In this episode we look at robotics software platforms with Jean-Christophe Baillie who is the CEO of Gostai, a robotics software company out of Paris.

He tells us about the software URBI that he created to help developers program and control robots and his motivation to go open source at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in a couple of weeks.

Jean-Christophe Baillie

Jean-Christophe Baillie received a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from University of Paris 6 and Sony Computer Science Lab and then founded the Cognitive Robotics Lab in ENSTA/ParisTech.

He tells us about his past work on developmental robotics and more specifically on the Talking Heads experiments covered in part in an interview with Talking Robots. During this research, he designed URBI to control complex robotics systems like the AIBO. In 2006 Baillie founded Gostai to further develop the URBI technology which has now been extended to many robotic platforms such as the Nao humanoid used for the RoboCup robotics competition. He also tells us about his plans to make URBI open source and what that entails in terms of business model.

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For videos of the current autonomous Audi TTS rally car prototype, details on NASA’s new autonomous exploration system AEGIS, and videos of Ishiguro’s new android, Geminoid F, have a look at the Robots Forum.

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