Amir Patel is an Associate Professor of Robotics & AI in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL). His research uses robotics methods--sensor fusion, computer vision, mechanical modelling, and optimal control--to understand and quantify animal locomotion, especially high-speed predators such as the cheetah, and to translate these insights into bio-inspired machines. Previously, he served on the faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Cape Town, where he founded and directed the African Robotics Unit (ARU). Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.

Claire chatted to Christine Evers from University of Southampton about helping robots understand the world around them through sound. Christine Evers is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Director of the Centre for Robotics at the University of Southampton. Her research pushes the boundaries of machine listening, enabling robots to make sense of life in sound. Her current focus is embedding our understanding of the human auditory process into deep-learning audio architectures. This bio-inspired approach moves away from massive, internet-scale models toward compute-efficient and inherently interpretable systems - opening the door to a new generation of embodied auditory intelligence.

This bonus episode was sponsored by euRobotics, an international non-profit association that aims to boost European robotics research, development, and innovation. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines. Find out what the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems has in store. Graduate students in the aptly named RAD Lab are working to improve RoboBall, the robot in an airbag.

Honeybees use a sophisticated dance to tell their sisters about the location of nearby flowers. This phenomenon forms the inspiration for a form of robot-robot communication that does not rely on digital networks. A recent study presents a simple technique whereby robots view and interpret each other's movements or a gesture from a human to communicate a geographical location. This approach could prove invaluable when network coverage is unreliable or absent, such as in disaster zones. Where are those flowers and how far away are they?

Long before Meg Mitchell founded the Ethical AI team at Google in 2017, she loved Boggle, the classic game where players come up with words from random letters in three minutes or less. Looking back at her childhood Boggle-playing days, Meg sees the game as her early inspiration to pursue studying computational linguistics. "I always loved identifying patterns, solving puzzles, language games, and creating new things," Meg says. "And Boggle had it all. It was a puzzle, and it was creative."