Brainwaves - Prof Sethu Vijayakumar

What role will robots play in our lives in the future? We already interact with robots on a daily basis but with the development of intelligent, free-thinking robots our relationship with them will change.

Sethu Vijayakumar, Professor of Robotics at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and judge on BBC2's Robot Wars, has spent his career in robotics pioneering the use of large scale machine learning techniques for use in healthcare, in our homes and in ground breaking unmanned missions to Mars, the precursor to a potential human Martian colony.

We shouldn't be afraid of robots, he says. Instead we need to become comfortable that robots will be more efficient than us and make less mistakes than us. Our future is shared and fully autonomous robots. Humans just need to become content with relinquishing some control of our world.

In this Brainwaves, Pennie Latin meets Sethu Vijayakumar in his lab in Edinburgh, along with some of his robots - from a relatively simple prosthetic forearm to one of the most advanced humanoid robots in the world, Valkyrie.

Published on Wednesday, 17th January 2018.

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