Question: What fascinates you in robots, like how they are programmed or how they move?

Huma Shah answered on 7 Nov 2016:

Hello Jess,

What fascinates me about robots is why we can’t yet build them to talk in human language, as robots do in movies. Robotics is actually quite hard. We might be able to mechanically put artificial limbs together and wire them up to move and control their mobility, but getting them to understand what they see, and talk about this, is proving to be very, very difficult.

For example, after the Tsunami that caused the earthquake in Japan which led to the Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011, robots were sent down the reactor but it is humans who had to make sense of the images that the robots were able to send back – it was too dangerous to send humans down due to radiation. What if robots could talk as well as do the dangerous tasks going into dangerous zones and accurately describe the problem and help humans to solve them?

So language, talking robots is what drives me to research in this area. Please do ask more if this answer was not helpful.

Huma