so why don't we start by just having you
tell us
um let's see where you were born and
where you grew up
i was born in slovakia in the city of
bratislava
which is the capital um our family uh
emigrated uh just at the beginning of
the second world war
and uh by then it was impossible to get
the visas to the united states
because um the united states had
nationality quarters in those days
people from each country
so we went to south america and lived in
bolivia for five years waiting for our
number to come up
and when it came up we moved to los
angeles
how old were you when we got here it was
17.
and uh you did your undergraduate at
ucla i did my undergraduate work at
ucla except for the senior year
which i did at berkeley ucla
was just starting its engineering
uh curriculum when i went there and
basically they added one year every year
so when i became a senior i could have
stayed at ucla was the first
time they offered a senior year and
but i was also eager to get away from
home and
so i really wanted to go to a more
established place and not be a guinea
pig in the first year
so i went to berkeley and had a
wonderful year
and you wanted to be an engineer yes my
father was an engineer
and i guess it was largely inspiration
from him
and i was good in mathematics and so yes
i've
i always wanted to be an engineer but
that's not completely true
once i got my master's in engineering i
went through a period when
i seriously considered becoming a
minister
um and i actually i was working running
a computer at ucla
and in the afternoons i came to usc
which at that
at that time had an accredited
theological seminary on the campus
so i came here and i i spent
two and a half years almost three years
in a master of theology program and
the first year was entirely made uh
first year
were undergraduate deficiencies that i
had because engineers have
almost no humanities in social sciences
so i spent the first year taking
sociology
1 or 101
psychology 101 and so on the second year
i took all the things that i wanted
in the third year second and third year
by the fourth year it would have been
entirely professional courses involved
like in running a church
and i couldn't stand it so i dropped out
were you studying robotics from the
beginning or when did you no
my interest in robotics started in the
1980s
i was at ufc of course where i started
in 1962 so i was at ufc 40 years
before i formally retired and came here
to cal poly
where i now have a faculty position
but in the 1980s
we hired a young man from stanford
who was the first robotics person in the
school of engineering at usc
and
so who was that
why am i drawing a blank on his name
it'll come to me in a moment and you'll
be doing editing anyway right yeah so
as soon as i get the name i'll tell you
he dropped out of robotics by the way
sometime after that
but he got his phd at stanford and
when he came he really wanted to have
a robot manipulator when he came in the
1980s we really had no mobile robots yet
except a few remotely guided vehicles on
factory floors
but but largely it was manipulators
so uh i wrote a grant proposal to nsf
and got money to buy a puma manipulator
and uh so that came and then
then he and i started a robotics lab
it was only in the 1990s when
i had a number of students working in
the lab with me and we began to get
interested in mobile robots
and then we built
four-legged and six-legged and wheeled
machines that ran around and we also got
interested in robot helicopters
which is a tradition that gorham
sukhothmi followed
and took on from me and continued in the
process
yeah i saw a lot of those helicopters
good okay
there's a there's a picture on that wall
that shows some of my students in some
of the various assorted robots that we
built
oh yeah you have to get a shot of that
yeah so what were you doing for the the
20 years from
when you started on the faculty until
you started working in robotics
when i wrote my thesis on mathematical
models of
human operators in control systems that
is how do you represent a pilot for
example flying by instruments
what is the mathematical relationship
between
the visual input and the manual output
in controlling a joystick let's say
and then i continued in that kind of
work for
a number of years maybe six eight ten
years
after i came to usc but i was also very
interested in biomedical engineering
and this started because i met
uh one of one of the people on my phd
committee at ucla
called me in one day and said
george you're the one with the most
peculiar interest in the
among the students i know here there's a
man at the medical school
who needs some advice from an engineer
because he says he's getting very
strange results
he says he's got blood flowing against
the pressure gradient
in the sheep that he works with so um
it's flowing uphill
and he doesn't understand and he said
i'm not interested can you go see him so
i went to see it
so i went to see um professor ossaly ass
ali
who was in physiology
and obstetrics at the ucla medical
school
it turned out that the reason for
the mysterious uphill slow was that
he didn't understand that um this is a
dynamic phenomenon and not a static one
and so when
blood is ejected by the heart
it has inertia each
bolus of blood you might say has inertia
so that even
when the pressure stops and the blood
and the pressure gradient reverses
the blood continues to flow against the
pressure gradient but with decreasing
velocity
does that make sense yeah so so that's
what it was and then we began to build
mathematical models of this process and
and i worked with dr ossoli for maybe
five or six years then i started the
biomedical engineering department
at usc and did a number of other things
involving respiration circulation muscle
function
and so on what year was uh
probably around in the early 70s
yeah i would have to look it up because
i don't remember but that's
approximately right
so so i started in
human operator models then at the same
time as i moved into
biomedical engineering things i also
started to get interested in signal
processing
and i introduced the first course in
digital signal processing
at usc so
which is kind of amazing because when i
left
as in my undergraduate years
i'd actually been consulting for beckman
instruments
and working on analog computers
now most people don't remember what an
analog computer is like but
but in those days uh that's what i did
and so in uh
sometime in the 1960s
i co-authored a book this green book
right here
hybrid computation refers to a combined
analog and digital computation so that
if you
so the idea was to be able to get the
speed and bandwidth out of the analog
computer and the precision out of the
digital computer
and i think the this book was the
copyright date is 1968.
