okay
i was born in newton massachusetts i
moved out to california when i was
one and i had one sister and
we grew up in a suburb of los angeles
and i went went
as an undergrad to cal state long beach
which is
closest college to my where i grew up
then i went as a graduate student to
ucla
and i was i've always been interested in
machines
motorcycles are sort of what got me the
most
excited about mechanical engineering i
like machines that
go fast and have high performance
so i've had lots of fast
motorcycles and cars and things like
that
and so then i started learning about
dynamics
because that's always interested me
and then at ucla there was
an interest in robotics and that was fun
because
it was a new field and
it seemed like i could make a
contribution in that
so do you remember when you first came
across
these exciting fast powerful machines
when i was a kid i you know starting
with my mini bike
i souped it up and raised the
compression on the briggs and stratton
engine
took it apart figured out how to make it
go faster
well my my dad had a lot of tools and
i like playing around in the garage so i
i enjoyed doing that and just learned by
doing
what would you say is your first robot
or your first robotic project
i didn't um really get involved with
robots
till my i started doing my phd work
so and even at that time we just had
some really
uh sort of prototype
crummy ones at ucla and
so we never even had a commercial robot
when i was doing my research at that for
my phd
so it was more of a mathematical study
were they were they built in-house yeah
yeah just some of the students
um steve dubaski was
the one i had two advisors steve duboski
after i finished at ucla he went to mit
and steve gibson was more a
mathematician
and i studied with both of those guys as
my co-advisors
and steve duboski had some masters
students building robots and
i would work with them but so
i got some exposure to the machines
through through them
knew it was a mechanical engineer yes
mechanical engineering
but i've always enjoyed electronics and
computers
were they any focusing on any specific
thing like manipulation
or mobile robots or my phd work was
mainly on manipulation but
how to make robots move as quickly as
possible
so that was sort of my main contribution
was
i had an algorithm that would produce
the fastest possible
point-to-point motion for a machine
and that algorithm is is used in a lot
of robot controllers today
there is no way to make a machine go
faster than
what was done in my phd so
that was you can use it for any kind of
machine it's been used for mobile robots
and other
machines after that but the focus was
manipulation
point-to-point motions
no name we had some people made up names
but i don't
i don't have a name sorry
and so um after your graduate work then
did you decide to go into robotics well
um that was when cad cam was starting to
become a big deal so i went to i went to
work in the
cad industry i actually
published a paper on machine tool path
generation
for automatically creating motions for
cutting parts and cad systems
and then i decided that i didn't like
working in
industry as much as
exploring things in the university i
thought maybe i'd have more freedom so
after about a year and a half i got a
job here at uci
i've been here ever since then so what
was that it's 1984 is when i got
started working here so you finished
ucla
82 ish yeah so how was before you go to
uci
how was working for mcdonald douglas
yeah that's the cat system they had a
unigraphics catch system
so what was the workplace like
it was great the programmers
back then um i i had worked
at hughes aircraft and trw
with engineers working on satellites
but it was refreshing to work with
programmers at mcdonald douglas
automation
because they um they're
sort of younger people they'd come to
work in cut-offs and
they're just a good group of guys to
hang out with so i i really enjoyed that
well there's probably a hundred people
in this division
i mean uh it's it's now it was purchased
by siemens
and it was purchased for four billion
dollars so
it grew to be a pretty big thing
and so how did you decide that you
wanted to go into academia
well i i like working
with a cad software but i just like i
said i wanted to
have more freedom to work on my own
projects
rather than working on a project that
would make them
money rather work on my own stuff if i
if i had the opportunity to do that was
there anybody else
no i was the first person they were
this department was mainly
thermal fluids so they didn't have
anybody that did
dynamics and controls and that sort of
thing
so how was it starting a
robotics angle here
well it's been it's been fun it's been a
lot of work
and um but
uh it's it's kind of nice to
go to a place and if you're the first
one you get to make the
choices that affect what's going to
happen for years afterwards
so now it's been 26 years or so since
i've been here and
i think so we made some good decisions
and some
decisions that weren't so good but i've
learned a lot
