okay so if we could start with your name
and where and when you were born
okay um i'm robert o ambrose i was born
in 1964 in boston united states
and did you stay in justin did you go to
school there
we uh we moved from boston very soon
after i was born
my parents were in school there and we
moved to houston texas
and did you and that's where you went to
college
as well or no so we moved to houston
i went to elementary school in the
houston area
and then we moved to chicago i went to
elementary school there as well
then back to houston and i finished
through high school
in the houston area and then
college i went to washington university
in st louis which is in st
louis and i got a bachelor's in
mechanical engineering
and a master's in mechanical engineering
then
moved to austin and i got married
and my wife and i both went to graduate
school in austin at the university of
texas in austin
i continued in mechanical engineering
especially on
robot system design how did you decide
to go into mechanical engineering in the
first place
well i actually wanted to do three
majors and
it wasn't possible in the amount of time
that i wanted to
i decided i would rather do graduate
work than
three majors but what i really wanted
was physics mechanical engineering and
electrical engineering
and i compared the the syllabus that was
available for all three of those degrees
and they were based basically mutually
exclusive so there was almost no overlap
so not even the freshman year so
i realized it was going to take 12 years
to get
all three degrees and i decided i'd
rather get a different set of three
degrees in less than 12 years
so i looked at the syllabi
and i saw that the parts of physics that
i was most interested in
were well covered in mechanical
engineering
and the mechanical curriculum required
that i take a lot of electrical
engineering classes whereas the
electrical curriculum
had no mechanical engineering classes so
i decided to go mechanical
but since then i've always been very
interested in what i consider to be
mechatronics
and as i got into my phd work
i spent a lot of time on electrical
design
and software design uh in addition to
mechanical engineering
if you were to back up a little bit more
and well what got you interested in the
three
areas there i mean that's a pretty
ambitious undergraduate
so the three areas of physics and uh
well i like physics
and the parts of physics that i like the
most are
mechanical and electrical in nature
so i'm really into electromechanical
systems
and so i was looking for a degree that
would allow me to work in that area
and then i started to develop an
interest in
the software engineering aspects of
robotics i feel those are the three key
things mechanical electrical and
software engineering and
robotics together it was just something
in high school maybe like a subject in
high school and you know i went into
class
i've been building things my whole life
and i always like motors and
electricity and gears and
mechanisms and
i've been building things with electric
motors in them since maybe
age kinds of five have you built
uh well i've i've built a number of
robotic systems
more recently but back when i was i was
from five-year-old
[Laughter]
boats airplanes
um
cars and
at age five i would build things and
turn them on and watch what happened
there was not a whole lot of closing
control going on
by the time i got into middle school i
didn't understand what it was
but i built a closed loop control system
for a solar collector that was pointing
at the sun using a photoresistor with a
tube
and when it would when the sun would
move and cast a shadow it would
turn on the motor and it would re-point
it
and it that's when i that's my first
experience with
closed loop control systems and i didn't
understand the math
i was just completely winging it
obviously
but um and still do
maybe but uh the
experience had a lot of impact i mean i
remember playing with friction
to add friction into the the system
which caused things to be stable
but then i noticed that i would it would
stick
and it would develop an error and it
would take a certain amount of air
before it would break free and move
again
and that that experience playing around
with the physics of
what was going on there came back to me
later when i was in college taking
uh a close a linear controls class
and it was kind of intuitive to me what
was going on and i was now trying to
figure out the math that explained it
so i put that but was able to put those
things together
and it was it was a good feeling to
understand the math behind
something that i've previously
experienced
and in your undergraduate did you have a
chance to work in any laboratories or
participate in research um not really
my ita classes a little bit and
but never really needed lab classes
to get hands-on that i
could just build things we built things
in dorm rooms we built things
at home on summer breaks and
i like to build things and then need to
go to school to do that
garages are great what kinds of things
did you build in
college other than potato guns
a
submarine that was kind of fun built
airplanes rocket-powered airplanes
walking machines
a lot of boats and a lot of rockets
and so were these where did you find
what kinds of materials did you
use and where could you find them well
my
my ability to use machine tools was
not so great and i i picked that up in
graduate school and i really wish
i learned how to use a mill and a lathe
early
it would have really improved the
quality of my prototypes
so i was doing a lot with wood plastic
and
composite glue glued together
i didn't really get into metal until
graduate work
and i really wish i had done more
earlier but i didn't have a machine shop
but readily available and i wish i had
my kids do
what kinds of materials were available
then i mean there were kits and things
and
where else did you find the other
components motors gears
so i found a lot of shops that
salvaged equipment and that was great i
could go in and i could buy
a squirrel cage fan that had a big motor
in it a impeller and i
could find a power supply that had been
taken out of
a washing machine or
refrigerators have great electric motors
in them and
i was able to find a lot of actuators
through salvage like that power supplies
and
you can find them in salvage being
pulled out of
heavy machines terrible kids
even back then in the prehistoric era
when i was a kid
you could find a lot of electric motors
that were
for their time excellent and like a
starter motor
the apollo rover was built basically
with starter motors and
very simple electric actuators
terms
so when you got to graduate school
what kind of environment did you find
there and did you start working with
well i did a a theoretical masters
where i was doing linkage synthesis it
was the first time i really started to
use computers to do design work i'd
always been into cad
and liked drafting just always
enjoyed drawing i grew up in a household
with a lot of
architecture and drawing just and design
was always being discussed
and i i got into the cad work early
but then starting to use computers to do
synthesis
where a more formal synthesis
i started in my senior year
and learned a few
software packages that were just coming
out
that were extremely painful to use but
you were able to do so much more than
you could do by hand
they subsequently led to packages that
are more common like the adams
mechanical design package we were using
some early versions of that where you
would
build a file that a fax would
read and that that file had a file
structure where you would define
a mechanism as parameters and then you
could
iterate and write have the program
iterate through
variables and optimize so i started
as as a master's candidate i started
doing a lot of
formal optimization design theory
design methodology took a couple really
good classes from
professors who were really knowledgeable
in that field
and very strong computer backgrounds and
mechanical engineers
so they really knew how to use computers
to do design work
i took a class we were in st louis and
there was a very large aerospace
industry there and one of the classes
that was arranged was to use a
brand new cad system that they developed
and they were using for the harrier
and f-18 programs and
they kind of used this as guinea pigs to
take and learn how to use this cad
system and watch how we learned it and
use us just as a beta testers of their
in-house cad which was a great system
it's really
very capable and then
couple into that some of these more
analytical design tools
so that that had a big impact i mean i
went in through uh
linkage design and the uh the process of
stating a requirement
and then optimizing
to get the best results
was something that i really embraced and
then
took that into my my phd work at ut
austin
where i came up with a design
methodology
for specifically for robot manipulator
design
and that was the main thrust of my my
phd work
i really wanted an experimental
component to that
so what i did was i built a set of
modular joints and links and i
tested them thoroughly so i got a lot of
empirical data on what they how what
their performance was
and then i built a database using all
that data
and wrote a design program where you
would state a requirement for the arm
and it would hunt through every possible
permutation of putting
every piece in the in the tool chest
together in every possible
configuration and then tell you which
one was best for the requirements that
you just
specified and it was it was a great
design
problem and i obviously used a lot of my
master's work in lincoln consistent
optimization
[Music]
but i think the most important thing was
i actually built those
parts and when i got to nasa
i realized that by the time i was done
formulating that design problem i knew
what the answer was before i ran the
program
that i had to formulate the design space
and to to
to write it all down so you could run
the synthesis
i'd already figured out which corner of
the design space was best
so what i started doing at nasa was
focusing more on visualization of the
data
and not trying to wrap the synthesis
loop around it
just to build visualization tools so i
could try out different ideas
and then visualize the results and then
let i would just
in what i call wet wear synthesize and
play around the parameters until i got
the design
where i wanted it and
that was a long time too live
visualization so
data visualization came up with ways to
just
to see the design of the robot stretch
and morph
very physically rather than bar charts
it was the actual shape of the robot
would change in front of my eyes as i
would tweet parameters
and the payload would
shrink and you'd see they were making
progress or not and what year was this
when you were doing a lot of this stuff
so my phd work started in the summer of
87
and i finished in the summer of 91.