interesting so um so as you can see i
did a variety of things
now then in the 1980s it was interesting
because as i
started learning about robotics
what what i discovered was that in some
ways
the field of robotics was a blend of
many of the things i had studied before
certainly the robot was in some sense
modeled after a human
so that what i learned about
manipulation
in manual control systems was also
applicable to a large extent
here there was a great deal of signal
processing there was a lot of control
of course i was a controls person so
many of these things fitted very well
and they began to click and come
together
so then as i got into robotics i stayed
in the field
and i'm still there okay i'm just gonna
switch the slide real quick really
bright
very good um okay um
so who was your thesis advisor
my thesis advisor at ucla was john lymon
who was uh whose field was biotechnology
they didn't call it biomedical
engineering
he was really more interested in human
factors
the ways in which uh humans relate to
machines and operate machines
and this whole idea of human operator
models came out of my phd thesis
and since died yeah what kind of
influence did cybernetics
have on that field well quite a bit i
mean
i was personally very influenced by it
really norbert weiner
who invented that word as far as i know
and uh
so and particularly you know i've had
from the
from the very beginning of my college
career
i've been very interested in the broader
impacts of science and technology
so weiner's book on the human use of
human beings
was one that had a great deal of
influence on me i always felt that there
was a
we really needed to make sure that human
beings are not treated like machines or
become machines
and this
this clearly had a lot of effect on my
studies in robotics as well
i think in a curious way i've always had
the feeling
that as you study robots and the way in
which
particular humanoid robots particularly
in which they behave
we also learn something about ourselves
and that gives you in one sentence some
of my philosophy of life
great so what are some of the things
you've learned about
people by studying robots
well but it's particularly the things
that
where robots and people are different
makes you appreciate the way in which we
as humans
process information the way which in
which we're able to
do multitasking in ways in which robots
can't do very well
we certainly slow ourselves down by
multitasking but that doesn't mean that
we don't
that we can't do it as you know this is
one of the curses
of the present time is that everybody
wants to do multitasking
so so that's one of the issues and i'm
enormously impressed by
the human sensory system we have an
amazing way
of receiving information from multiple
senses simultaneously
and then assigning weights to these so
that times
vision is more important than hearing
and other times hearing is more
important
other times the sense of smell dominates
everything if you smell smoke
and and so on so these kinds of
subtle changes in the way we relate to
the world are very important in robotics
because after all robot is a machine
that senses the world
and so sensing is very important but
senses for robots tend to be
unifunctional you know they're they
don't have the ability to do that kind
of blending
but i think it'll happen more and more
fusion that's right sensor fusion i
think
is we humans do all the time and it's
becoming more and more
important in robotics as well so what
are some of the central problems that
you focused on in your
robotics career well i was particularly
interested in
ways in which robots could learn
display some intelligence so
in the early days as you know we spent
so much time just keeping them working
the meantime between failures wasn't
very long and
so and also in the early days we just
couldn't buy
inexpensive robots to use in the lab so
i was when i built the robotics lab at
usc
i actually put in a small machine shop
so we had a lathe and a drill press and
things like that so that my students
actually made
parts that were needed to put robots
together
and this was unheard of in a computer
science department
you probably know there's a famous
saying that never trust a computer
scientist who carries a screwdriver
and so we did a lot more than
screwdrivers
so but
but so so initially our goal was to try
to do things about
locomotion actually tony lewis worked
on one of the projects
having to do with uh enabling robots to
learn how to walk
we built several six-legged machines and
i think he carried on some of this work
in iguana robotics as well
so we we built these machines where
we did not specifically program a
movement sequence for the legs and
so when you first turn it on and
it has some kind of a reward system to
see how fire can travel in the direction
of the body axis
and of course it does nothing but fall
down and its legs flail
wildly but little by little the machine
learns how to
select the leg sequence that gives it
mobility forward
and so so our robots
learned how to do a wavegate
so that they use the two front legs or
two middle legs and two rear legs in
sequence
in a wave that travels across the body
and so on so that was one of the issues
the uh
then i had a contract from
jpl which involved
comparing wheeled and legged robots
on a simulated moon-like surface
so we we built a sandbox
with sand that was that follow a jpl
specifications
as being something equivalent to moon
sand
and we put in rocks and you know
whatever
so
sand isn't particularly good for robots
so yeah and we found
that the robots that legged robots
actually
do better than wheeled robots
if there are a lot of obstacles that
they have to climb over
and uh otherwise they're much slower and
use a lot more energy
than wheeled robots
what was the first robot that you worked
on
i don't remember well the first robot
was a puma of course
the first robot we worked on in the lab
was uh just it
was a robot manipulator and then because
of of the interest that i'd had
in uh manipulation and manual control
one of the things that we wanted to do
is to see whether we can get
robot arms to pick up objects and
manipulate them so
this led to a collaboration with
a man named tomovich from the former
yugoslavia
who had been the developer of probably
the first
five-fingered hand for robots
actually he originally developed it as a
prosthetic device
and then we adapted it to become a robot
hand
and having five fingers
which were not independently controlled
but were synergistically controlled so
that what happened was
if the hand reached any kind of an
object
then the fingers would all begin to
close until they made
contact so it would be this meant that
it was passively shape adapted it could
pick up an object of any arbitrary shape
without having to be individually
commanded for each finger
so this got us into some work on robot
hands that we did for maybe 10 years or
so
what were the biggest challenges in
grasping and manipulation
i would say from my point of view
one of the biggest challenges was just
simply mechanical reliability
we had a lot of trouble with these with
these hands we
we installed the pressure sensors on
them on the
on the sensitive surfaces of the fingers
on the palm
so that worked pretty well
but you see the whole goal was to try to
build a very simple
and inexpensive hand to compete with
usual parallel jaw grippers that were
used in industry
and when we could keep the hand working
it worked very well
but i never was able to find uh to be
honest with you
the killer application for a
multi-fingered robot hand
as a robot hand ideally it would be
excellent for a prosthetic hand
but for a prosthetic hand now when
needed nearly total reliability
uh in the for the robotic hand
the applications that we tried which
were primarily
having to do with manufacturing
the idea being that since the human hand
is highly adaptive and it can pick up
objects of a variety of shapes and sizes
the robot hand should be able to do the
same and the answer is yes
it could however
to build a five-fingered reliable hand
is very expensive and it was much
cheaper for industry
for the robot arm to go and pick up a
different hand
from some magazine of hands
then you could get one that would be
designed to pick up small round objects
or fat square objects and so on
and that was a lot less expensive to
have a series of special purpose
grippers
but nevertheless we did what professors
do we published a lot of papers on
grasping
great do you still uh do you still
involved in the field of grasping
not anymore really last year was invited
to give a talk on the history of
grasping
and but i don't have anything to do with
it anymore
and did you build other hands after that
no that was really the only hand that we
built
there are still
i still have one the latest model in
a file cabinet in my office at usc
and it comes out occasionally for
historical reasons
um what was the first uh mobile robot
that you worked on
well there were we built two or three of
them
and i'm trying to remember which one was
the first one
you can just tell me about all of them
well
okay so
the first mobile robot
that i worked on was actually done
jointly with
bob mcgee who
joined the e faculty at usc about the
same time i did he had just graduated
and we had a phd student named andrew
frank
andy is now in the faculty at uc davis
but he had the marvelous
combination of having had a bachelor's
degree in mechanical engineering
so he really understood mechanical
things
and so in the 1960s we built
the first four-legged walking machine in
north america to the best of our
knowledge
and which was
it was mechanical and slow but it did
walk
and you walked with a variety of gates
slowly
and it could it could do the equivalent
gate of a trot for example
we called it a horse but of course it
didn't really look like a horse but
more or less it made it had longer legs
that green book has a picture of it
if you look in the index under phony
pony you'll find it
was the name of it the phony point it
was the name of it it shows up in other
people's robotics books
what year was that i'm i'm guessing
68 69.
