Assistive tech, preventing injury at work and biomimetics feeding into the design of future robotic systems – listen on to find out more about the robots of the future.

Robotics is a swiftly changing field: Cheaper hardware is making research more accessible, and thanks to advances in AI, the focus is now shifting from feats of physical dexterity achieved by expensive robots, to building ‘general-purpose robot brains’ in the form of neural networks.

Talking these ideas over are Mac MacLachlan, professor of Psychology and Social Inclusion, and co-director of the Assisting Living & Learning Institute at Maynooth University, in Ireland.Arash Ajoudani the director of the Human-RobotInterfaces and Interaction laboratory at the Italian Institute of Technology. And Tim Landgraf, based at the Dahlem Centerfor Machine Learning and Robotics at the Free University of Berlin.