Robots for the Rest of Us Podcast
Episodes
What Does a Humanoid Robot Do? I Asked a Humanoid Robot
22 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I am at ICRA – the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, aka 7,000 roboticists from all over the world converging to discuss eve...
The Work AI Can't Help With
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why hasn’t workplace artificial intelligence made life easier for everyone? Some surveys see a vast majority of employees saying AI adds to their wo...
How to Manage AI Therapists, Robot Friends, AI Ghosts
16 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most people agree there’s something wrong with an AI pretending to be a human being. And especially wrong about an AI telling you it’s a human the...
Before AI Permeates Our Lives, We Need a New Deal for Privacy
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Data scientist Wes Chaar was at home a few years ago, working with the tools of his trade, when he had an “aha!” moment. He realized the informati...
Sometimes You Just Need a Robot to Scratch That Spot You Can't Reach
13 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We’re an aging society, with a shortage of young-ish people to do the work, paid and unpaid, of helping others get through life. (Immigration crack...
Making the Robots People Actually Need
17 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Robot-makers often test the limits of the possible and make ingenious new technology. Can we make this? Can we make it do that twice as fast? Robot us...
How 'Acting Human' Is Like Human Acting
28 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
People often see double when they see a robot. They know it’s just a collection of metal and plastic parts. And they think it might be sad after wor...
When You Can't Talk to Me, Talk to "Me"
08 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Soon, AI companies expect to be selling “agents” — AIs that reserve tickets, cancel subscriptions and take other actions for their users. The co...
To Understand Robots, Get a Horse
13 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Eakta Jain’s urban, engineering-centric New Delhi childhood, the closest she got to intimacy with living things was watering the plants. Even the...
Just Human-ish Enough for the Job
11 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Moxi is a human-sized wheeled robot that’s built to do hospital chores. It’s made by Diligent Robotics to free nurses and other staff to spend mor...
To Understand a Robot, Teach It to Make Art
24 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How should we see robots as they roll (or walk, or fly, or swim) into our lives? As animals to train? Children to guide? Loyal servants? Amiable frien...
There Is No Apolitical Robot
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Decades before Karel Čapek coined the word "robot" in 1920, Americans and Europeans already dreamed of mechanical workers. Actually, they weren’t j...
To Design Better Robots, You Have to Imagine a Better World
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When robots were simpler it might have been reasonable to talk about them with generalizations about "people," "needs" and "experiences." But now robo...
The Best Robot? One You Don't Notice
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How do you make a robot that people will actually want to use? That is, a robot that they understand without having to take a three-day training cours...
Levatas' Chris Nielsen on ChatGPT in Robots, Measuring Trees from Orbit, Robot Hype Cycles and Much More
31 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Not long after ChatGPT was unleashed on the public, engineers at Levatas started tinkering with ways to incorporate it into the robots they furnish to...
Kenneth Y. Goldberg: artist, engineer, inventor, entrepreneur & AI researcher
12 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In his younger days Ken Goldberg had two versions of his CV: One for his wide-ranging work in robotics and artificial intelligence, another for his eq...
Electric Sheep's Naganand Murty
01 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Most robots do badly in unpredictable situations. I’ve seen a dexterous robot stop its assembly work because a piece of plastic didn’t land precis...
Jonathan Hurst of Agility Robotics
14 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For the past century, humans have imagined people-like robots but used robots that didn’t look like people at all. Only science-fiction people have ...