so i was using
a pc uh
and a silicon graphics so discovering
the silicon graphics
was a great kind of eye-opening
experience for me
it's a great computer system that
allowed the opengl
well the gl graphics library that
then became the opengl graphics library
that's used a lot
today was a great experience
and being able to visualize design in
three dimensions
and move it
see how it moved and see how it performs
great design tool how is that different
from
having the you know the kind of playing
with the materials
in your hands and shaping them while
you're designing versus looking at
something on a computer screen
it's cheaper but it's it's um
not as satisfying to me so
for my my phd work i wanted to do both i
wanted to build
uh modules and then
be able to more virtually synthesize the
combination i didn't want to put every
possible sequence of the joints and
links together every time
i wanted to evaluate something i didn't
need to do that
but i think having designed and built
the parts
was very important for me to understand
it had led to some important things that
occurred later in my career i can
actually
design and build robotic systems
early and the
those early robots that i built were
really really bad
horribly bad uh very wrong
and uh i was free to do that
and it was important to be able to get
that out of my system
and it allowed me to set a lot higher
standards for later when i was
doing it professionally to
know what could be done and
have an expectation that it will be done
better each time
what do you mean could you describe bad
and wrong a little bit in terms of these
so when we come up with some more
descriptive terms
uh clunky uh
fat uh weak
um
we can just describe the robot or well
i uh i built robots that
were not deeply integrated so i was
buying components like actuators
and sensors with their own housings and
then putting those together
rather than starting with more basic
components
like the stator of a rotor of a cedar
and a motor or just the optical disc
and a reader head bind the whole encoder
with a package around it means you've
got this big
thing sticking out the side
clamping it
and it violated my sensibilities what
design should be but i i was learning
getting a feel for all the componentry
that had to go into the designs
and i i'm big on iteration and i
can just look at designs and know that
they were a first
row or that the person didn't care it
might be a tenth rep and they just don't
care
but you look at it and it's it's clear
that they were putting things together
for the first time
and i hadn't really thought it all out
yet
once you get all the pieces together you
realize oh it would have been better
if i known that the nth piece that i was
going to add
was that way i would have made a much
different choice
on the first and second piece
and it's it's clear when a prototype
that's not
well thought out like that early in the
design uh
just has another clumpy look to it
they were just starting
and who did you work with during your
phd with your advisors
my my phd supervisor was del tesser at
the university of texas austin
and dell really liked design and
liked actuators came from
an era in mechanism design
and uh got into robotics
uh after he graduated and uh went to the
eric or
university of florida and worked with
some great people like joe duffy
in florida then came to texas
before i came to texas and started a
robotics team there
and we had sedel was great
but even better than dell were the grad
students we had a great group of people
that were just really into robotics
there were a lot of students like 30
students there
and we all were just really into
robotics and we all
learn from each other and we're always
finding new things
and you know back then that was again a
long time ago
pre-google so if you have 30 people
with fairly crude information gathering
capabilities
you know that might be as good as one
person today who's got
the world at their fingertips with that
many people all finding things
the old-fashioned way where you had to
go into the library and read
was better than just a person by himself
so all those people finding new things
and new ideas
and hanging out at the lunch table
discussing them
that was really important that's where
most of the learning was really going on
with the students all working together
to
figure out this field of robotics and
who are some of the students over here
well one of them was my wife so
i was very i'm definitely married up
she did her master's in biomedical
engineering
and then came back to mechanical for a
phd and started working
in the same team same
supervisor professor so she was about a
year behind me
but there are a number of other students
and several of them now
are in the work work with me at nasa
a lot of them went into academia
and manufacturing we were pretty heavy
in manufacturing thinking about
robots to do manufacturing
some very high tech manufacturing like
semiconductor manufacturing and a little
bit
some of the folks went into military
robotics and what kinds of
projects were they generally also
working on so
our our group's thrust was manipulator
design
manipulator dynamics and manipulator
control
we had basically nothing going on in
mobile robotics
we were very focused on manipulator
manipulation
and uh secondary thrust and
well so all aspects of manipulation
design and manipulators
dynamics control
then secondary thrust in human robot
interaction primarily force feedback
joysticks that are essentially
manipulators themselves i mean
able to apply forces back on a human's
hand or arm
so we built a lot of force feedback
joysticks and connected them to force
feedback
manipulators and built force reflecting
systems
we had a number of consortiums where we
worked with other universities which was
a great experience
university of florida tennessee and
michigan was part of the department of
energy consortium
and then a little bit more locally we
had a consortium
with nasa and i volunteered for it
because i wanted to go work at nasa
so i volunteered for this project that
had little to do with
my thesis but i just wanted to
learn about nasa and there
we had ut austin ut arlington texas a m
and rice
and we were operating robots across the
internet
back before that was cool and
semi-dangerous so we were learning a lot
about
remote displays common interfaces
between robots we built one
back around 89.90 so the robots from all
the different
labs could take the same commands
and could display some more data despite
totally different everything about that
robot
and that still persists today there are
just
standard after standard after standard
right for robot
developers and
many people would think i was a newcomer
coming to that in around 1990
but it's a constant
evolution of commonality
and we we made our own attempts
back then the group that i was part of
and i got to operate a robot that was at
nasa from my lab in austin
and that was fantastic later
aspects of my career what kind of
profile was it
it was a robotics research 1607
kb 1607 it's a very nice manipulator a 7
degree freedom arm
way ahead of its time built by the
robotics research corporation
keith kowalski did a great job designing
that manipulator
and we operated it from austin
with a joystick that looked nothing like
it our goal was to be able to build
what tester called universal joysticks
so they didn't have to be mapped
to look just like the machine they were
controlling
they could be designed to work well with
you
rather than have to mimic the machine so
we had force feedback joysticks that
looked very different than the robotics
research arm
and how did you decide you wanted to go
work at nasa
even during grad school well i had
already decided i was going to work at
nasa
um so i was in houston during the moon
shot
and i decided summer 69 i was going to
go to work at nasa
so there was no no fuzz on that um
and you know there were a few speed
bumps along the way
uh after i made that decision i then
entered kindergarten and discovered i
had a bunch of education i had work on
before i could get working now so so it
was kind of a harsh reality a
five-year-old but um yeah assume i could
go work the right way but
apparently they like you to get an
education first
so uh but yeah i've wanted to work at
nasa for a while
and so what was it like when your dream
came true
or how did you study you started every
day
i really liked working at nasa it's a
fantastic place
i think the ultimate place to be an
engineer the the challenges that we're
given are literally out of this world
there is no preconceived notion that
we've always
we've done it this way we'll always do
it that way the presumption is
that the only way we could ever do it is
if we come up with a new way to do it
because it's such a new problem and
there's something about nasa
being kind of um
you know for the betterment of all
mankind if you
take a lot of our our us agency's
acronyms and you bounce those alphabet
suit
acronyms off of people in various parts
of the world they won't react
