Question: have you always enjoyed robots and all things linked or was it more of a discovery that then turned to a later on interest

Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 30 Jan 2020:

In my case, robotics was more of a discovery that I made when I was visiting a university in Bruxelles as part of a European student exchange program.

I always had an interest for things that can move by themselves, but I did not oriented my future career on robotics until I’ve actually seen real robots in operation in a lab.

I have to admit that, since my bachelor degree had a lot of computer science, I was interested in Artificial Intelligence early on as this was one of the research field more mysterious at the time. However, if I wouldn’t have visited that lab I wouldn’t have discovered robotics and I might have focused my career on another field like computer vision for example (which is used by robotics but it is not sufficient to have a robot working).

Definitively I did not plan any of this when I was still at school.

In my opinion, the subjects you study at university and the hype of the moment tend to orient your choices quite a lot. The only certain thing was that I wanted to become a specialist on a research topic, something new that is not much explored yet. It ended up being robotics because at the time when I studied it was a research topic very advanced with lots of unknowns to uncover.