not there not in the index but um oh
well i'll go show it to you
so this was but you were
this was before you really got into
robotics in the 80s
i have a video of this thing yeah
walking so
well that's really not true i i i sort
of repressed this idea because this
really was a robot
okay yeah but then we didn't do anything
for 20 years
but you consider this robotics at the
time or did you consider this just a
control
application or well i i wasn't using the
word robotics i don't think we did
well this was an artificial quadruped
and
so i don't know i i don't remember
whether we used the word robot
i don't i'm not sure to be honest with
you but i remember that also
somewhere it may have been in the 1970s
or 80s
when i would talk to people from darpa
and i use the word robots they say well
i remember these people telling me if
you use that word
in a proposal we can guarantee you will
not be funded
because that's considered a bad word at
darpa
because so much money has been wasted on
robots and they don't work
but then they came back with a vengeance
so you know so so i've seen some of
these trends in society as well
anyway that machine was very interesting
it uh it really did walk very nicely
it had it didn't have any ankles
it it had a large horizontal bar to
provide lateral stability
but it had hip and knee joints and
so it was able to pace and walk and trot
and so on
and what kind of control system did it
use it used
a um
it was a digital control system designed
largely by bob mcgee
let me go to the book for just a second
well there were some ideas there which
appeared in
in later things that i worked on so
i always felt that
an animal or a human
does not control
every minuscule element of the motion of
their limbs
right i mean i don't solve the
differential equations of motion of my
legs when i'm walking
right so there's a combination of
learning and autonomy uh that occurs
in the way in which we do this and
so we we adjust the nervous system as a
in the process of learning from
childhood so that it
it solves by doing learning you don't
have to solve
the inverse kinematics of motion for
every step that you take
because that would require matrix
inversion and things of that kind which
we certainly don't do
in our heads so those principles
appeared here
and we we called it at the time
autonomy so that each limb was as
autonomous as possible on its own
and that principle showed up in other
things we did
later like what
i guess i shouldn't have said that right
but i should have known you would ask me
but
how it showed up later
do you think it's really good well it it
also showed up when we began to
disorganize because you see that the
hand was meant to be completely
autonomous
it was triggered by a single contact and
then it would autonomously close
so certainly showed up there do you
think there's some
relation to the subsumption architecture
approach that randy brooks developed
later
oh yes yeah similar concept
well certainly similar um
rod and i are friends and i i like him a
lot and i respect his work enormously
in fact the first um six-legged robot we
built in the lab we called rodney
when i told him that he said thanks a
lot
um
so were there any other robot-like
machines that you that you built before
you called it robotics
frankly i don't remember
but i don't think so because after this
as i told you i went into other things
i was trying to do digital signal
processing and
hybrid computing and one thing in
another so i don't i don't
i don't remember but i don't think so i
don't i think the basically the
the idea of these kinds of autonomous
machines
sort of disappeared from my current
things
and then reappeared
when we formally started the robotics
program in the 1980s
do you think you would have maintained
your interest in analog computation if
you'd had
the kind of high performance digital
computation that we have now
it's i'm not sure oh by the way the the
young man that i worked with who came
with an interest in robotics was barry
soroka
s-o-r-o-k-a
so barry worked with me for three years
and in spite of my best efforts i could
never get him
to to write a paper even when i outlined
it and wrote the introduction for him
he just didn't have the discipline to
write and usc
is a publisher parish school so after
three years
barry left and went to cal state
university cal state polytechnic
university in pomona where he became
chairman of computer science
a very bright guy and wonderful sense of
humor
and a great
breadth of interest in art and so on
he and the woman who worked in the
in the dean's office jointly composed an
opera
at usc where all the characters were
faculty members
yeah make a lot of friends there
yes amber now you stay down you stay
down you stay down
don't get in the way you stay down
so what were the uh the first robot
helicopters that you worked on when was
that
well the there was a competition
for robot helicopters at the georgia
tech
amber stay down i'm going to evict you
out of the room if you don't do that
stay down
stay there
and
so i entered our lab into the
competition
even though
we'd never done it before
but i had two outstanding phd students
andy fagg
and tony lewis both of whom were very
imaginative
and we basically turned them loose on on
the project
so this competition had i forgotten
let me guess maybe 15 entries
that arrived with various flying
vehicles and the goal was for the
vehicle to fly
from a starting position into an
enclosure area
pick up something and then bring it back
the first year of the competition which
let me guess must have been in the mid
80s but i don't remember exactly
none of the vehicles actually left the
ground
they all crashed or disintegrated or
fell apart in some way
so actually the winner was declared to
be
the vehicle which fell in the direction
of the target
by the second year they were beginning
to fly
and there were unusual creatures there
vehicles with four propellers
and so on and uh so our helicopter
actually did quite well
and though i think it may have been may
have been tony lewis
who came up with a formula
for calculating how much it would cost
to repair it
after every crash and the formula was
that it would it would cost a hundred
dollars
times the number of feet above the
ground at which it failed
so if it failed 10 feet above the ground
it would mean it was a thousand dollars
to fix
it you see and as a result of that we
flew them very low
until until the 1990s where we began to
do really serious uh high altitude
flying
and it's ridiculous who got much much of
that work done
so um who are some of your other
students and
what kind of work have they gone on to
do
well i've i i've had 30 i graduated 38
phds in my 40 years at usc
so almost one a year and
so of course the first ones were not
connected with robotics but
after sometime in the 1980s they were
all in robotics
and so so what can i tell you so let me
begin with a few
the ones that i can remember immediately
we've mentioned tony lewis whom you know
who is still in the field
and doing very well
juan liu is now at arizona state
university
in the computer science department and
he worked on grasping
and models of grasping and and so on
he's completely left that area he now
does
information retrieval from
the social networks so
completely different story he says he's
completely changed fields
let's see who else andrew fagg is
uh at
a university in the south no east
and he has the last time i heard i
haven't heard from at least five years
but he was work he was building a
humanoid robot
and so he's still in the field
who else worked in in robotics
specifically
yeah i mentioned fred hattier earlier
who built who does this
group a flying
synchronized group flying of satellites
he didn't work in robotics at all
in his phd program he was working on
methods of doing system identification
which
is one of my interests for 20 or 30
years
that is given input input and output
measurements of the system
can you build a mathematical model of
how those
are connected and you can see that this
grew out of my work on human operators
see i was interested in connecting
the sensory input with
the manual control output
and some of those projects were very
successful in others
which i still thought were a great idea
or failed fairly miserably
so i'll give you one example
i proposed a project to jpl which was
funded
where i said you know
people who have
paraplegics who can't move their legs
some of them actually have
in principle the possibility of moving
with canes or
with walkers or the equivalent but but
they won't walk with canes
because they're afraid of falling and
that's because
they don't have the afferent signals
and from the nervous system that would
give them the indication that they're
starting to fall
so i said why don't we do this why don't
we install
accelerometers on a belt that would
provide an indication of falling
either forward backwards or laterally
or create a vector to show you that
you're falling at 45 degrees or
whatever is happening okay and then use
that information
let's say that you're falling to the
right
and use that information to tickle
you on the left-hand side so now that
gives you the indication what you should
do
is to push on your canes or whatever to
