Welcome to Episode 86 of The Robot Report Podcast, which brings conversations with robotics innovators straight to you. Join us each week for discussions with leading roboticists, innovative robotics companies and other key members of the robotics community.

This week we talked with Nima Fazeli about the chess-playing robot that, unfortunately, captured the world’s attention this week when it broke a finger of the 7-year-old chess player in Russia. If you haven’t seen the video of the incident with the chess-playing robot, you can watch it at the bottom of this article.

Nima is the perfect person to break down the flaws of the chess-playing robot used in the Moscow chess tournament. Nima is an assistant professor of robotics at the University of Michigan and director of its Manipulation and Machine Intelligence Lab. But he also created a famous Jenga-playing robot during his days as a grad student at MIT.

Nima discusses the lack of basic safety protocols, the poor choice of using an industrial robot instead of a collaborative robot, the system’s lack of intelligence and much more. He also shares some of the lessons he learned while building his Jenga-playing robot. The interview with Nima starts at 20:34.

Mike and Steve also discuss some of the week’s top stories, including researchers at Rice University using dead wolf spiders as mechanical grippers, another strong quarter from Teradyne’s robotics group and more.

Links from today’s show:

• University of Michigan Manipulation and Machine Intelligence Lab
• MIT robot combines vision and touch to learn Jenga
• Why I’m saying no to ‘necrobotics’
• Teradyne’s robotics group makes $101M in Q2
• Locus Robotics completes SOC 2 certification

---

If you would like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of the podcast, or if you have recommendations for future guests or segment ideas, contact Steve Crowe or Mike Oitzman.

For sponsorship opportunities of The Robot Report Podcast, contact Courtney Nagle for more information.