"Perception is quite difficult with cameras: even if you have a stereo camera, you still can’t really build a map of where everything is in space. It’s just very difficult. And I know that sounds surprising, because humans are very good at this. In fact, even with one eye, we can navigate and we can clear the dinner table. But it seems that we’re building in a lot of understanding and intuition about what’s happening in the world and where objects are and how they behave. For robots, it’s very difficult to get a perfectly accurate model of the world and where things are. So if you’re going to go manipulate or grasp an object, a small error in that position will maybe have your robot crash into the object, a delicate wine glass, and probably break it. So the perception and the control are both problems." —Ken Goldberg
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Ken Goldberg — robotics professor at UC Berkeley — about the major research challenges still ahead before robots become broadly integrated into our homes and societies.
Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.
They cover:
Chapters:
Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Dominic Armstrong, Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, and Simon Monsour
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore