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Technological advances in robots play an increasingly important role in business and life in general. In associated areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, they’re expanding skills, showing awesome productivity and getting more sophisticated. But the question is: Are they going to be able to do our jobs? Will they be better than us? Join us to find out!
Robots in our world
Dr Jeremy Wyatt
(Professor of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, University of Birmingham)
Building algorithms for robots that help them work in our complex, messy and unstructured world is hard. Really hard. One of the main reasons is that it is difficult to deal with unfamiliar environments. I will try to give you a sense of why, and what we are doing to overcome it through telling the stories of our robots: Dora and Boris. Dora was an experiment in getting robots to think about what they don't and do know, so that they can plan how to act in unfamiliar worlds. Boris is an experiment in robot manipulation, using machine learning techniques to grasp novel objects dexterously.
Robots as therapists? Boosting rehabilitation after stroke with robotics
Dr. Orna Rosenthal
(Research Fellow at the School of Psychology, University of Birmingham)
Stroke can severely hamper the ability to perform basic daily life activity. Intensive exercise therapy can help recovering impaired motor functions in some cases but depends on limited therapist availability and the type and severity of the impairment. Recent development of sophisticated robots offers opportunities for individualised robot-mediated therapy. Can robots replace human therapists?
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