Episode Forty-Two: Thom Kirwan-Evans
Thom Kirwan-Evans, co-founder of Origami Labs, discusses applying AI and computer vision to industrial robotics, drawing on his background at DSTL and Phasor Nash Consultancy. He details defense applications like the DASA autonomous last-mile resupply program, focusing on scale, speed, and separation, while highlighting the critical gap in current 'smart' systems regarding true autonomy and trust. Kirwan-Evans also explains technical challenges in low-power drone vision, specifically using Google Coral TPUs to optimize neural networks for high-speed, low-false-alarm object detection. Finally, he contrasts the near-term impact of soft robotics with the complex, emergent nature of swarm robotics and the associated safety case difficulties.