Guy Hoffman: Robots with "soul"

http://guyhoffman.com/
http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/10/7-covetable-toys-that-blurred-the-line-between-robot-pet-and-friend/

Raffaello D’Andrea

Raffaello D’Andrea work's is focused on the creation of systems that leverage technological innovations, scientific principles, advanced mathematics, algorithms, and the art of design in unprecedented ways, with an emphasis on advanced motion control.

By their very nature, these creations require a team to realize. Many are enabled by the research I conduct with my graduate students. Many are also the fruit of collaborations with architects, entrepreneurs, and artists.

My hope is that these creations inspire us to rethink what role technology should have in shaping our future.

http://raffaello.name/dynamic-works | http://raffaello.name/biography

Rodney Brooks

One of episode of Big Thinkers features Rodney Brooks, who is an Australian computer scientist and former Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the following video, Rodney told about how was his infancy, and how he started to get involved in building things that are intelligent. He also presented the recent investigations on robots of those day, and a immense amount of questions about the purpose of building a robot, but mainly

 he wants to understand: What is life? 

Working with Robots at his personal experience is going from failure to failure with no visible rewards, however at the end, he said every ten years he got one of the biggest rushes in his field of research.

Russ Tedrake

Russ Tedrake, a renowned roboticist at MIT, is interested in finding elegant control solution for interesting dynamical systems that he can build and experiment with. His research group is building robotic birds in which the mathematics behind the control approach will have been applied for design more efficient wind turbines in planes. I am fascinated when he said that he worked with the best students in the world. Apart from that, he is a bare-foot runner to which he believes that is less likely to get injure (it is needed to search about this assumption).