straighten up the body in that direction
so i still thought that was a one of the
better ideas i had
and but what i didn't figure with was
that it by the way it worked very well
but for a short time why
because the human
skin habituates and the electrical
signals that we used for tickling
they didn't feel them after a while so
you had to raise the power
and then eventually got to the point
where it was burning the skin
see so you can't go that high so this
you can see how that would happen right
so
anyway that's why that never became a
phd thesis
now let's see who else did work in uh in
robotics
specifically danilo basi
uh who is uh currently in the united
states at valparaiso university in
pennsylvania i think
he would return back to chile after
getting his degree and stayed there for
many years
so he worked on control
of manipulators
using genetic algorithms
and another related
mathematical methods so he returned to
chile
and then became interested in uh using
um robots in mining
there are a number of copper mines in
chile and so you got interested in this
then he tried to form
uh for a long time he was working on
forming a consortium of american and
chilean companies to do mining robotics
and
foreign mining consortium and so on he
was never able to get it quite off the
ground
and now he's trying very hard to
get an immigration visa so he come to
the united states permanently he's here
on
some kind of a temporary visa
i just wrote a letter for him
so he really moved so here he was in
robotics from the beginning uh but but
what he did was then something quite
different after that
we never did anything on mining
i'd have to pick up a list of my
students uh
which i can certainly do um yeah we can
just
go on for now yeah let's just go on
there are many of them
yeah oh so who are some of the people
that you've collaborated with over the
years at their institutions or
at usc
well michael larby michael and i had
several joint grants
from the national science foundation and
so we worked on those things
together uh who else did i i
collaborated with bob mcgee the the man
who i mentioned to you
was involved in the construction of the
original horse
bob left from usc
and went to ohio state university
where he built a humongous
four-legged walking machine that was
originally designed to
carry soldiers in malaysia or someplace
it was never successful for that purpose
but it
but it was a remarkable machine and from
there
when he retired from ohio state he went
to the navy post graduate school
from which he's now retired also and
there he was working on robot fish
so he's a he's a man who was in robotics
from the very beginning and
pretty much stayed with it
from the time of the 1960s
what was this area mcgee m c
g h e
now let's see who with whom is he still
in monterey
he still lives in monterey and
he'll be at the talk on on friday so we
have a chance to meet him yeah
all right
you should look him up on google yeah
and um i think
i think you'll find a very interesting
guy he's pretty much
dropped all professional work when he
retired from uh
from there concentrating on his
grandchildren i think
so but that was uh that's now been
probably
four years five years and i believe
about a year year and a half ago his
wife died and that
confirmed his sort of leaving his life
though
i've been told
that one of his students who is a
faculty member at the navy post graduate
school
now does some technical collaboration
with him so he may have returned a
little bit
so sometimes you know we in robotics is
guessing our blood and we can't quite
let it go
so it comes back
where were we i'm sorry you recognized
collaborators well collaborative okay
so bob and i had some joint grants with
um
i think with the army research office or
af osr i don't i don't remember
at this point
the my last major
contracts which were darpa contracts
the maya and gorham were copyi's
i was a pi and they were assistant of
copy house and then
actually when i'm when after a year or
so after maya came
i i turned it over to her because i was
too busy i was working in the dean's
office i was an associate dean and
like she is too except that she's
superhuman and she can do several things
at the
ones which i can't do so
okay now let's see who are other
collaborators
i never formally collaborated with uh
with rod brooks
i wrote some joint papers with people
like
see i think our
arthur sanderson or rpi
do you know him no okay so
art sanderson was a
actually he was president of the ieee
robotics and automation society before i
was
in the maybe mid 1990s
but his and he's built some very
interesting machines at rpi
the latest one we see that jointly with
the navy in
some context is a fairly large um
ocean-going vehicle which is uh
completely covered with the solar cells
on its horizontal
surface and so what it does it charges
up all its batteries
and then dives and then behaves like a
submarine until it needs to be charged
again and it comes back up and charges
up
so um that's a very interesting robot
vehicle
very interesting
well i'm sure i'll think of other
collaborators before before the
time goes too far
can you talk a little bit about the um
the society uh
robotics sure
so in um
we're talking 50 years right so so we're
talking about the 1960s
and so at that time
one of the leaders of the well there
were several people who were among the
original leadership of the society
george cerritos was one of them
he was actually probably considered the
founder and he was the first president i
believe
of the society i'm not sure about that
but i think so
george cerritos
eventually moved
back to greece where he came from and i
believe he died about five years ago
seven years ago something like that
but george was a very imaginative and
hardworking guy
he and i collaborated
in the organization and running of a
couple of conferences
one of them was the the
international federation for automatic
control conference on system
identification
and so the proceedings of that are
available edited by george cerritos and
george becky or the other way around
i've forgotten which but
but that's what we did so i knew george
fairly well
the other people were involved in the
original
society one of them was was untold
baichi
who is probably historically the most
interesting
roboticist at jpl he's not retired but
still lives in pasadena
b j czy
and it goes by tony though his real name
is a-n-t-a-l
but so uh tony batesy was a
pioneer in space robotics
and uh so he was involved in the
construction of some of the first
manipulators that were used in space and
prototypes of the big space arms
the ones on the shuttle now were built
in canada but there were a number of
prototypes village apl
he was also i believe the inventor of um
providing rate feedback for manipulators
the point here is for anyone who worked
in control theory
he realized that if you don't give
to the advantage of being able to read
the velocity when something is moving
is that you can get some a measure of
anticipation see let's say for example
i'm aiming
from here to here and if i want to use
position control
when i shut it off the system has
inertia and it'll
it'll overshoot if if i measure the
velocity
then i can use a combination of position
and velocity and have it reached
precisely the target
so i believe he was the first person to
use that
in robot arms and that's one of the
strong features
of da vinci surgical robots
they use rate feedback and
which which i think makes them
significantly more stable than they
would be if you only use position
control
so tony was one of the other early
people there were there were two or
three others and
i believe at least uh one or two of them
have since passed on and i don't
i've not made any contact with them
larry ho from harvard was an early
participant but i but his field was not
robots in the way in which i knew it it
was more
well i don't remember what he did but he
wasn't exactly robots
um and were you were there other robotic
societies
or was that the first at the time when
we started this one i believe the
robotic society of japan was already in
existence
and so we really became the second
society
and then somewhere about the same time
or perhaps a little later i don't
remember
the asme the american society of
mechanical engineers
began to do work in robotics primarily
through one of their sections that
dealt with control and structures and so
on
but i think that that this was really
the original
society and
as the ieee does is you know when you
form a new society they usually don't
give you the society name right away
that's reserved for people after some
level of maturity
apparently so it's called a group or
something like that
and it's so it was jointly sponsored by
two or three other societies initially
and so
we were not permitted to call our
journal the transactions at that time
that again is another ieee formula
i think it was called
it was called what
maybe well
the society was always called robotics
and automation it always had the
automation component in it as well as
straight robotics
but in the word transactions only came
when we formally called it a society and
that took about five years
i was president from 1996 to 98.
