Making robots huggable and safe | Gordon Cheng | TEDxTUM

Our sense of touch is vital to us humans -- so why not equip robots with it? For this, one needs durable and fault-tolerant hardware with a variety of sensors, as well as modern approaches to data processing. Gordon Cheng’s group might just revolutionize the field of robotics by having solved these challenges. In this talk, he explains the complex technology behind making robots huggable and safe.

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TUM’s own Gordon Cheng envisions a future in which robots and humans can work together. Instead of taking our jobs, in Gordon’s version of the future, robots should be doing the work that humans don’t want to do anymore.

As founder of TUM’s Institute for Cognitive Systems and a professor of the same discipline, Gordon is fascinated by the potential of robotics—a passion which harkens back to his boyhood days. As a child in front of the television, Gordon noticed that robots in cartoons always seemed to enhance human life, and he became captivated by the possibilities of the future.