hopefully you'll tell us about something
i don't know
maybe i'll tell you so what was the
first
robotics project you got going here
well i started with pneumatic robots
because i didn't have any research money
and robots were motors are very
expensive
so it turns out that air is cheap if an
air compressor
every gas station you can fill up your
tires with air
and air actuators are
just pistons that you can buy for twenty
dollars
and i'm sitting on this this chair
that's um actuated by air
there's some pistons on the side
and so this is a flight simulator chair
i just turned it on and if you want to
buy
one of these if it were electrically
actuated
probably cost you five thousand dollars
but this thing costs closer to about a
hundred or two hundred dollars
and you can hear uh you can hear the air
actuators running
so the uh the motor the actuators
themselves
are very cheap and it's a fun way to
work on things
without having to worry about melting
your electric motors and
five thousand dollars bites to dust it's
more like five dollars bites to dust if
you if you
wreck your actuator if it's an air
powered machine
so that's what i started when i was here
mainly uh because i didn't
couldn't afford um expensive actuators
the other thing about air is that
pistons are very light and it would be
nice to have a lightweight robot
and so i have lots of machines that
we've made since i came here that are
powered by air and they have some really
great
advantages over other robots and so
we're probably the leader
of all the researchers that build
pneumatically actuated robots we started
it and it's still being
done today so a lot of the um that work
has evolved
to rehabilitation research i should
probably turn this off now that it's
just
making a hissing noise okay i'll turn it
up
that's the power right there turn it off
so anyway the uh starting i think
that blue robot is the first or
the first generation air powered robots
and the actuators are actually
part of the structure of the robot the
whole thing is is light
and the advantage of air is that it it's
kind of spongy so when it's in it when
you're interacting with
people you can't hit hit them with hard
forces
it's more like hitting him with a sponge
and so
a lot of my work to start with was
figuring out how to control
the force from the sponge accurately
without
and safely and so we've made a lot of
machines
doing that were you doing rehabilitation
from the beginning
no when i first started i wanted to make
i just wanted to make a
fast robot because that's i had this
algorithm that said this is how you make
them go fast
i wanted to try it out on my own machine
so i wanted strong actuators
and air seemed like the way to get
strong actuators without a lot of
expense
and so that's that's why i was sort of
motivated to
to make these air powered robots so the
a lot of the early industrial robots
were hydraulic so how does that matter
yeah hydraulic is great i mean it's uh
same kind of advantages in the sense
that
you get a lot of force and a light and
very low weight package
but for that you need to compress the
oil so you need a
power source a oil compressor so that's
usually a noisy thing
and the biggest disadvantage to oil is
that it
if you're assembling the robot or
disassembling the robot
you get oil all over the place it's just
uh
overall in general it's not a pleasant
thing to work with whereas if air leaks
it just everything is air that's fine if
oil leaks it's you get a big mess
and i've built my share of oil powered
machines
as well but it it's just not as fun
in general it's uh you gotta you know
you're always getting squirted with oil
and i'm you know i'm a grease monkey but
i don't like to be
smoky all you know all the time so but
in terms of precision and
control well now you can
because you can get higher forces from
oil systems you cannot and
you can typically make them more
accurate as well
because error there's uh there's a
problem with the amount of friction
compared to the force
on each joint so it's more difficult to
make an air powered system
accurate but we've been able to do
pretty well
and i've had companies approach me about
commercializing these products
and usually they want to get venture
capitalists
involved and i've met with them and i
decided that i wasn't something that i
wanted to do
but you've worked with a lot of smaller
companies yeah i've worked with small
companies that
um have used
air power for specialized applications
but what i was talking about with the
venture capitalists was
more like general robots that they could
mass produce and sell to the huge
businesses and things like that
but the companies that i've worked with
are more specialized in rehabilitation
things like that
well mainly through one of the faculty
we hired dave frankensmeier
that was his research area and
he's interested in helping patients
after they've had a stroke or any
neurologic
injury and so
the robots are a good way to automate
the therapy
and i like designing
robots to do different tasks so it was a