very positively you know our various
agencies that we have
and you know that's not good or bad it's
just the truth and
yet if you ask anybody around the world
what's your perception of nasa
it's a very positive one and you can't
fault now since
it's doing work for all of mankind
and when
we go into space we always do it
with other countries and it's a very
international
kind of endeavor so it's a great feeling
to be a part of that it's very it's
humbling to get to be a part of that
story and every generation in nasa
gets started a new chapter and we're
entering some some interesting new times
at nasa and
hoping that our robotics engineers are
going to be
once writing those chapters and so what
were some
what was the first thing that you
started working on when you got to nasa
and what group were you with so i went
to work
for a a division
at the johnson space center that i now
lead
and that division had a number of
branches in it
i went to work for the technology branch
which was the branch was kind of looking
at the far out
future stuff and
there was a gentleman named charlie
price that i worked for
yeah i can't say enough about charles he
was very forward thinking
always had a gaze that was downrange
i always was thinking ahead and
as far as i know the only mistake he
made was hiring me
he brought me in as a contract employee
and the first year there i went to over
20 places
because i was a contract employee he had
very limited travel budget
he was always getting invitations to
come to places like this conference
right today he couldn't go so
it's in rob my first year i went to over
20 places got to go to basically every
robotics lab in the country
and it was a great kind of drinking from
the fire hose experience but i got to
meet a lot of people
and it really
helped me build a network that i
continue to use today
the first project i was on was
well i had no one gets to work on one
thing
i had a project that i led where i was
designing a set of i imagine this
manipulator joints
that you could put in a thermal back
chamber so
i wanted to learn about the space
environment so i've been thinking about
how to build a manipulator
in air and now i wanted to think about
what would be different in space
i didn't want to just build keep
building
fun robots and then the only reason they
would be nasa robots as they'd have a
nasa sticker on
i wanted to do what was unique to nasa
so i
i think that's the environment so i
tackled thermal and vacuum first
and started over on the design thinking
about those
components that would
be able to work in the space environment
and built
a bunch of parts and took them into a
thermal vac
chamber for some early experiments that
was a great
experience for me to get to see the
way that a robot's performance changed
as a function of temperature
pulling a vacuum didn't have a big
effect on it per se
if you design the material so they can
take vacuum
when you pulled the vacuum they still
worked now you had made those choices
up front but temperature is a very big
deal
and i set as my objective to build a
robot that could work
in what was called the eva touch range
so uva's extra-vehicular activity
spacewalking with an astronaut wearing a
spacesuit i wanted to be able to build a
robot that could go anywhere
a person in a space you could go so i
researched what that in
the thermal range was and it was about
minus 50 to positive 100 degrees celsius
and if it's colder or hotter than that
we don't like astronauts to touch it
because they could get burned or
frostbite
so i said okay that's the range for us
we'll build a robot if everything's got
to be designed to be in that range
to work with the astronauts we'll we'll
build a robot that can work in that
range too
minus 50 is mighty chili and 100 degrees
is boiling hot
most robots can't take that
and what i immediately found even though
the robot worked
it worked so much differently at cold
and hot temperatures that i had to
change
the software i had to have the software
adapt the robot
to its new temperature so that was a
major breakthrough for me
was to have the robot read its own
temperature constantly and constantly
update itself
so that it always had the same response
so if you asked it to go from
zero to five degrees range of motion the
way it went there
the the rise time
the settling time where it would
overshoot slightly and then stop
the amount of time it took to stop i
wanted all that to be exactly the same
no matter what temperature the robot was
at and at cold temperatures
when you would give it a command it
wouldn't move at all because the
lubricants were sludge so you had to
have a different set of control gains
and i found what those were
and then at high temperature it was
completely out of control
because at high temperature the
lubricants were so loose
that the friction that the control
system was counting on wasn't there
anymore
it had gone away now when it cooled down
it was back
so what i wanted was a control system of
the invariant to the temperatures no
matter what
when you commanded the robot you get the
same right result
and you didn't have to care about what
temperature it was
which is a very unusual idea and you
don't
see that even today it's normally people
just warm the robot try and keep it
at a constant temperature because
they're afraid of all those changes
so that was that was a good project for
me i built those joints
i also was on a second project where
there would have been a
enormous i think probably the biggest
robotics project
ever had just been canceled it was a
project called the flight tele robotics
servicer fts
uh maybe 500 million dollars
and had been cancelled just as i had
arrived at nasa and so
my branch chief sent me around the
country and we called it the fts
technology capture effort i would go
around the country
and find every component that had been
developed a great expense
for this incredible robot and find out
what was good and bad about that
component so that
we wouldn't lose that information we
spent so much money
coming up with that design that we
wanted to
take that into future designs
um so i went to every vendor every motor
every sensor
every bearing the people that built the
cable harness
and just interviewed them and looked at
the designs
and about five years later
four years later we
we got all that equipment access to us i
got it all delivered to me
at that point i was i was further kind
of up in the
team structure so i actually was the one
who took delivery of all that equipment
and so i they built one flight
manipulator
and i've still got that in storage
protected and bonded storage
so if i needed to go do something with
it i could but i ended up using
a lot of the parts the spare parts in my
own experiments because they were
these incredible components and
did a whole series of additional
experiments on thermal vacuum
performance
develop some custom lubricants that
could work in the space environment
worked with a number of other people
that had been searching for these
materials also
and we kind of came up with some
concoctions that we thought would do
well
in space and all of that
led into my thinking in the design of
the robonaut system
that we started around 96. i just come
off this
technology capture program built our own
joints and a bunch of other experiments
at that point we felt we were really
ready to
design our own robot we'd invested in
all sorts of hands that charlie price
was really into robot hands
and we we're buying the best we have an
incredible
museum of robot hands it's really
it's about the best in the world and we
continue to help any little company
that's got a new hand
i tend to buy it just to help them
because there's so few out there
and we add it to the collection but we
also learn from it
and you know part of nasa's
mission is to help get our economy
moving and so giving a contract to old
company
has been an important part of nasa's
history
we didn't invent the microchip but we
bought 90 of them in the 60s
and that was really good for little
startup companies like texas instruments
and we were giving them these contracts
and we could do that in robotics that'd
be great
so we've been buying a bunch of
prototypes
we've been doing experiments kind of
piece by piece studying the
componentry and by about 96 we decided
we were ready to build
our own robot in-house and that's when
we started the mobile
project so why was the flight tele
robotics servicer cancelled
um it involved
uh congress
and the white house and strategic
objectives for the country
and i don't it was obviously canceled
before i joined nasa
so i don't really remember all the
details
when i got there it already had been
cancelled so i was
part of this effort to try and make sure
we got the most out of it
but it was it was a big project it had
been designed to go to the space that
was
going to go to the space station but at
that point
the space station was going through some
redesign its
assembly was being moved
scheduled to the right and so they
decided to put more money
