For the second part of our RoboHouse Interview Trilogy: The Working Life of the Robotics Engineer we speak with Wendel Postma, chief engineer at Project MARCH VIII. How does he resolve the conundrum of integration: getting a bunch of single-minded engineers to ultimately serve the needs of one single exoskeleton user? Wendel oversees technical engineering quality, and shares responsible for on-time delivery within budget with the other project managers. He spends his days wandering around the Dream Hall on TU Delft Campus, encouraging his team to explore new avenues for developing the exoskeleton. What is possible within the time that we have?

As retail and e-commerce demands continue to intensify, more businesses are considering autonomous vehicles. Since its founding in 2017, the mission of Gatik has been to deliver goods safely and efficiently using self-driving vehicles. The startup said it focuses on business-to-business, short-haul logistics for the retail industry. In this presentation, Apeksha Kumavat, co-founder and chief engineer at Gatik, will discuss how constraining the operational design domain (ODD) has brought middle-mile autonomous delivery to market quickly and effectively. Gatik's fleet of Class 1-6 autonomous vehicles moves goods from micro-fulfillment centers and "dark" stores to pick-up points – retail stores, distribution centers and offices – known as the middle mile.

The future of the driverless car is going to affect the future of how we travel and what we do in cars. But driverless cars are also likely to transform roads, cities, suburbs, jobs, the economy and daily life. My guest Samuel Schwartz expects it to be a very disruptive technology. Schwartz is the author of the new book "No One At The Wheel: Driverless Cars And The Road Of The Future," which he says is about the good, the bad and the ugly of how driverless cars will change our world. He knows a lot about transportation systems. He served as the traffic commissioner of New York City and chief engineer of the city's Department of Transportation. He now has his own consulting firm and has worked with cities around the world on transportation-related issues. Later in our conversation, after we talk about the future, we're going to talk about traffic problems that plague us today. We're going to use the words driverless car interchangeably with the words autonomous vehicle, or AV. In your book, you write that AVs, autonomous vehicles, will be the most disruptive technology to hit society worldwide since the advent of the motorcar. Give us a couple of examples of industries or jobs or roadways that we might not realize will be profoundly affected by AVs once they start to really dominate. SAMUEL SCHWARTZ: I think everybody is expecting fewer drivers, and, you know, that's no surprise. But it also means that there're probably going to be fewer repair shops because AVs lend themselves to fleet operations, especially if they're going to be offering rides, as opposed to selling maximum vehicles. So car dealerships may disappear. So this is going to have wide impacts. Truckers, of course, are going to be impacted - how we move about in so many different ways.

Indian manufacturing companies are going all out to woo expat talent in digital, artificial intelligence and other new-age technologies, as they seek to strengthen their global footprint with improved products. Companies in sectors such as automobile, industrial, pharmaceutical, chemical and packaging are keen on bringing in people familiar with international best practices who can replicate the quality and precision of developed markets such as North America, the UK, Korea, Japan and Germany. Over the last six months, automaker Mahindra & Mahindra has hired six expats for top-level posts while the diversified Vedanta Ltd in February brought in five expats at senior levels in India. A spokesperson for Hero MotoCorp said several experts have joined the company of late. "There has been an increase in expat hiring in the last six months. Expat hiring isn't about numbers but about inducting appropriate capabilities and talent," said Rajeshwar Tripathi, chief people officer, M&M, which last year inducted 15 expats at senior levels.