Robot Talk Episode 54 – Robotics and science fiction

In a special live recording of the Robot Talk podcast at the Great Exhibition Road Festival, Claire chats with Glyn Morgan (Science Museum), Bani Anvari (University College London) and Thrishantha Nanayakara (Imperial College London) to explore how our intelligent friends from the world of science fiction fit in with advanced robotics and the reality of artificial intelligence.

Glyn Morgan is curator of exhibitions at the Science Museum, most recently: “Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination” (open until August 20). He also teaches Science Fiction courses at Imperial College, and has published many aspects of genre writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Royal Society, and the Science Fiction Research Association, among others. Her research is interested in the interface between science fiction and other disciplines from history to psychology and beyond, and the ways science fiction can be used as a cognitive tool to help us understand ourselves and our society.

Bani Anvari is Full Professor of Intelligent Mobility at the Center for Transport Studies in the Faculty of Engineering at University College London (UCL). He is the founder and director of Intelligent Mobility at UCL. Its vision is to enable people to trust and fully benefit from the benefits of future mobility services through new technologies and innovations. His research focuses on Intelligent Mobility and explores interactions with semi- and fully-autonomous vehicles in a variety of contexts, which Robotics and AI greatly benefit from.

Thrishantha Nanayakkara is Professor of Robotics and Director of Morphlab at Dyson School of Design Engineering (DSDE), Imperial College London. Her group has used soft robots to understand how body compliance helps stabilize dynamic interactions with the environment. He is and has been a PI on a project over £5 million that has pushed the boundaries of our understanding of how body conditioning enhances the efficacy of action and perception in human-human and human-robot interactions.