This week you'll meet Michelle Johnson, Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Pennsylvania. Michelle is also the Director of the Rehabilitation Robotics Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, whose aim is to use rehabilitation robotics and neuroscience to investigate brain plasticity and motor function after non-traumatic brain injuries, for example in stroke survivors or persons diagnosed with cerebral palsy. If you'd like to know more about her professional journey, her work with affordable robots for low/middle income countries and her next frontier in robotics, among many more things, check out her video below!

In this fourth release of our series dedicated to IEEE/RSJ IROS 2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) original series Real Roboticist, we bring you Peter Corke. He is a distinguished professor of robotic vision at Queensland University of Technology, Director of the QUT Centre for Robotics, and Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision. If you've ever studied a robotics or computer vision course, you might have read a classic book: Peter Corke's Robotics, Vision and Control. Moreover, Peter has also released several open-source robotics resources and free courses, all available at his website. If you'd like to hear more about his career in robotics and education, his main challenges and what he learnt from them, and what's his advice for current robotics students, check out his video below.

Today we continue with our series on IEEE/RSJ IROS 2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) original series Real Roboticist. This time you'll meet Radhika Nagpal, who is a Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering from Harvard University. Did you know Rhadika directed the research that led to the creation of the Kilobots, the first open-source, low-cost robots that were specifically designed for large scale experiments with hundreds and thousands of them? You can watch this example or this other one if you're curious. If you'd like to know more about Rhadika and her achievements, challenges and what she would tell her younger self, below is the whole interview.

Last Sunday we started another series on IEEE/RSJ IROS 2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) original series Real Roboticist. In this episode you'll meet Ruzena Bajczy, Professor Emerita of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the founding Director of CITRIS (the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society). In her talk, she explains her path from being an electrical engineer to becoming a researcher with Emeritus honours, and with over 50 years of experience in robotics, artificial intelligence and the foundations of how humans interact with our environment. Are you curious about the tips she's got to share and her own prediction of the future of robotics?

Are you curious about the people behind the robots? The series'Real Roboticist', produced by the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), shows the people at the forefront of robotics research from a more personal perspective. How did they become roboticists? What made them proud and what challenges did they face? What advice would they give to their younger self?