About the session
The machines are coming and they will be both mobile and autonomous. They will do good useful work for us - moving ourselves, our goods and our sensors around the physical world. They will continue to extend and augment our human capabilities, physically and economically. What drives it all is robotics science. As so much great engineering does, it constitutes a heady mix of disciplines - computing, sensing, modelling, making, design and control. This talk seeks to lay bare the essence of this endeavour. Couched in the speaker's own professional experiences as both engineer and researcher, he explains the approach we are taking in producing: self-driving cars; navigation systems for Mars rovers; and warehouse management robos.; He explains what problems we have solved and those that are set to vex the next generation of engineers. This is a profoundly exciting time to be an engineer: we have the opportunity to start to make extraordinary machines that will have a deep impact on society, but we have to choose carefully the order in which we build things and, vitally, be intelligent in the way we communicate to society about those machines. We should talk about that a lot.
