Monroe Kennedy III

Today we’re joined by Monroe Kennedy III, an assistant professor at Stanford, director of the Assistive Robotics and Manipulation Lab, and a national director of Black in Robotics. In our conversation with Monroe, we spend some time exploring the robotics landscape, getting Monroe’s thoughts on the current challenges in the field, as well as his opinion on choreographed demonstrations like the dancing Boston Robotics machines. We also dig into his work around two distinct threads, Robotic Dexterity, (what does it take to make robots capable of doing manipulation useful tasks with and for humans?) and Collaborative Robotics (how do we go beyond advanced autonomy in robots towards making effective robotic teammates capable of working with human counterparts?). Finally, we discuss DenseTact, an optical-tactile sensor capable of visualizing the deformed surface of a soft fingertip and using that image in a neural network to perform calibrated shape reconstruction and 6-axis wrench estimation. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/619.

Monroe Kennedy III

Assistant Professor and Director of Assistive Robotics and Manipulation Lab

Stanford University

The 1980s promised robotic servants were in reach. They’d clean up our houses. Bring us drinks. Usher in an era of leisure. We didn’t get robot butlers. But if we look around, we’ll find an army of robotic servants already automating away domestic drudgery.  Richard Rowland recounts the extent to which Androbot over-promised on its ability to build a robot servant. 40 years later, we still don’t have robot maids. Monroe Kennedy III walks us through the complexities of seemingly simple tasks. To make things more difficult, each attempt to build a robot had to build the hardware AND write the code from scratch. Keenan Wyrobek explains that’s why he helped write and share the Robot Operating System (ROS). Leila Takayama describes how beneficial ROS was to the field of robotics. And Terry Fong shares how NASA is using ROS to build the robots that explore our solar system. If you want to read up on some of our research on domestic robots, you can check out all our bonus material over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.  Follow along with the episode transcript.

Richard Rowland

Monroe Kennedy III

Assistant Professor and Director of Assistive Robotics and Manipulation Lab

Stanford University

Keenan Wyrobek

Co-founder and CTO

Zipline