My name is Sethu Vijayakumar, I'm a
Professor of Robotics at the School of
Informatics at the University of Edinburgh,
and I also direct the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics
So since I was a young child I was
interested in opening up toys and
gadgets at home and tinkering around a
lot, so I always was very inquisitive
about what made things work, and that was
probably the part that led me into
looking deeper into some of the
fundamental ideas in science and
trying to discover the underlying cause
and the reasons behind some of the things at work
I do robotics and robotics is a very broad and wide field, so there are people who
do hardware, people who do software
engineering, and there are people who do design
so robotics is a field which incorporates
expertise from various domains, and I
particularly work on the control side of
robotics which means that I actually
work with humanoid robots and
these robots are very hard to control
and so we have to write programs, we have
to write or design algorithms, which
make it walk, manipulate, do things that
you and me take for granted every day
and make that happen on these very
complex robotic platforms
So it's very hard to say what the next
big discovery in robotics will be, but I
think the scale of robotics will
be massive in terms of both the size and
the level of application
so what I mean by scale is you can get,
these days you can get, very big robots
for example, there are some large robot arms
working in the space station basically helping out
astronauts maintain the ISS space
station; on the other hand there are
nanobots, which for now you can actually swallow inside a capsule and it works inside your body
so there's a huge range of form factors
that the robots take and I believe that
extreme form factors will be the next
generation, either very big massive
machines which can for example 3d
print a whole house or a building
or nanobots which can actually do drug
delivery inside your body and monitor things
and cure lots of diseases inside the body
Robotics is a very multidisciplinary
field, it has got a role for a wide range
of people, people who are interested in software engineering, people interested in hardware
obviously people who understand and like
operating systems, people who are into
design, so aesthetics is a very
important part, form factor so
meaning materials and equipment that
have to be the right form factor for a
particular robotic platform, on top of
that given that now robots are becoming
ubiquitous in the society there is a huge role
for lawyers and ethics and social
engineers to understand what are the
implications of applications of these
robots in everyday life
it doesn't matter whether you are
somebody who's interested in math or
physics or engineering or even you know
computing or aesthetics and art there
is a niche for applying your abilities,
your technology into robotics
Bank lends money to people who already
have money, I said that's very funny
you should be lending money to people who
don't have money