into the construction of the station
itself than
robots and other things to go with it
at that point i think the space station
was was
scheduled to be assembled like starting
around 94-95
and it ended up being much later in the
than that but they they had to
reprioritize
and it fell off the chopper
and before we go to the robonaut i was
also curious you mentioned in your first
year
you ended up meeting a lot of people and
going to a lot of different places what
were some of the
people in places well i met my personal
hero red whitaker
carnegie mellon that was great i met him
a couple times before
but i had never gone to cmu so i went
there for a couple meetings
and you know red's incredible uh
and to this day i mean a lot of what
we've got in our program
john space center is is based on what i
saw
as the right way to do things at cmu
and his students might disagree with
that
but they're wrong oh the way he does it
is the right way to do it
and sometimes you just have to do a
100-day death march to be successful and
he's not afraid to do that from time to
time
he also has a
a long-term vision for
the technology doesn't get too
lost in the moment he's seen
the the evolution of
the profession and he knows where we are
in that profession and
what you can expect as improvements
i remember i was talking to him about
students
and yet today's students coming into
robotics
are so much better than they were even
ascension yet
a decade ago
he said yeah it's really becoming a true
profession
and that kind of hit me that robotics
was of the turning point
going from kind of a oddly formed
collection of
anecdotal um rules
and guidelines and truly becoming a
profession
and that was probably late 90s when i
said that to me over
the adult beverage uh and it
it's it's true you know robotics really
has matured into a profession
who else um i
met a lot of great robotics engineers at
jpl
guys like paul shanker and samad hayati
brian wilcox just incredible robotics
engineers
in particular for me space robotics
engineers
rich folby paul bachus
chuck wiseman some great
thinkers in the field of robotics and
space robotics
um a pretty good guy up at the ames
research center butler hein
and then universities all around the
country
uh osama catie stanford bob cannon is 10
for
retired steve rock stanford
a number of uh professors at mit like
steve dubowski and rod brooks and gil
got pratt meet all the mark raver
just great robotics researchers
that were very inspirational
as you can see in them their own visions
for
where this robotic story was going
and they
they taught me a lot
and so how did all of this the then feed
into the
verbonaut system and how did also people
decide that that was the
the kind of platform that they were
going to build something more
humanoid well robonaut started
with a idea
to build something called a work system
and it was an idea that was formulated
by a guy named dave lavery at nasa
headquarters
and charlie price they
outlined in i think it was a brief white
paper
three levels of a work system uh the
first was
something that could fly around and
again very focused on space station and
working
in a microgravity environment with
people
as opposed to like a mars rover so that
team was very focused on
supporting human space flight with
robotics and they
defined three levels of a work system
one was a free flyer that could just
inspect
you can provide camera views you never
have a camera in the right place
you always want it somewhere else
looking back at some angle that you just
don't get
and it as you're working you always want
a new angle on a new camera and a new
place
so being able to have a flying eyeball
was
kind of a minimal functionality it
doesn't have to do a lot of work
it just needs to help you see or
perceive maybe not even cameras maybe
some other kind of sensors um we built
one of those and we flew it
called air cam but the original name was
this great name it was uh ews
number one uh external work system
number one
uh as kind of a class
robot air cam's my surname uh
ews2 we didn't build but um it was
generally regarded as a mule that could
move up near you
and keep stuff for you and you could use
it as a
mobile workbench or a mule like a just
pack the old carry stuff for you so
astronauts are
pretty encumbered with what they carry
having to use their hands to climb
typically
so they're kind of out of hands for
carrying stuff
and they're
cognitively challenged climbing because
they're in a spacesuit and they're in
free food
it's kind of like rock climbing where
the rock is falling
in in free fall and you have to climb in
a vacuum
so you're wearing a suit but other than
that it's pretty easy
so since they're challenged they um
wanted something that could carry stuff
for them so they could focus on
themselves not have to carry
equipment we never built one of those
but
it was a good class of a machine and
uh ews3 external work system number
three was one that could actually do
work
so it could work with the astronaut
very likely in kind of a junior
apprentice role or an assistant
and then when the astronaut would go in
they could keep working and
maybe work in some level you know not as
good as an astronaut but
it's out that's persistent it could stay
out all day long and
you could leave it behind and
that was the kind of niche that we
targeted
uh robin up for now we didn't call it
robot i went through a bunch of
renames you know
but after a couple of years by about 98
we called it robonaut
didn't exist there was none
built at that point but after a couple
years we had
pieces together and
i became the robonaut project leader in
august of 99.
at that point we still didn't have a
robonaut but we had
a hand and we had
an arm and uh
we're running out of time so it was kind
of a critical moment
i'd been the arm sub system lead and
i've built the manipulator down to about
right here based on some of those
experiments that i've done early in my
career
and we
we really needed to put it together so i
i
challenged the team to let's get this
thing together
i knocked out a neck pretty quickly
uh with a head with some cameras and
we put the the head subsystem the arm
subsystem and the handsome system
together
and i remember the first day
we we turned it on and we had a
teleoperator
we decided we were going to start with
teleoperation because we could
and the teleoperator put on a vr helmet
same helmet we were using the command to
command another robot we built and to do
vr training for the astronauts
gloves and a helmet and we had a
guy put that on turn the robot on and
you reach out and grab something just
perfectly the first time
i said okay we got something here
reaching out and grabbing
uh a tool and getting it in a really
nice grasp
that where you could actually use it and
it was strong and could
apply forces just instantly with no
zero training um said to me okay we've
got
got something here now i knew
for it to really meet its potential it
would have to be autonomous
but that'll take 50 years
um in the meantime it's if a person can
step inside the machine
and just be that good i'll take it
but clearly uh over the evolution of the
robonaut system we've gone more and more
autonomous
and with the robonaut 2 we started
autonomous only
and it's a great taller operator robot
but we've hardly done
any time operation with it
but when we reached out and we grabbed a
tool for the first time i liked the
first try
we knew we really had something that was
pretty capable
and that that really summed up pretty
much every experiment we ever did
and continued to do with the robonauts
especially with tel operators the first
take almost every
video you've ever seen of a robonaut one
was the first or second take and that
was it
we didn't need to do a whole lot we
actually found if we kept doing it got
worse
so it was actually better to just take a
first
hey try this and we'd videotape it and
it would work perfectly
and he would say okay done let's try the
next thing try that
and there's something about
the way we describe tell operating
robonauts is
going in is stepping into the robot
and it when you put the helmet on and
you move your head around and the view
moves so
well um
that's probably 90 percent of convincing
you're inside the machine
and then when you look down at your
hands and you wiggle your fingers
and you see them it just looks like
you're wearing
astronomic gloves right and you do
this and you see your hands you are
you're there uh we've had
just some really fun experiences where a
person is you know there's there may be
in another room
right down at the other end of the same
room
and they're tell operating the robot and
holding like a big chunk of metal or
something and they drop it
the tail operator way over there moves
his foot out of the way
because operator doesn't want it to hurt
a toe right but then
the caliper looks down and realized well
rubbing it doesn't have toes
and actually i'm not in this thing am i
but it was really telling the way they
uh they felt they were there and all
their reflexes
