Last spring in Genoa at RoboBusiness Europe, I met Clive Loughlin, the editor of the highly respected U.K. publication, Industrial Robot Journal.

We chaired a few sessions together and got to know one another. We found that we were both passionate about robotics and our respective jobs of communicating news and information to the robotics community.

Clive has come up with an idea for doing an ongoing series of up-close-and-personal interviews with well-known roboticists. Here’s Clive’s idea from a recent email:

I am keen for our Industrial Robot Journal to act as a bridge between the academic and commercial robot communities. To this end we are now including a Commercial Interview in each issue, in which we target a successful robot entrepreneur and quiz them to find out what makes them tick and how they turned original ideas and dreams into a commercial reality, and the challenges they faced along the way.

Clive asked us if we’d care to carry these interviews as a new column for Robotics Business Review.

We loved the column concept, and really appreciated his first interviewee: local favorite (his office is about six miles from ours) and industry icon, Bill Townsend, founder of Barrett Technology, which also happens to be one of our RBR50 companies.

The interview was conducted in July (2013) by Clive’s U.S. editor, Joanne Pransky.

We include it here in Robotics Business Review as a PDF download (see above) just as it appeared in the Industrial Robot Journal.

Please enjoy the first of hopefully many more such interviews to come.