i'm pretty sure that that's right but i
had been
active from the beginning because i
started the journal
oh it was called the ieee journal of
robotics and automation
that's that was the word and we were not
permitted to call it the transactions
until
society was formalized but you started
the journal at the same time
yes it took about a year longer
because we formed a society and then i
spent about a year
fighting with ieee bureaucracy and
to get this thing started
um so what what year was that
do you remember i don't
we could probably take the current
transactions
and look at the volume number and work
back ah
yeah should we do that it'd be
interesting
i don't remember obviously i could look
back at my various
cvs okay this is volume 26
dated 2010.
so that would make it 1984 right yeah
but that would have been as transactions
um
i think they remain they kept the the
volume numbers continuous
in other words you know journal
volume is let's say that there was
journal of volume five
um then when it became transactions it
became vitamin six
they didn't start all over again start
over again yeah but it was a volume
every two years or
no no the the volume was for the whole
year right
so there were i think initially we had
maybe four issues a year
quarterly
yeah um and then the uh you were also
involved with the
autonomous robots journal yes
well that's that started uh
significantly later and
i was at a one of the
ieee robotics conferences and uh
i was chatting with the editor
of kluwer publishers cluer no longer
exists
they were taken over by springer
okay but we were chatting and he said
you know we should really do something
in robotics so
i would you be interested and i said
sure let's start it
i mean that's how it happened and uh
so then uh kluwer sent out the
questionnaires to every member of the
society and some other people
to try to get feedback about whether
there was really a need or an interest
in another journal
and and so that's what happened so we
got it
now the gear i can tell you very easily
because that
that hasn't changed so that's still in
the
continuous numbering i think it was
roughly
volume 29 okay
now that's interesting because because
that means that i may be wrong
that the journal volumes
terminated in transactions volumes began
yeah
that could be because this was
definitely
later oh but in
in um but i believe autonomous robots
for a long time
numbered their volumes twice a year
right and so i'm no longer sure when
this thing started
i can't be sure yeah you can find out
that's right
so that's the story with autonomous
robots
i also um i have in my in the bedroom
closet because there wasn't enough room
here in my office but i have volume one
number one so if you're really
interested in this i can pull it up
oh wow yeah actually
um rodney brooks was one of the authors
in volume one number one
okay yeah so um
what do you consider your your most
successful or your proudest robotic
accomplishment
well i i think that even though it was
never a commercial success i
i thought the work under about hands was
one of the things that i always
was most pleased with and there my
collaborator was professor tomovic from
yugoslavia you see so
that was a very clear collaboration
and he would travel to the states once a
year and i went to belgrade about once a
year
so that was a very interesting and very
fruitful collaboration and i still have
contacts with one of the people from
yugoslavia who worked on the original
project
who was there was still there
so that was one and then the second
thing was
the uh the project that that tony worked
on which is
uh which i always thought was one of the
major accomplishments of our lab which
is this
project on using genetic algorithms to
to enable a robot to learn how to walk
i think that was actually probably one
of the more successful things in the
and you know i can't uh
andy frank who built that four-legged
robot in the 1960s
um was formerly my student
that is i was his major professor but he
was guided much more by
uh bob mcgee than by me
because i didn't understand the digital
technology very well
uh
having just grown out of the analog side
and i was moving into the digital
whereas bob started on the digital side
and
he had a lot of some analog background
as well what kind of computers were you
using at that point
well when i came to usc
we had the only digital computers
that we had which the university had
were some
ancient honeywell computers honeywell no
longer makes
general purpose digital computers and so
and it was as i recall it was difficult
to keep them running but they were the
only
machines around and then in a year
or so after i came
i wrote a proposal to nsf um
to get a digital computer that we could
use as part of the hybrid system
beckman instruments where i had worked
gave us an analog
and then nsf gave us enough money to uh
well we had enough money to buy maybe
half
of an ibm 1620. the 1620 was a process
control computers originally was a
serial digital computer
which meant you know that each word
processes each bit
serially one at rather than going in
parallel
this is early technology
so you were you were getting an ibm ibm
1620
and then we
formed we created this hybrid system by
connecting those
those things together the beckman analog
computer was very large it was a vacuum
tube computer
and uh what was it what was it designed
for
it was designed to be a general purpose
computer general purpose analyzer i was
jumping over furrier central computer
and the uh
don't forget that the early digital
computers the first earliest ones
actually had
uh patch boards also and you had to do a
certain amount of programming by moving
chords
around and then the stored programs came
later
on on digital computers
so and they were very slow
so um the idea of a
of a joint uh of a combined analog
digital system was really a
very interesting thing at that time and
you know we learned a lot from doing it
i was at trw uh before coming
to usc i'd actually been there
full time and then i went on part-time
and
went back to campus to write my thesis
but i did almost all my coursework while
i was working at tw
and there we built a
sizable hybrid computer and i've
forgotten what the
what the what the digital component
component was
but the idea there was to try to use a
hybrid computer to simulate the flight
of intercontinental missiles
because we had been using analog
computers to study
the high speed dynamics high frequency
dynamics of
rockets because
the these early rockets like the atlas
for example
are very flexible they had to be because
the skin was made as light as possible
so that they would carry as much of a
payload for these long distances
so they were full of liquid fuels and uh
and they were very flexible so there
were two phenomena that occurred one was
bending
so these these things bent you know and
not
only this way which is in the first
bending mode but also this way
and even this way they were to the point
where there were three frequencies that
we had to look at
because there was significant bending in
the first second and third bending modes
and then the fuel as a result of the
spending the fuel began to slosh
this was liquid fuel and if you hear a
saturn airplane and had coffee
sloshing in your cup you realize that if
you
excite it improperly it'll slosh right
out of the cup
right and that's why airplane cups often
have a lip
sauce to prevent the coffee from and or
whatever liquid you have from sloshing
out
so those things happened at such high
frequencies it was impossible to do on a
digital computer they were too slow
so what we thought was let's do all the
high frequency dynamics control system
sloshing bending
on the on the analog
and use the digital computer to
integrate the equations of motion
so that we can maintain the accuracy
that's needed to hit within a few feet
of a 5000 mile trajectory
okay because the analog computer drifts
it
it's not able to maintain precision for
that longer period of time
so it was a i still think it was a hell
of a good idea
and so you know my name is associated
with some of those early experiments
we succeeded in building it but it took
us a year longer to get it
fully debugged and the reason was that
while we had taken into account the