good match and i'm still
building robots with them today when did
you start working
probably about 15 years ago 10 or 15
years ago
and i'm curious so since you were the
first person who's
interested in robotics here um when you
were getting fired was that something
that was of interest to the department
as well
or is it something that came on later
how did people
hear react to the robotics direction
i think in back back in 1984 robots
were sort of new and they needed
somebody that knew
knew the kind of core material that i
know dynamics and control
and the application seemed interesting
to them
so they were they they seemed you know
pretty receptive to
having their faculty in that area how
about
students students loved it they always
love it i always have
students that want to come and build
these machines
usually too many of them
and have you had a lot of phd students
in their products
well i've had i think i don't know i've
had about 15 of them
it's not a big number compared to other
places but it's been fun
a lot of masters students a lot of
specialized projects which end up being
master's degrees
most of my phd students are
gone to work for places like jet
propulsion lab
a couple of them in academia
well brian martin
garrett sol scott plum
those three are at jet propulsion lab
those are the only then there's several
master students and
stuff like that there eric bolbrecht is
idaho teaching
and then another
bunch of them floating around
before you got into the rehabilitation
robots where there's some other
systems you developed
um i i've
worked on a lot of different things
hydraulic systems i've
worked on software that to solve some
problems in robotics
uh but as far as actual machines
it's sort of been a slow progression
from some of the machines blue machine
into the upper extremity
rehabilitation machine
so it's i don't know it seems like it's
it's been there hasn't been any like big
project that's that you want to know
about
there's a lot of little ones and mostly
in fast control or did you
expand other problems potentially
i mean for making them move faster oh
no yeah i sort of moved that
there was a lot of people that sort of
went farther into time they call it time
optimal control
of robots i did a little bit more work
in that
and then i uh sort of lost an
excitement about that and wanted to do
other things so
i kind of um one of the projects
was this weight lifting robot which is
not
we sold it i guess we sold it on ebay
but um
so i tried to find i'm interested in
finding motions for machines that
maximize their how much they can carry
for example
so rather than moving them really fast
what's the biggest
weight a machine could lift so i have
i had a puma robot in here there's a
video on my website that where
we show that we can make it lift three
times more
than what the manufacturer says it can
lift by
finding the motion through my algorithm
so i've been working that's an optimal
control problem
different than minimum time it's minimum
effort
optimal control so i have reliable
algorithms for doing that
what's the general strategy the
general strategy is that you have to
write a
function mathematical function that
describes as best you can
your desire to maximize the payload
and minimize the joint torques and
so they call that an optimal control
problem and then
the next step is to find a solution
reliably
and so i published three or four papers
on how you
good ways to to solve that problem and
and
applied it to both sort of
simulated machines and real machines
like the puma robot
and also to rehabilitation as well
i know others haven't been using
pardon me have other people been
employed
other people other people have
made similar algorithms to solve their
own problems
but i don't think as many have done it
then they haven't gone as far as i have
solved as many
realistic problems
so tell us about the rehabilitation what
were some of the challenges
we found in trying to design those
systems
well the first one we built was a
gate rehabilitation machine and
the um the challenge was to
i need to stand up well i don't know if
you're gonna get this but
the the patients
have a severed spinal cord
or partial partially severed
spinal cord and they don't have
the ability to walk if they're paralyzed
but if you support them on a treadmill
you can make them therapists can
like chris they can drive the
patient through a normal gait cycle this
is how they would
regain the ability to walk if they were
trained
to walk again so we
solved first we solved an optimal
control problem which said
if we were supporting the patient at the
hips could we
swing the hips so that the patient would
take a step
on a treadmill and we were able to use
the result the
programs that i wrote for weight lifting
and things like that
for hip swinging so we published a paper
on how you
swing a hip in an optimal way and then
we
built a machine which parts of it are
back there
you can't i don't think you can see it
that's our hip swinging robot
and we actually tried it out on
some patients at ucla so