were there we played around with audio
and being able to talk to your friend in
this robot
is just amazing that i did a bunch of
experiments where i would work
side by side with the robot being tell
operated
and it was just i was standing next to
fred
and we were just talking about what we
were going to do and i'd say here hold
this
and we would try something for the first
time building some assembly together
and i was just like i was talking to a
colleague and we were
putting something together for the first
time it was just that easy
and it pointed things to say here you
put your hand put your left hand
here i'm going to put the tray of parts
on your right and you'd look over on his
right and see it
and we would just start building things
together
and that human robot team
was was clearly uh very
powerful so so was it uh like 2001
did you say when you start first started
where you did that first experiment
the first person grab was
september 99 oh and we went from nothing
to
having that ability about two weeks two
months
so we had a neck with a head on it some
cameras one manipulator with a
robonaut one hand on the end of it and a
telepresence control system off to the
side
and that that came together now those
pieces existed
in july and by so then in september
we had put them together first
integrated test
and that was 99. in 2000 we put another
arm on
a lefty and we
took the system we went upright with a
upright torso with a waist joint that
could
move the torso and
then we really in 2001
we repackaged the torso with a better
computer system
and some new software and uh
went into skin design started looking at
tactile sensors and
some over overlays for improving the
vision system
uh visual system 2002 we built a second
unit
that was uh robonaut so from the very
beginning i called
the first one we built robonaut 1 one
r1a1 and everybody made fun of me
that you know this is just robin on
white where he called it r1a1
but then we built robonaut 1b
1 and r1b1
and then they they started to get the
picture
that we were going to be building these
for a while
r1b1 was
very similar to the first but all the
electronics
that were in a rack behind the robot
were integrated in the torso
and it was the first time we built a
lower body and we built a single leg for
climbing
and zero gravity and we did a number of
experiments on a flat floor kind of
hovering
climbing stabilizing with the leg while
working with the hands being able to
move the body
on the leg
we later because the torso was
self-contained
we could do that and we later started
swapping out other lower bodies
got a great project with darpa about
about that time and
they gave us doug gage uh actually mark
swenson was our first tarpon program
manager
he believed in us if he hadn't given us
our first contract we would have been
absolutely dead
uh he believed in us and gave us our
first real
grant and then uh doug gage came in
and teamed us up with a great group of
university researchers
thinking about autonomous control
manipulation
so there i got i got working with rod
groupen university of massachusetts
and alan peters at vanderbilt
and maya matarik
usc and cynthia brazil at mit
and their students
great team uh mark doug gage gave us a
segway
and we put r1b1 on this segway which was
terrifying
had a multi-billion dollar robot
balancing
wow but we we really learned a lot about
mobile manipulation bringing mobility
together with manipulation
and we learned how that design was
really bad
that the the torso on a segway was not
the right answer
it could not reach the ground so if it
dropped something
it had no ability even with robonaut's
arms being pretty long
it still could not reach the ground so
at that point i realized
that just bolting manipulators
on rovers was not the right
thing to do it's easy to do but it's
clunky
that just you got this part you got this
part they weren't designed to go
together
and if the mobility system had ever seen
the manipulator when it was being
designed it would have been designed
differently
if the manipulator design had never been
designed thinking about mobility
it would have been different so if you
hook them together
because you can but then you realize
that arm can't reach the ground
and the arm can't reach here's that spot
in the middle of your back you can't
quite reach
most mobile manipulation system that
spot is huge
and it's a majority of the robot that it
can't reach
and that's really wrong mobile
manipulation should be able to scratch
an edge
wherever it's got it um
we're gonna stick uh
the uh the last thing we did with
the robonaut one series was we we built
a custom rover
and we we solved this problem we went
after a number of things we built a
mid-joint
mid waist that would allow the upper
torso to bend all the way down
get close to the ground had a spine
rotation where it could rotate around
we put a little workbench on the tail
end of the of the rover chassis
where it could set things down so it
didn't have to always carry it
it could pick things up and set things
down it could have tools
that it could use on its own little
workbench
and i'm i was just looking at some
robots downstairs and an exhibit hall
that had a little tray where it could
set things on its
self you know what a practical idea
and we did that in 2006 had a
nice size workbench that rubinak could
turn around so
the torso had an additional mid
body so that that tray was not always in
the way
it could turn around but when it needed
to get to the tray it would reconfigure
the torso and
turn around and
so i started thinking a lot about wastes
i think that the waste
is the key in robot design to bring
mobility and manipulation together
so i started studying primates
and my wife and i wrote a paper on the
primate waste
i for it was the first
it was the first issue of the journal
for humanoid robotics
and we looked at primates and
small primates have an incredibly
athletic waste
like lemurs and monkeys
and so we defined a waist as a gap
between the pelvis and the ribs
and the musculature to flex it
seems simple right all primates have
that right well
turns out not if you look at the great
apes there's only one great eight that's
got a waist
and that's us if you look at bone bone
chimps and orangutans
and gorillas the ribs touch the pelvis
there is no gap there is no range of
motion
there is no musculature to flex their
body is just a rigid buck
that's got incredible limbs coming off
of it the
torso is just very
rigid they don't spin it's
um if you look at their skeletons it's
very different from us and so then if
you compare the skeletons
little monkeys great apes no waste and
then humans with a waste
again and what happened
that's it's interesting
but if you look at the way great apes
move and manipulate
they tend to do one or the other the
ring and pink here
mainly just for stabilization of the
object
we'd also decided we were gonna so we
were gonna go after a hand so they can
interface with all those sim tools
and the hand has a feature
that very few robot hands have
if you look at any of the hands that are
in our museum
or in like the exhibit hall
they don't have palm you know the only
ones that do are the anthropomorphic
cans
right the palm is actually one of the
most important features of a hand
and most robot hands don't have palms
it's just the whole algorithm for using
the hand becomes different
if you've got a palm you use the arm to
put the palm
on an object and then you grasp it
and that is such a simple
and effective way to grasp an object
rather than to reach out and try and
make
a pincer grasp on it that's
much more delicate slower it's less
robust
having a palm is the first typically
first contact
or even you envelop so the grasp is an
enveloping grasp that's very strong and
rugged that's such a
useful grasp and most robots can't even
begin to do it
it's just like the most basic thing an
infinite has a
infant has a grasp reflux curl reflex
that is that you touch their palm and
they do an enveloping
curl that is
really simple and powerful and most
robots can't do it
so we wanted to be able to just put the
hand on an object
and have it grasp it so that was one of
the the first
autonomies we built for robonaut that
the the grasping was hard to control
um so much of what happens
when we as humans grasp things is done
where we can't see what we're doing
that are we we tend to go overhand on
objects
and we one of our astronauts noticed uh
dr nancy curry noticed that
teleoperators robonaut
tended to go underhand to grab objects
so they could see what they were doing
and when she said that it was just
obvious to me after that
how we were doing it all wrong and
humans reach overhand and they grab
things but at some point they
transition from vision to tactile we
were trying to do it all with vision
the tell operator so we could do it but
it was taxing the operator
they were seen
forces which is a computationally
intensive way
to get forced data but humans are great
at it
yeah i was but we had
novice tele operators able to do all