possible advantages of the analog in the
digital side
we didn't take into account the
disadvantages and the disadvantages were
that the digital computer accumulated
round off errors
and the analog computer drifted anyway
so we still had problems with
and so it took us a year longer and the
air force
just didn't want to wait any longer i
mean after
we had promised them we would have
simulations that they could use for
guiding their
missiles they had a schedule to meet and
they couldn't wait any longer so
they flew the first missiles
toward some island in the pacific
and what they discovered was
that and experimentally from seeing it
is that the
the high speed oscillations had a
negligible effect on the trajectory
so therefore you could solve them
separately and it didn't matter how long
it took
on the digital computer to do the uh
other equations because
it was not relevant you see you could do
them separately
so that's what happened and um
but so this was not not robotics but it
was certainly part of my own background
it had to do with learning uh computer
technology from both sides
yeah and at that time analog and digital
computation were
sort of comparable
late 50s and early 60s there was a
there was a great deal of competition in
fact at
and at at the western joint computer
conferences
there were always panels that had to do
with analog versus digital in that kind
of thing
in fact i could i'll even tell you about
a poem
the worst of computing perversion is
analog to digital conversion
so why do you think digital was so
successful in the end
well i mean increasing speed i mean
we're still you know this is the benefit
of the
over the early days of moore's law
they began to move away from uh from
vacuum tubes and moved to a solid-state
switching and
faster and faster speeds
the analog simply couldn't keep up on
the other hand there's been a
rebirth of analog computing at the chip
level
so there's there are clearly advantages
to be able to do some things and
without having to convert things into
into digital form process on the digital
and then reconvert
back you see so analog vlsi yeah right
absolutely
and on vlsi is exactly it
okay and now see let me think like would
you like me to look up the names of
former students and talk about them for
a while
visit rockwell okay
so on the
on the robotic side
juan liu whom i mentioned to you who is
not arizona state
uh he did grasping
knowledge based planning for grasping
with robot hands
did yan young who's in hong kong uh
worked on non-linearities in
connectionist or genetic algorithm kind
of learning
but he's completely dropped all that
sort of interest he does other things
now so he has nothing to do with it at
all uh patty
koenig with whom i have almost no
contact anymore
she was a jpl for many years and i don't
know where she is now
so she came
she came to me saying i'd like to do a
phd thesis
but i really would like to do something
with horses because
i'm a horse woman and i like horses
and particularly i like horses that do
dressage and other unusual movements of
one kind or another
so we came up with a following kind of a
peculiar project so the idea was so i
went out and bought the plastic horse a
full-sized plastic horse and
we instrumented the horse in such a way
that if you
you could pick up signals from pulling
on the reins
because we put strain gauges on the two
sides of the mouth
of this horse and then we put the
pressure sensors on the flank so that if
you kick it
you could pick up that signal okay so
then
those were used as inputs to a simulated
horse on the computer screen
so that you could now see a person would
be sitting as a rider on the horse
and they would command it and the
simulated horse would move accordingly
and so
the idea was that you could train people
by this combination of actually sitting
on a saddle
on a what on a full-size horse
but doing the control on a computer
and people who came to use it who were
experienced riders said that
it was spooky how realistic it was and
they would begin to forget that they
were sitting on a mechanical horse and
visualize themselves on the simulated
horse on a big screen
so was that robotics well in a way
okay that's right and
and uh when she published uh
and she published by the way the the
simulator horse had unusual colors
you know so uh and uh so she
she published some of this stuff about
the
green horse and
so um so that was um
there was patty
then arvin aga
who is now a professor at the university
of kansas
did his work on coordination in robot
colonies
and so he did initially did a simulation
in which he had a hundred simulated
robots on the screen
and the idea was that these robots would
be tasked with
picking up objects of one kind or
another some of the objects were smaller
some were larger
the robots were able to call for help if
they found an
object that was too big for themselves
to carry and so a second one would come
to help
there's a lot of interesting
sociological experiments in in that
particular study
there was a we discovered that
depending on how wide you made the
communication radius
how far each robot signal would carry
out to the rest of the colony
what you could do is you could make the
robots
move in clusters rather than
individually but if you made the
radius either too large or too small i
can't remember then they would begin to
move as individuals
so there were many interesting things in
this and he he actually built
um some small physical robots
that were used to pick up a piece of
pipe and carry it
there was still two robots cooperating
maya was the original developer of the
multi-robot thing at
mit when she was doing her thesis
because she had she was able to get
something like 20 of these small robots
operating and
she called him the nerd herd and you
probably have heard this before
right she was very good at that okay so
that's uh
um tony lewis um
worked on uh locomotion controllers
in robots and animals and so he was very
interested in models of the spinal cord
and spinal reflexes and how they could
be
imitated in robots he's always had an
interest in the biology
particularly the nervous system as well
as
and locomotion as well as building
robots
um john
kim is a very interesting person um
i was consulting at the time at
a rehabilitation at a chronic
rehabilitation hospital in
downey california called the rancho los
amigos
medical center and
and i was really interested in sort of
how you use
knowledge based methods to try to
understand what's going on
i didn't really want to build quote
expert systems unquote
in artificial intelligence but i usually
refer to them as knowledge based systems
to see how you could use accumulated
knowledge
to make decisions so
the lab where i was consulting was
concerned primarily
with issues of human walking
both normal walking and
pathological walking like with people
with cerebral palsy
and so on or people who had spinal cord
injuries and and
that kind of event so
and the what the physician in charge
kept saying you know
we really don't know when we see a
particular pathology
which muscles are responsible and we
might be able to do corrective surgery
if we knew
but the trouble is there are 20 some
muscles in the lower leg
and you know in the legs and so
therefore we have to identify which ones
they are
so what i did is the same thing we would
normally do in trying to build this kind
of a system in
a.i what we did is
we hung like butcher vapor around a
whole
gigantic conference room and then i
began to interview
the various doctors about uh
what the conditions are that they saw
and what things could happen if a
particular muscle
was defective or inactive and so on
and so out of this this fellow
john kim developed a diagnostic
knowledge base
to make predictions about which muscles
were responsible for particular gait
pathologies
and it was very successful this worked
very well
i'm not sure how well it was used but it
certainly it certainly did work
so he got a phd in computer science and
then heavy worked in ai and then he
graduated and decided that
this was really not for him and he got a
job
as an intern in a law firm
where which are built primarily in
patents and patent law
and as you know patent attorneys usually
