The impact of robots who start taking decisions like humans do. w/Cristina Andersson

03/04/20 • 39 min

Cristina talks about the impact off the ever growing set of tasks that robots can perform and that they can start taking taking decisions like humans do.

In 2013 she organized events in Finland during European robotics week and found that many people was very interested but that there was also a big lack of knowledge.

She calls of more visions on how we can use robotics to address the challenges society face today. She is especially interested in three areas,

Demography, many countries are facing a big change in the numbers of working to non working. She thinks that we need to develop technologies to address the needs of everyone and assure that it is accessible for everyone that needs it.

She also sees that robotics have a big role to play in exploring environments that are hostile to humans and that they can make it possible for us to better understand thees environments. This understanding will make it easier to address the most important issues in a efficient way.

Her third focus is making education accessible for everyone. When large transformations happen due to the introduction of new technologies it is very important to make it possible for everyone to participate and then education is critical. This is absolutely true for robotics.

She also talks about introducing robotics in society in a way that makes it easy for everyone to understand the benefits as this will make the process much easier. When people see the clear benefits in one field or situation they will be much more interested in bringing robotics in to their private or professional lives.

She also talks about the Bestick robot that helps people that can not eat by them self, and how profound this is, giving some one back an ability that most of us take for granted.

This podcast is part of the Wevolver network. Wevolver is a platform & community providing engineers informative content to help them innovate.
Learn more at Wevolver.com

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Cristina talks about the impact off the ever growing set of tasks that robots can perform and that they can start taking taking decisions like humans do.

In 2013 she organized events in Finland during European robotics week and found that many people was very interested but that there was also a big lack of knowledge.

She calls of more visions on how we can use robotics to address the challenges society face today. She is especially interested in three areas,

She also talks about the Bestick robot that helps people that can not eat by them self, and how profound this is, giving some one back an ability that most of us take for granted.

This podcast is part of the Wevolver network. Wevolver is a platform & community providing engineers informative content to help them innovate.
Learn more at Wevolver.com

Promote your company in our podcast?

If you are interested in sponsoring the podcast, you can contact us at [email protected]

Previous Episode

Computer vision for field use in agriculture and recycling w/Michael Nielsen

Michael talks about his work in computer vision for field use in agriculture and recycling.

He started out in computer vision in the agriculture space doing machine vision and 3D reconstruction of plants. He then moved to the Danish Technological Institute when they expanded their work on machine vision for field use in agriculture.

Michael worked with a fusion of sensors like stereo vision, thermography, radar, lidar and high frame rate cameras, merging multiple images for high dynamic range. All this to be able to navigate the tricky situation in a farm field where you need to navigate close to or even in what is grown. Multi-baseline cameras were also used to provide range detection over a wide range of distances.

We also learn about how he expanded his work into sorting recycling, a very challenging problem. Here the sensor fusion gives him RGB as well as depth and temperature. Adding a powerful studio flash to the setup allowed him to heat the material being sorted, making it possible to determine the material, depending on how it absorbs the heat from the flash. Michael is also working on adding cameras capable of seeing above the human range of vision to make it easy to specify which materials to pick. We also hear about the problems faced when using time of flight and sheet of light cameras. He then shares some good results using stereo vision, especially combined with blue light random dot projectors.

This podcast is part of the Wevolver network. Wevolver is a platform & community providing engineers informative content to help them innovate.

Learn more at Wevolver.com

Promote your company in our podcast?

If you are interested in sponsoring the podcast, you can contact us at [email protected]

Next Episode

Rescue robotics & using machine learning to detect gasses w/Achim Lilienthal

Achim talks about rescue robotics and how he is working with integrating sensors that can work and be useful in this challenging application like gas sensors.

Achim got in to robotics from working in physics when the team hid did his PhD worked on gas sensors and he saw an opportunity to contribute based on his background in physics.

He also talks about a strong personal reason for developing gas sensors as a family member was killed in a gas explosion when he was a kid.

We also hear more about the challenges in using commercial senors that are intended for lab use and not for field use mounted on a robot.
He talks about how he implements machine learning to detect gasses that was not meant to be in that particular situation.
We also get to hear about how you can use different sensors to create a fingerprint of the gases in a situation and how you can use this to great a “heat map” describing what gases are there and at what concentration.
This can help in determening the risk of an explosion by sensing gas type, consentration and heat.

He also tells us about the smokebot project that aims to oreduce risks for emergensy personel and to use resourcess mor eficently in an timecritical amergency situation.

We hear about why it is very hard to deploy robots in many emergensy situations and especilay in fires where there are smoke that blocks most sensrors blinding the robot. One of the few sensors that actually still works are radar and that can offer great asistance to firefighters.

This podcast is part of the Wevolver network. Wevolver is a platform & community providing engineers informative content to help them innovate.
Learn more at Wevolver.com