kinds of things with robonauts because
humans are just crafty and they would
see things flexing and they would know
that there must be a force there and
they would see
contact because somebody would bend or
flex
and they could feel it
kind of in an intuitive way but it was
clear we needed to get into
tactical force control and where we
we went was we turned that over to the
robot that all force management
was up to the robot and the tele
operator just thought they were really
good
that it never broke the arm and never
crushed the object
and they just kind of would go like this
just get it
and that's because we had the robot
protecting itself from the tell operator
not doing exactly what was told
and contextually deciding how hard to
grab
objects based on what the vision system
saw
it's a delicate object it would grab it
differently than if it was
cue ball could possibly crush
so that that was our first major break
in
autonomy starting to do turning over all
forces to the
machine and letting it handle forces
and then once you do that you can
automate the higher level
actions because the robot's going to be
safe it's going to not hurt itself and
not hurt
the environment so getting to that was a
major breakthrough because then we could
start
automating everything how do you how do
you i'm imagining your office you have
like
you know all these uh skeletons of apes
and things like that so how do you
educate yourself on
some of these you know like just even
just figuring out the palm is important
and
you know you mentioned uh a doctor
who is right for nancy or dr nancy
something but
she noticed the other hand so it sounded
like you have a whole team there of
people
doing looking at sure biologists and so
on we've
we've got a great group of people at
nasa and basically surrounded myself
with people that are a lot smarter than
i am and
they make observations like that all the
time and
you never know where it might lead but
it's that same kind of team approach to
figuring out a domain
everybody comes in with a little
different perspective nancy
has flown in space four times uh
she's a robot operator
um excellent she uh
trains other astronauts how to use
robots in space
she has a phd in human factors and is
really
into that intersection between humans
and robots working together
and it it turns out that is our
niche at the johnson space center
will allocate space but then
no one can do everything in robotics
it's a big enough profession now
and our niche is space robotics
obviously but
my buddies at jpl build robots that go
to planets without people
and we help them a little bit and
at jsc at trial space center we build
robots that work with people in space
with some help from jpl and other
centers too
because there's a lot of commonality of
course but it's really our
our niche is building robots to help
humans in space so for the last six
years
i've been leading a project called the
human robotics systems project
and it funds work at the johnson space
center plus jpl ames
glenn goddard langley and kennedy so we
got seven centers all around the country
part of this team and we're really
focused on building machines that can
help people work in space
when we
turned to the moon in about 2005
2006
i uh i was told to
stop horsing around with robonaut we
need to build a rover
so i said all right
we're going to get into mobility and
i focus the team on designing a rover
for people
which is a different kind of a problem
you know the
uh the apollo lunar rover was an
incredible machine
and it was very different than
sojourner spirit or
maybe just look at the design everything
about it about this almost exactly the
same mass
as spirit but totally different
performance spec and not at all smart
because you'd load this cognitive
subsystem on board called the human but
boy it was fast and pretty torquey
it could carry a lot of payload gear two
astronauts
and unfolded pretty remarkably off
the side of the winter lander
but when we decided we were going to
build kind of the next generation of
lunar rover for astronauts
i put that picture up on the screen and
said this isn't it
said we're going to challenge every
aspect of this design we're not just
going to go
build a modern version i'm going to
follow we're not just gonna
swap the aluminum out with carbon it's
okay this is the update
but so much has changed let's
let's rethink this plus the mission's
different
the mission we were given was to stay on
the moon for many weeks
and the design spec for that rover just
was not
what we wanted they would never
they were never allowed to drive that
rover further than they could walk back
to the
lander so just fundamentally just didn't
trust it
but if it broke down they would die
there was no hope they would run out of
oxygen before they would get back
so they just never drove it very far
they drove up spirals around the lander
and in the last mission they they
allowed it to get up to 10 kilometers
away because it said that was pretty
much
furthest they could run before they ran
out of oxygen
and they started out there and they
worked their way back so it was all
about getting
the crew back to the lander so they
could return to earth
so i said okay that's the job we're
going to design a rover
that no matter what we'll get the humans
back to the lander
absolutely count on it and that way
we'll
trust that we can drive further than we
can walk
and that's what we did we built an
incredible machine
it's a rover called chariot that we
built
in 2007 and
it is the ultimate off-road vehicle
and the people that told me that were
the people that built the hummer
one and the people who built the hummer
two and three when they test drove it
they said you know
this is the ultimate off-road machine
and it is
it uh it's designed to carry
two astronauts and live in it
for a couple weeks maybe even four weeks
we've only tested it up to two
and it can basically drive anywhere it's
just an incredible
beast uh 12-wheel drive
on six legs active suspension
you can turn on a dime drive sideways
any direction you can dock it's got a
pressurized cabin
so you drive it in shirt sleeves you
don't have to be in a suit the whole
time
and we we test tested it we built two of
them now
chariot 1a and 1b so you know where i'm
going with that
we had crew in it for 14 days two
astronauts
in each of two of them and last year we
drove
we did a we emulated a long mission on
the moon
driving in the volcanic region of
northern arizona
and we aged about 200 kilometers driving
together
and they were we tested them by having a
science team that
only had overhead imagery but they
didn't know what had happened in that
valley and so the science team had to
figure out
what were the sequence of events that
occurred geologically in the valley
so they used the astronauts and the
robots to go explore
and there was a ground science team that
had done their phd on that valley knew
everything about that valley and they
kind of graded the remote science team
so we wanted to see how effective they
were at exploring and using
this rover pair of rubbers totally
redundant sign
uh it's got redundant drive in each leg
uh
down the steering redundant suspension
and it's designed to do everything it
needs to do on five out of six legs
if one leg completely breaks
and lift that paw and keep driving so it
doesn't drag
the leg and then absolutely everything
goes wrong
we have two of them and we showed that
in an emergency all four could
climb into one of the rovers and spend
the night driving back to the lander
so that's the way to trust you build a
completely redundant very capable
machine
put everything into making it able to
survive failures and then you build
another one too
and that's what you send to the moon and
the idea was they would stay on the moon
and the crew would use them they would
land
the rovers would drive up like valet
uh they would use them for a couple
weeks maybe
a month and then they would go home to
earth
and the rovers would drive to a new
valley
and wait for the next crew to come and
then explore that valley
and kind of we called it the leapfrog
exploration
where the you know it might take six
months or a year to drive robotically to
the next valley
and then wait for the next set of
explorers to come and
explore that valley
the those rovers are incredible
and
we're now working on the next generation
that
it's going to be even better
it's really i joke with the guys if you
look at the rover designs it's
what happens if you ask somebody who
designs manipulators to design rovers
that it's got legs and active suspension
and the body can control where it needs
to go
and along the way
we brought in some ideas from jpl brian
wilcox
totally new ideas about putting wheels
on the ends of legs
as opposed to just both holding on some
wheels onto a box and calling it a rover
just really new thinking about how to
design
rovers along the way we discovered
that if you did that it would change the
way manipulators
could be mounted on the rover
and it would change the way the waste