employ engineers and computer scientists
because
they need the background so they sent
him to law school
and he spent almost three years
going to law school while working
part-time at the law firm
and then he decided the law was not for
him
so this was this career change number
two
he he currently is he went to school
again
and he's now the minister of a korean
church
in in one of the suburbs of los angeles
and he's happy as a whatever you might
say clam whatever
but he's very happy so um i don't know
whether that's relevant to our story but
i thought you personally would find it
interesting yeah
um gaurav sukkot me uh worked on
ways of evaluating autonomous mobile
robots and he's the one who compared the
legged and wheeled robots on the surface
of mars
alberto bihar worked on
intelligent tele-robots small robots
that could be sent to a
space sent by space vehicle either to a
planet or a comet or some other vehicle
to do exploration
and some of this stuff was done in
hardware and some was done in
simulation
ayanna howard who is now a professor at
georgia tech in electrical engineering
did her dissertation on grasping but it
was grasping of deformable objects
which nobody had done before everybody
grasped rigid objects
so but now if you grasp something
rubbery that squishes
the dynamics become completely different
and she her work was beautiful and she's
still in robotics
she now um so she teaches in electrical
engineering
and but i don't know exactly what she
does
but she's definitely still in the field
jim montgomery did his thesis on
robot helicopter flying
and uh still does that kind of work at
jpl
he still slides robot helicopters or
simulated helicopters uh to be used and
for planetary exploration and things of
that kind
and um the last um
my last student is stergios rumeliotis
who is now an associate professor
of computer science at the university of
minnesota
and he did his work on
using coleman filters and other
statistical methods
to help localize robots to determine
where they are from
some surrounding measurements this is
the
usual question of the which is sometimes
referred to as the kidnapped robot
problem
you know what information does a robot
have to have
if you kidnap it and put it down
somewhere to determine where it is
so what do you see is the the biggest
challenges and problems facing robotics
into the future
well so i think among the current
problems of greatest interest in
robotics
one of them is certainly human robot
interaction
the ways in which humans and robots can
not only interact but collaborate
work together and a lot of this is
related to
the increasing capability of humanoid
robots
so that we mentioned sensing before
but but clearly humanoids do a lot more
than sensing they
they not only move they are nonsense but
they process information
in increasingly human-like ways
and my feeling is that it's not
necessary to build
identical models of the human brain what
we want to do is to try to
build into robots the functionality
in some sense of aspects of the brain
so so i think the greatest challenges
i believe will come in
in two or three different ways so one
way is to try to continue to improve the
capability
of humanoids so they can interact with
human beings
in a more and more significant way so
that
they can receive commands by voice
they can interpret our gestures
they can display emotions very important
research area
robot emotions at the present time
and that means that a robot then could
be
a genuine household helper it wouldn't
be rosie from the
cartoons but but it certainly could be a
genuine household helper
so and and not and not simply
a um unifunctional device like a roomba
vacuum cleaner you see
we're talking about something that has a
great variety of capabilities
and these things are not easy you know i
mean my my friend
rudiger dillman at in in germany
has been working for the last five or
six years at building
a kitchen helper robot that's supposed
to clear the table pick up all the
dishes put them in the dishwasher
and so on and uh it's not an easy
problem
see i mean that it displays all the
difficulties of coordination
sensing activation and so on
he's now able to uh the robot now stacks
dishes in the dishwasher reasonably well
but they use plastic dishes to make sure
that they don't break
so it's um these are not easy things so
so that's one of the areas that that i
think
and the second area that grows directly
out of that is that i think
um society is going to have to pay
attention
to the way in which robots relate to
people and what functions to perform in
society
as you know kurzweil talks about
sometime in 2020 or so that robots will
demand to be treated before the law
as if they were humans and they will
succeed he says
okay but i don't know about that but but
i
but i do i do believe that
we have no basis in our legal system
currently for how to deal with the
quasi human beings uh with with
we have no way of handling issues of
responsibility
and ethics and
and so on so so these are
that's one reason why i'm so interested
now in this whole area of robot ethics
so i think that those issues and that
includes by the way
the the use of robots in the military
robots and war
as i'm sure you know there are now more
than 40 countries that have military
robotics programs
we've had a monopoly on the use of
robots in the
field but we no longer have a monopoly
on guns
every country has guns you see so i
don't think we'll have a monopoly on
robots either and that means
that um there will have to be some
pretty dramatic
oh you got it it's okay it's okay okay
that's fine that's fine
that's fine you can go ahead and go away
go away go away
the um
i'll get her i'll get here
go out
okay
i think um autonomous vehicles
will be one of the major challenges in
robotics from the time that
sebastian throne won the dharba
challenge as you know
the idea of using robot vehicles
has become much more prevalent and there
are programs in europe as you know
as well as in the united states and
other places to create these vehicles
but again i think we need to find ways
in which
we can we can adapt
to such vehicles in terms of our of our
legal system
we don't have the appropriate rules
rules of the road we don't have the
appropriate vehicle codes and we don't
have the right
questions of risk and responsibility the
third area that intrigues me a great
deal
is robots in
healthcare in a variety of ways
we know that we have
we have robots surgery devices like the
da vinci
system but it's really a tele-operated
robot
and i think that the time will come here
as well as in the military
that these robots will have increasing
degrees of autonomy
and will be able to perform surgery on
their own
just like i believe the robots within a
decade or so
in in some unknown conflict
would be able to find their own targets
and release their own
missiles without human
immediate consent so
uh but but in healthcare the this of
course raises a whole series of new
ethical questions as well
and if i wake up from a surgery and it
was done by a robot and i thought it was
going to be done by a physician
by a human physician and it didn't go
well
then whom do i sue you see
and to what extent will hospital
administrators begin to rely on
robots to perform surgeries
if it's less expensive both for the
hospital and
and for the patient so these are things
again we don't know how to do we don't
know how to deal with the
we don't have the the
social and um
i would say emotional machinery
for integrating robots into society in
any kind of a proper way
so we need legal and social frameworks
which we currently don't have and i
think that's going to be one of our
biggest problems
the second area in the healthcare
is the prosthetics and
where i think robots are already playing
an important role the the autobahc
computer-controlled knee which is fitted
to nearly all the amputees coming from
iraq or afghanistan is a
wonderful device but it's
only the first one of what i think would
be many more
there's a large darpa program to create
artificial arms
with the full functionality of a human
arm
so those are robot arms they're they're
they're not
they're clearly autonomous devices with
a lot of sensors and the ability to
actuate
but there are lots of other things going
