Dr. Ayanna Howard on Human-Centered Robotics, AI Guardrails, and Physical AI

**Ayanna Howard** (0:00)
My fear is actually around these LLMs and agentic AI. We are not putting in the guardrails necessary. I talk about things like military AI. AI at some point will be able to actually pull the trigger.

**Brian Heater** (0:16)
The minute you tell somebody that, you know, you're a roboticist or you're in and out around AI., people's ideas of robotics are both way in the future and way in the past at the same time.

**Ayanna Howard** (0:27)
The technologies that are coming out today that seem to be highly advanced. We were working on some of these things 25 plus years ago.
We now think, oh, it can do everything. And the fact is, is that we are still trying to figure out how to do this in the real world so that we have general purpose robotics.

**Brian Heater** (0:45)
It sounds like you understand what the really big problems are.

**Ayanna Howard** (0:48)
When I look at the current humanoid robots like Figure AI at this live stream, that is not the real world. If you ever go into a logistic center, I mean, it's a massive mess. Manipulation is still hard.

**Brian Heater** (1:01)
You're seeing these incredibly cool demos, but these things aren't coming to the store and coming to your house tomorrow.

**Ayanna Howard** (1:07)
So I would say...

**Brian Heater** (1:22)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Automated with Brian Heater, who is me, Brian Heater. I am the managing editor at the Association for Advancing Automation, and I am excited to bring you a conversation with someone that we've been working on booking for the show for a long time now. Dr. Ayanna Howard is the Dean of the Ohio State University School of Engineering, among many other things. We cover a lot of ground during this conversation, but one thing we keep coming back to that's been, I would say, a constant through her academic and professional career, is the push to apply robotics and automation for the common good. It's a really great chat, and I hope that you come out of it wanting to make the world a slightly better place. I know that I did. Thank you so much for listening. If you've been enjoying the show, it would be a huge help if you would like and subscribe and tell a couple of friends. While you're at it, why not subscribe to the newsletter over at Automated.fm. Now, please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Ayanna Howard.
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That's also still a thing that's happening right now that we still have to think about on top of everything.
Is that work that you're still active with, that you're still engaging with?

**Ayanna Howard** (4:03)
I'm not. That was my life when I was working really on science-driven robotics.
What that meant was taking rovers, taking robots in the field to help scientists collect data. Everything from underwater robotics to glacier robotics, to of course prior when I was at NASA thinking about future Mars rover exploration. I transitioned from science-driven robotics maybe in, I would say, 2012-ish timeframe where I finally said, okay, I'm going to put up my hat on that and go 100% into healthcare robotics.

**Brian Heater** (4:42)
It's tough, right? I mean, because you can never, in something like that, you can never be like, all right, problem solved.

**Ayanna Howard** (4:48)
You can't. And even now, I still, when Artemis, I was glued like, okay, what's going on? Oh, we're going to actually go back to the moon. Okay, that's going to be rovers. You have to have rovers with astronauts when we do the colonization of the moon. So I'm still always interested and always fascinated and start thinking about these things.