Wevolver Robots in Depth - The social robot revolution w/Gabriel Skantze

The social robot revolution w/Gabriel Skantze

02/12/20 • 38 min

Gabriel Skantze talks about how he works with human robot communication, and about how the social robot revolution makes it necessary to communicate with humans in a human ways through speech and facial expressions. This is necessary as we expand the number of people that interact with robots as well as the types of interaction.

Gabriel gives us more insight into the many challenges of implementing spoken communication for co-bots, where robots and humans work closely together. They need to communicate about the world, the objects in it and how to handle them.

We also get to hear how having an embodied system using the Furhat robot head helps the interaction between humans and the system.
Having an expressive face like the Furhat adds many improvements to how a system can communicate with people. It also improves the human engagement and understanding of what the system tries to communicate significantly.

Gabriel then talks about the how they use AI and machine learning to understand speech. Understanding an individual speaker’s way to speak, thus adapting a robot to its user can improve their communication.

As the Furhat system is used out in the field, we get valuable insights from real world situations. One such case is guiding travellers at an airport to improve their experience and make travelling more efficient for everyone.

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

Previous Episode

Learnings from working + 20 years in robotics as an entrepreneur, teacher, lecturer, and researcher w/Lars Dalgaard

Lars Dalgaard shares his experiences developing robots in many different contexts.

We hear about Lars’ early work with large mobile robotics in a commercial nursery garden handling the transfer of plants from the greenhouse to the field.

He also speaks about the Hydra project a self re-configuring modular robotics project that developed several different modular robotics systems including the Atron system.

Lars felt that there was a problem with the process used to introduce robotics and automation into society. Commercialization was hard and unreliable mostly because there was no focus on designing a complete system. This lead to an industrial PhD done at the Danish Technological Institute (DTI) focusing on a system level design approach.

He then talks about his work at DTI that focuses on transferring research, knowledge and research results from academia into companies and the Danish society in general.

One project Lars has been working on is augmenting mobile platforms so that they can handle tasks as they move around in a production facility. This also aims to make it easier to program the mobile platforms and any systems added to them.

Lars thinks that looking at the bigger picture and bringing multiple partners and end users into projects, and doing so early, can bring big benefits to a project.

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

Next Episode

Understanding the world around you using game theory w/Nicole Immorlica

Nicole talks about game theory and how she feels that it is her way to understand the world around her.

Nicole talks about game theory, a way to understand how intelligent agents, humans or machines, interact and optimize their outcome in a particular context.

Nicole discusses how this process can be used to create user interactions that are understandable and can be used efficiently.

We also hear about how dynamic games apply to robotics and how robots deal with the ever-changing world they act in.

Nicole then talks about a trend in market design where large amounts of data about previous behavior is used to redesign the market and optimize it. We also hear about how this is used to understand how people use and interact on social media platforms.

She also shares how game theory can be used to explain behavior that is not optimal, for instance in procrastination.

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