors are dramatically reduced.

Robohub Podcast · Robots-as-a-Service In this episode, Lilly interviews Afshin Doust, CEO of Advanced Intelligent Systems. Doust explains the company's modular, robots-as-a-service subscription business model. They discuss robotic solutions for the agricultural industry, disinfecting robots to combat COVID19, and other exciting new developments at AIS.

Afshin Doust on Advanced Intelligent Systems, Inc. and their UV-disinfecting robots.

Annie Kern discusses the Cybathlon competition where people with disabilities compete doing everyday tasks with advanced assistance systems

Robohub Podcast · Inside Cybathlon Kate speaks with Anni Kern, Head of Communication, strategy, and teams at Cybathlon for over four years. She describes the motivation and concepts for the Cybathlon organizations to develop a common platform to remove barriers between people with disabilities, technology developers, and the public. Anni also describes the specifics of Cybathlon competitions and the organization and planning.

Bernhard Thomaszewski on computational design and digital fabrication.

Robohub Podcast · Computational Design Lilly interviews Bernhard Thomaszewski, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montréal and research scientist at ETH Zurich. Thomaszewski discusses his background in animation at Disney, his current work on mechanical metamaterials and digital fabrication, and how physics-based modeling has connected the dots.