Question: What made you want to specialise in robotoics?

Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 2 Nov 2017:

That’s a very good question, short answer: I sensed the potential of robotics being an Erasmus student in Bruxelles, and I decided to purse it because it is fun work and I then guessed might have given me some sort of job security

I think your question deserves also an elaborated answer: when I was a child, I was always frustrated of having to move all my legos and cars by myself, as my own plays were getting more complicated I was spending more time moving objects than playing with it (that was the motivation that made me stop playing with toys and playing only on computers). Video game props and characters instead were able to move by themselves making the game more fun, but you couldn’t touch them. This probably was the very first time I developed an interest and curiosity into “real things moving by themselves”, which is what a robot does. I thought that “things” could only be fully automatic in virtual reality, until I had my experience as Erasmus student in Bruxelles. The labs at the host university were much better equipped than my own university and I decided to take a course in Artificial Intelligence, which was not taught back at home. I really appreciated how the subject was explaining how different parts of a software can take decisions (such as what’s the best path to go from A to B) and I was dreaming to get more into it to purse a career as AI developer in the video game industry, since AI was the thing I was appreciating the most of video games. Once day I had the opportunity to visit the local robotics lab and too see all the equipment they had and how they were working and I finally had the intuition: what happens if you apply AI to robotics? All those “things” that I was so frustrated they couldn’t move by themselves they will be able to do so. I sensed the potential of it and I decided to make a gamble and invest all my energies into robotics thinking that when the industry would get into it, I would became an expert by then. As few people will be experts I would be able to secure a safe job and possibly a good salary to live with. It was an uninformed investment: robotics might have exploded when I will be too old or might not have picked up at all and maybe a business (which informs itself very well in these cases) wouldn’t have invested so much of themselves into it. In between now and then, there is an academic career which attracted me very much, but I decided not to pursue in the end.