Why Can’t Robots Walk Like We Do?
Every year, thousands of people walk the Yorkshire Three Peaks — 24 miles over mud, rocks, and rough terrain, in all weathers. We barely give it a second thought. Ask a robot to do the same, and the limitations become immediately obvious.
The physical world wasn’t built for robots. Until they can move through it — up stairs, across broken ground, through wind and waves — they’ll remain confined to warehouses and factory floors.
Jenny Read is a Programme Director at ARIA, the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency, where she leads the “Smarter Robot Bodies” opportunity space. Her work starts from a simple but radical premise: that the biggest barrier to transformative robotics today isn’t intelligence but the robot’s body. While much of the field has focused on software and AI, Jenny believes that hardware could be the real frontier, and that unlocking it will require a new approach to how robots sense, move, and interact with the physical world.
Jenny brings an unusually broad scientific lens to robotics with a background spanning theoretical astrophysics and computational visual neuroscience. She’s held research positions at Oxford, the US National Institutes of Health, and Newcastle University, where she was Professor of Vision Science until last year.
Jenny comes to TDC to discuss her work at ARIA on creating robots that move well — with real range, robustness, and the physical grace to be genuinely useful in the wider world.
