Imagining other uses for robotics technology

David McKinnon from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW, speaks to interviewer.

DAVID MCKINNON: I love working with robots because there's a lot of things you can make them do and it happens in the real world. For example, it's easy to make a program that will show pretty lights and flashing colours and everything on a screen, but I find it so much more interesting to program a robotic arm to move things around based on what a camera's seeing. Like play a board game with a human. It's a far more interesting challenge to me and I think there's a lot more real-world application there. Not just in playing soccer, but in serious problems like robotic arms mounted on wheelchairs for disabled people, industrial robots, other such things. Automating dangerous jobs like rescue robots in damaged buildings, et cetera. I love the challenge of trying to explore that area and make new things and get them working. So a couple of past team members from RoboCup went out, started working… They were contracted by this company that worked with saws and people moving large blocks of wood past these bandsaws, and one problem they had was the workers hands would get too close to the saw and then injuries happen, and what these people did was they mounted a camera above it, and using similar techniques to the ball detection in RoboCup, they managed to detect the worker's hand and would cut the saw, cut power from the saw when the hand got too near so people wouldn't get injured. So a lot of good applications can come out of this.