Robot Talk · 18 Mar 2026 · 45m
Dr. Patrick Holthaus, Dr. Nicole Salomons, Dr. Gerard Canal, and Dr. Carolina Fuentes Toro discuss the future of home assistant robots at the Festival of Tomorrow. They explore technical challenges such as navigating cluttered environments, ensuring safety with powerful actuators, and managing user trust through explainability. The panel highlights specific applications including dementia therapy, autism social skills training, and assistive feeding, while noting the lack of cultural research in the Global South.
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Hosts Daniel and Forbode discuss two robotics projects: a pizza-making robot from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and UCSD that uses a teacher-student AI framework to learn dough manipulation, and an autonomous wheelchair study by EPFL that highlights safety risks and the need for assisted navigation in crowds. They analyze the engineering challenges of soft robotics, sensor integration, and the legal implications of human-robot interaction.
Brittany Postnikoff (Straithe), a researcher and community manager at Great Scott Gadgets, discusses her master's thesis on robot social engineering and her upcoming PhD research into privacy risks posed by mobile robots in public spaces. She explains how physical robots like Roombas and Knightscope security bots exploit human trust through anthropomorphism and authority to collect sensitive data, often without user consent. Postnikoff also details her role at Great Scott Gadgets, where she manages open-source contributions for hardware tools like the HackRF and the upcoming USB toolkit Luna, emphasizing how hardware sales fund open-source development.
Professor Ayanna Howard of Georgia Tech discusses her research on designing robots to interact with children with special needs, focusing on kinematic modeling, emotional expression, and the phenomenon of human-robot trust. She explains how robots like the Nao and Darwin Mini are used to engage users, detailing the technical challenges of creating fluid motion and reactive behaviors. Howard also addresses the 'uncanny valley,' the risks of over-trusting autonomous systems like self-driving cars, and offers advice for hobbyists and students on getting started with robotics platforms like Lego Mindstorms and ROS.
Dr. Kate Darling, research lead for ethics and society at the AI Institute, discusses the intersection of robotics and social science with hosts Steve Crow and Mike Oitzman. They cover the recent RoboBusiness 2023 event, highlighting the industry's focus on humanoids like Agility Robotics' Digit and Figure AI's robot, as well as the integration of Generative AI in robotics. Darling shares her perspective on human-robot interaction, using the Stop & Shop Marty robot and public perception of autonomous vehicles like Waymo and Cruise to illustrate the social challenges of deploying robots in shared spaces.
Hosts Daniel Scott Mitchell and Farbod Moghaddam discuss three recent tech developments: a Technical University of Munich neural network modeling forest fire impacts on Yellowstone, MIT research on assistive robots for helping the elderly get dressed, and a Technical University of Eindhoven drone designed to evacuate nursing homes by detecting human emotions.
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