could be built
if the lower body can bend down
then the waist can be even better
different so with when we started the
robonaut 2 project
we knew we were going to build a new
rover for that
and we did we built a centaur two that
has incredible articulations it's a
rover and when you mount a robonaut on
in his upper body
it can just do all sorts of things we
reprised our design with a little
work bench on the back and the robonaut
2 is so much more capable than the
robonaut one
it can just do all sorts of things the
centaur 2 rover is so much more
than our first centaur
we just tested that combination of
robonaut at centauril
in arizona
a month ago and we commanded it from
houston
going out and picking up rock samples
across time delay
very autonomous where you just designate
a rock and say
you could give me that rock and since
it's a government robot after it got the
rock we told it
wrong rock but yeah didn't mind robots
don't complain
yeah we saw the rover part because we
were at isr but the
robonaut hadn't appeared yet
yet yeah so okay so you saw the chariot
rover
yeah and the century two center
with the digger on it the digging blade
yeah that's a
very capable design with the rook the
hands can't handle it the
bulldozer usually finishes
yeah we actually have a video of it so
we can just put it with your
store yeah yeah i've entered out there
got some good footage of it what was
that i'm sorry i didn't recognize you no
no no don't worry there were so many
people there that was a big bus
well good well you know the robonaut 2
project's been great
um we formed this team with
gm that was just fantastic they were a
great partner
and we built that team based on an
aligned vision
they wanted robots that could safely
work
next to people and handle all the same
things that were designed for people
so cars are designed to be put together
by people
right and spacecraft are designed the
same
human spacecraft or designs everything
can be serviced by they were it was all
put together by people originally anyway
but
it's all designed so human can fix
things service it
so where we were kind of accepting that
as the de facto standard for a robot
gm is looking at that same idea you know
we're not
we're not trying to get rid of humans
you know a robot that's designed to
safely work around humans
kind of assumes that they're going to be
humans if you're going to design a robot
to do it by itself
you know you design a totally different
kind of robot that could be sharp and
fast and
lethal and you wouldn't go near it you
put it in a cage
you never let people in you know as it's
doing its job
but if you're designing a robot that's
going to work shoulder to shoulder with
people it's got to be a totally
different kind of machine it's got to
move at a pace that's not
going to surprise the people it's got to
be smooth
and soft and
be able to fit in the same places that
people fit in
and handle all the same objects that
people handle
it's a lot harder if you could redesign
all the world to be handled by a simple
robot
you know go for it because that's
definitely
a better option as far as the cost of
the robot
but redesigning the world is kind of
expensive
so we decide okay world's designed for
people let's just accept that
rather than fight it and step up to the
challenge of building a robot that can
work in a human's world
that's what we've done with the royal
messes well we're on our way
we've been working on robonauts for 15
years
and i think it's going to take about 50
to get it right
so by the end of that probably be
pushing robonaut 10
and we'll have made just incredible
progress i
can't even imagine what the next 35
years will be like
that it's going to be great even the
jump from robonaut 1 to roman 2 is just
huge
the robot is so much more capable more
reliable
faster stronger better and
i expect the jump from our 2.3 to be
equally
impressive and we've got a lot of
pent-up ideas now
about what it might be and the team's
eager i think to get going on the r3
we're not done with the r2 yet we're so
like what are some of the
both the technological and the you know
conceptual
changes that made that jump
possible well just all sorts of ideas
uh we when we built the r1 um
it was a long time ago it was nice 697
when we were
designing it and
a lot of i like to design robots to
implement an algorithm
so if you understand the control
algorithm then you can make choices
about how fast should it be
what kind of sensors are needed where
should the sensors be
what kind of motions are appropriate
and get optimized but you understand the
algorithm that you're trying to
implement
and we found some new algorithms
so the algorithms for autonomy are very
different than for telepresence control
and it drives you very different kinds
of sensors
and you need more sensors and different
kinds of sensors
sensors that might be hard to display to
a human but that are
ideal for the robot yeah it's really
hard to show
force but the robot feels it much better
than a human
could ever understand so all kinds of
force sensing
very important um the
there was a an algorithm an idea more
than an algorithm
that gil pratt had at mit
called series elastic actuation and
it was i think one of the most important
breakthroughs
in robotics where he was putting
elasticity into the drivetrains and then
rather than trying to sense strain
gauges
signals break micro strain
where metal is distressed and it strains
very
minutely a strain gauge picks that up
the problem is strain gauge picks up
everything they're much better
temperature sensors and they are strain
sensors
they'll pick up all kinds of
electromagnetic noise and they
they age poorly and they're fragile
so what what gill found was with a
macro strain we had a lot of elasticity
in the drive
you could measure that that deflection
with position sensors that
we're seeing a lot of strain a lot of
wind up
and it um was easier to do without as
much noise as
in the signal plus when the robot's even
just turned off by its own business and
you bump into it it's soft
so a great new idea
and it had a huge impact on the design
of robot two
so i you know i looked at all the
implementations of sirius elastic and
most of the implementations involved
linear springs and cables and pulleys
like at the mit light lab but i was
looking for
something more inline
and direct and so we we came up with a
number of
very novel uh series elastic
embodiments and for the robonaut 2
project
and we're over 40 or 50 patents now
coming out of that project
so i can't go into all the details but
we came up with
a serious elastic design that's
basically one part
that could be made fairly expensively
and it just kind of simplified the whole
packaging down
so with uh you know with the robonaut
ones we already started to go to a very
felt design of the manipulator i didn't
want
things sticking out sharp pinch points
cylinders are nice but when they start
sticking out at orthogonal angles they
form sharp edges
i didn't want to hurt people so i also
like that if skin coverings that are
again soft and got a patented skin
design there are a lot of other benefits
to skins on robots for cleanliness and
emi electromagnetic interference control
but safety is a really good one
skins can protect the robot from a dirty
environment and vice versa
so we started covering our robots and
getting
soft fabrics space materials
teflon kevlar effect tran
and we've continued that with robot too
but with a soft core in the drivetrains
you don't need as much
compliance in the skin it's already soft
but again we
if you look at the design of the
robonauts
they're smooth there are no sharp edges
protrusions that have corners and if you
look at like a welding robot
it's lethal it's got 90 degree angles
sharp and steel
bolts sticking out of it here
with that bolt it might as well be you
know a knife blade
uh we don't want any of that
everything's got to be smooth it's felt
for working around people and
we've really pushed that to note the
robonaut design it's extremely smooth
and compliant now also
and i think that's essential for working
with people you just don't want any
sharps or pinch points and that's a it
goes to
the nasa design philosophies before
space hardware
is certified we go over it with a swatch
cloth
and look for any burrs or sharp edges
that could cut an astronaut spacesuit
and kill them so you know we don't want
that so
everything's got to be smooth i think
that's really important for
the future of robots working around
people is they just need to be
soft and smooth
uh easy to bump into and not
not cause a problem also helps when the
robot bumps into things that are not
people
it bumps into itself if a robot's elbow
touches its torso it's usually a
disaster
you know it's it's got a scrape on its
elbow it's got a scrape on its torso and
it probably
ripped its shoulder apart because that's
where all the torque was
so it's got typically three injuries
just from bumping its
torso and humans do this all the time
it's actually comfortable because the