on you see there are
there are programs for replacement of
portions
of the central nervous system including
portions of the brain by chips
which will be able to pick up
information from the outside world that
would normally be sensed
and sent to them by the eyes or you know
and so on or by
or by uh stretch receptors and muscles
and then this chip would process the
information
in the way in which the a say a disease
section of
the brain would have processed them and
then provide output signals to the world
so i i think that there's a there is a
an almost unlimited horizon in what can
be done
in creating new bionic people and many
of these replacements will be
from my point of view robots
and you see so that puts the whole thing
into a larger context
in which we really begin to ask
ourselves the question of what it really
means to be human
and to what extent does
do robots and humans
share concerns
and to what extent are they completely
different
you know i told you that i had spent
some time in in the school of religion
and even now
in the years when i don't teach
robotics i teach a class in world
religions here at
the california polytechnic university at
cal poly
where where i don't do comparative
religions in the usual sense
but i do talk about hinduism and
zoroastrianism and buddhism and
and so on and i try to look for the ways
in which
people in those traditions
look at the meaning of life and their
relationship to the universe
now how can you in
any one of these philosophical
traditions let me call them philosophies
rather than religions
how can you not relate to something
which is quasi-human
i don't know if you've seen the movie a
bicentennial man
okay well now that's that raises the
kind of questions that i'm raising here
you see
here was a a robot with the greatest
desire to be human
even though it meant becoming mortal
and
it clearly makes wonderful theater but i
think it also raises
the kind of questions that i was asking
from the very beginning
to what extent does working on robots
teach us something about ourselves and
what it is that makes us unique
and special it's clearly not the things
that we used to say
you know i mean there was a time when i
mean i remember when i was in college
there was a book called
giant brains and the reason
it was called that is because it
referred to the first machines
which were able to compute astronomical
tables by doing
huge numbers of additions
multiplications and divisions and
print them out and we thought that was
the activity of the brain you see
i mean now it's considered so trivial
that we don't look at it at all
so
i don't know if that helps but i think
in the in terms of the future
um i really think that
as the as robots become
more capable and more able to
interact with humans in on many levels
that i think we'll begin to ask
ourselves more and more of these kinds
of questions
and who knows what the future holds but
it certainly won't be boring i can tell
you that
in terms of uh technical challenges
what do you see as the big problems
facing robotics
in in the design of um
of uh
humanoid robots for example i think that
the
there are still issues involving
actuation
sensing we've done very well sensors
have become small
and have enormous capabilities but our
actuators are still too heavy
and too big and so i think we still need
to find better ways
of imitating biology
in the design of arms and legs and
tentacles or whatever we might use
which which are lighter
more flexible and so on
so i think that's still a major area of
concern
and then obviously the the question of
how do we model the activities of the
brain
and i don't need to tell you there are
many projects in this area going on
around the world
people are are doing one thing or
another with respect to the brain
and eventually some of these efforts
will become integrated
the increasingly
we're beginning to talk about having a
direct
um connection with the brain
even by implants by implanting
electrodes directly into the central
nervous system
so um from those we should be able to
derive the kind of information that
might be useful
in designing our brains for robots
but i think that's a that should keep
us and our children busy for a while
and uh over the course of your career
what do you see as having been the
biggest breakthroughs or innovations in
robotics
so i i think that the what has helped
robots the most is moore's law
the fact that we can do so much
computing so fast
in such small packages that use so
little power
that that and costs so little i mean
that's the most interesting thing to me
you see i mean you talk to people now
who do computer design and they
basically tell you that the hardware is
for free
the cost is in the software and
that was inconceivable when i was in
college you know
where the hardware was all the cost we
didn't have enough software to know how
to price it
but the but the but hardware was
extremely expensive
one of the first computers at ucla when
i was a student
was called the swac the
western automatic something or other
computer
and it used cathode ray tubes for memory
huge banks of cathode ray tubes and you
can imagine
now the cost of that kind of memory see
it's just that's a
completely different from where we are
now so um
so i think in in terms of what's
improved in robotics
it's happened on many fronts but i think
i think that moore's law has been one of
the major sources of
improvement because we can now build
robots with a lot of intelligence
and and for very little money and
using very little power
so i think that's been one of the major
changes
and i think the in the last
decade or so um
social acceptance of robots in the
united states has improved dramatically
i think part of it is due to uh rod
brooks and the roomba
of which as you know like something like
4 million have been sold
so now it becomes a commodity rather
than some kind of an unusual
specialty item and
whereas in japan robots have been a much
more accepted part of the culture for
many many years in the united states
they were not
there was always this question about how
soon will they take over
and uh so uh but
but i think that that's one of the
changes that i've seen so that now
it's expected that robots will be doing
many things that were that
that are not now possible for them and
that it's becoming much more accepted in
society
for the united states it's been a
relatively recent development
not for japan but certainly for the
united states
i'm concerned about oh one of the things
that we desperately need come back to
your earlier question
we need robots to act as um
as living assistance to the elderly
because with the aging population that
we have
we simply cannot afford as a society to
put everyone into old folks homes
it just costs too much we just don't
have the resources to do it as a country
when as you know the usual age pyramid
is now inverted so
the number of people over 80 is becoming
significant
you know so so the answer is um to let
people stay in their homes but provide
them with
with one or more robots to assist them
and
we're doing very little in that area in
the united states
i did a i led a team supported by nsf
to study the status of robotics in asia
and europe
five years ago in 2006 four years ago
and every lab we visited in japan
and south korea and most of the labs in
europe
were working on elder care robots
and so i think unless uh
things change in terms of finding ways
of of
supporting such developments with
venture capital or elsewhere
in this country um i think another 20
years
we'll be importing all those robots from
europe or japan
if we have the money and we may not
but that's another story anything else
you'd like to add
well i'd like to come just to say what i
said earlier i i really think that
robotics is the most it is a
incredibly fascinating field of study
because it enables you
to combine interests in psychology and
sociology and philosophy and engineering
and computer science
and i don't know of any other area of
study
which provides that kind of breadth and
the possibility of integrating all these
areas
so that's my feeling i think if you if
i'd like to say to young people you know
if you're looking for a challenging
field going to robotics
all right