end of the stroke of
your arm perfectly reasonable for your
arm to touch your torso shouldn't be a
disaster
and yet it is in most robots it's the
robots have their elbows out like this
because they don't want to touch
anything
and that's that's horrible if our arm
reaches in and bumps something
it should be no big deal but if it's got
a bunch of wires or sharp edges or snag
points
keep it away from me
with the nri there's a lot of focus now
on these kind of co-robotic applications
um so do you have a feeling for over
time how
in the community this this um
interest in more human-oriented systems
has developed
versus focusing on the ones that are
more autonomous and have their own kind
of
closed environment well that's what
we've always been focused on at the john
space center
uh robots for working with people is our
our deal
so we're really happy the rest of the
world now thinks it's a good idea too
i've been working i'm the nasa point of
contact for the national robotics
initiative
and i've been working with the office of
science and technology policy
to get it moving i
when i read some of the early white
papers on co-robotics
it was like i'd written them myself it
was just they were wonderful
a lot of really solid thinking
had gone into some of the ideas
i asked let me let me write an extra
section it was like a worker and
co-protector
inhabitant and i said well let me let me
write one on co-explorer
so i i put a few pages on that
and as i then started to talk to several
of the other agencies
other government federal government
agencies about the
initiative they could all kind of relate
to it
that they all had some aspect that was
important to them
the nih just has great applications for
robots working with people obviously
um in a nasa i've already gone over a
lot of
a lot of the ideas but
what i wanted was each agency to kind of
see itself in that
theme and pick out the aspects of it
that were important for that agency's
mission
and it was actually pretty easy for
everybody to do
and one of the the things that was the
probably the core value
that everybody had was safety around
people
that they all had some job to do in that
very agency to agency
but you know let's do that job
with robots next to people without
hurting the people
that's across every single agency's
interest
so it's the easiest thing for us all to
focus on
and it's really important right now
where robots have matured
and we're now getting them capable
enough we actually might want them to be
near us
because they could do jobs that are
worth it now please just don't hurt us
while
they're doing those jobs and that's
where we are now
there are a number of other aspects you
know it would be nice not
for them to annoy us where we could get
them to do a job quickly without having
to
take more time than just doing it
ourselves certainly
and so that's and then there are a
number of other aspects of the
human robot combination that i think are
probably
true of interest to all the agencies but
but don't hurt people is really very
fundamental
we we took some major steps in that when
we
got the robonaut 2 certified for space
station but that is a very
conservative community we don't just let
anything
inside the space station with the
astronauts it's got to really be
safe so fortunately we've made a lot of
really good choices in the robots
robonaut 2 is its design and we have
three independent ways to feel
a person bumping robonaut or vice versa
and that's enough that it's trusted so
three independent sensing
systems they can all sense forces of
contact
with their own cable harness going back
to separate processing
it's the way when nasa goes through a
design like that it's just very paranoid
you know what could possibly go wrong
i'll assume three things go wrong you
know what what
would you get and we went through all
that
and proved the design was safe enough so
that astronauts are allowed to be
in the workspace of this robot while
it's running
and that's a major breakthrough
you see some of that going on but it's
dangerous
people today are in the workspace of
rovers and manipulators
that i don't like that that concern me
because they don't have
redundancy and they aren't particularly
soft and smooth
you know a lot of the designs are just
really wimpy
so that you know they can't hurt you
much because they're not very strong
that's not the right answer either
because what we want is a machine strong
enough to actually do work
but safe enough to do it right next to
us so just
making the machine extremely incapable
isn't isn't the right answer so
a robot that can handle like with
robonaut we typically handle 20 pound
dumbbells
and you know full extension can do this
forever
yet we trusted to do it right next to us
that's the challenge anybody can build
an underpowered robot that can't really
pick itself up but build a machine
strong enough to do work and be safe is
a real challenge
and likewise with with mobility
so the co robot theme isn't just about
humanoids at all
robots are in so many different forms
uh cars are
gonna become robots and what would it
take for you to
trust driving on the same roads with
robots
what would it take for you to trust
being in the car
when you're not driving and what would
it take
to put your kids in a car and have the
car drive them
to grandma's house but you're not it and
the kids are crying
that's that's tough for me that last
one's probably the hardest
you know um what what's that going to
take
to be able to have robots working with
us
shoulder to shoulder driving lane by
lane
and trust that they will not do the
wrong thing and that's that's where we
are right now
we could build a car capable i could
drive any speed we want to drive
but making it able to do it right next
to us
is the big challenge so we called that
one co-driving
co-pilot's room was already taken but
you know being able to share the roads
with these things
huge breakthroughs are needed i think to
make that happen
but it's going to happen you know it's
going to happen we're going to have
mixed traffic big trucks little cars
bikes pedestrians
and you're gonna have robots driving and
all that
just a matter of who can figure out how
to do it safely first
and i mean in that case it's also not
just a problem the robot actually doing
something wrong it's the fact that
people are
somewhat unpredictable as well well
it'll always be the
people's fault always
robots should never be blamed
you can quote me on that it's always the
people
because at a minimum we designed them so
it will always be the people's phone i
also have a bad tendency to do exactly
what we tell them to do
it's definitely the person that's the
problem
um so one other thing i was going to ask
you about quickly
or maybe i shouldn't because it sounds
i've talked to some other nasa people
about funding
um thank you for not asking he wasn't
worried about going all two hours too it
looks it looks like we're getting closer
um so i think you told us a little bit
about how you see this stuff developing
in the future
um so we can get that from there but
are there any other aspects of the
projects you worked on that you wanted
to mention
or the teams or maybe people that you
worked with
um well i mentioned the general motors
corporation
great partner in the robonaut 2 and
i mentioned darpa another great partner
a number of universities
um i really don't think there's any
limit
to our advances in robotics
it's
my optimism mainly comes from
watching students build new machines
and i do a lot of work with kids in
robotics
and programs like dean cayman's first
robotics program
are truly inspirational and every time i
watch
kids build some new incredible robot it
it reinforces my mind
how the best robots are in our future
and i will help you build that name
they like building robots too um so we
that actually kind of nicely brings us
to our general last question
or did you want to ask no no no no
which is which is basically um if you
had some advice for young people who
were interested in robotics what would
it be
there's no excuse for them not to find a
robotics team somewhere
you know when when i was a kid that
wasn't an option
but now there are so many out there that
they really need to go find a team and
get busy it's
relatively easy today to do that the
resources are there
go find an engineer
and volunteer that's a good way to
to get a job i basically volunteered
to go work on a project that was funded
by nasa because i wanted to go work at
nasa
if there's a robotics team working on
some problem
nearby go volunteer to
help the engineers go build it
and it's amazing what
uh you can contribute just by having a
good attitude and
trying you'll pick it up and
learn to work with others on a team
and it's i think the best way to get
started
you don't need to wait until you go to
college
that it's not going to get you where you
want to go
start early and volunteer
to get involved a lot of ongoing
projects they're probably in your area
and seek them out and
volunteer okay i think i need thank you
so much