the challenge is not only to find these
motions but
also to create the machine that can do
them and of course the machine is
pneumatic because that's what i like to
do and it's cheap
but it could be you could do it with
electrically actuated machines
but finding the motion is an interesting
problem because
there's no uh motors for the patient has
no control of their leg
yet if you support the patient by the
hips and
move the hips just right it'll swing the
leg like a pendulum
and that turns out to be helpful for the
patient
yes it's good to know all the mass
properties and things like that
so that's another little challenge and
all that system identification problem
so we've worked on that as well
um how do you do system identification
yeah are you doing how do you do it how
do i do system
so you uh system identification is that
you have
equations of motion from newton's laws
and unfortunately for robots the
equations are
really non-linear and
ugly so
we end up doing a big
least squares problem where the
coefficients the unknown things that
you're trying to figure out
in a least squares problem are the mass
properties
or whatever is unknown about the machine
so mathematically it's just a big least
squares problem
but the challenging part is writing out
the form of the equations in an
efficient way
and then we you can do motion capture
for
um to actually find
the input to this big least squares
problem you can
sort of shake the patient or have
have similar humans walk which we've
done
there's lots of different ways to do it
so the patient actually becomes part of
the robot
system yes the patient becomes part of
the work
and did this ever become um applied or
yeah well we're trying we're still
working on that and
like i said we had a couple patients
that we tried our
gate robot out on or ucla
and then we moved on to upper extremity
rehabilitation so arm we have an arm
robot over there actually two of them
that um it's an interesting problem for
them
where patients need to move their arm
kind of like an exercise
you would in a gym but um
ideally they they uh i think the lights
does that matter don't hit that you need
to move more
oh the motion detector yeah um right
well anyway oh i forgot what i was
talking about
you were talking about upper extremity
yeah so for upper extremity
physical therapists would guide patients
through motions
normally but a robot can do that as well
and they try to get the patients to
exert as much force as they
can and try as hard as they can if you
just
attach a robot and guide a patient
through a motion
the patient won't be rehabilitated
because
the patient just lets the machine do the
work
for them so the challenge is to have the
robot
sort of push the patient like a
therapist would say try harder try more
and so we have one of the few robots in
the
world that will actually learn what the
patient is capable of doing
and not over um
not ask the patient to do too much or
too little just
just enough to get them to do the motion
and learn what they're capable of and it
can tell if they're slacking off
as we call the slacking controller and
it and it
lets lets up on the patient on the
forces that it applies to the
patient if it senses that the patient is
slacking off
so it's a it's kind of a neat adaptive
controller
so does it actually speak to the patient
no
usually there's a therapist there that's
that's that's speaking but
getting that patient engaged is a big
deal
and any kind of cues that you can give
patient
audio visual are really important
so how have you been figuring out those
cues
we we haven't played games we could get
the games
we'll try to encourage them to try
harder it'll
give them applause there's
there's just many different ways to do
it
it's it seems like a human like the
therapists that are
in the room with the patients do the
best job they they're sort of like
cheerleaders
and we don't have a cheerleader robot
but if we did
it might help do you work there are a
lot of people who work on
the kind of socially assistive side of
robotics so yeah
that could work yeah we if we had a
socially assisted
assisted robot in with the patients it
might work
that help did you worked with any
psychologist
or were you talking to the i'm just
curious how you picked
like what was happening in the game or
um were there other people that you were
collaborating with
yeah yeah i i collaborated with other
people
and it turns out that
we have a good programmer who has made
some games
with to work with patients in the past
so
that programmer is helping us figure out
the games
but the games that the patients play
need to
encourage certain function for the
patients or certain motions
and so we designed a lot of different
games just to get different movements
from the patient
and yeah that's more dave rankins meyer
and steve kramer is a
md that works on that
and in terms of the finding of just the
right amount
of force feedback is that a feedback
control system where it's it's trying to
learn
yeah so it's learning a control yeah
it's a feedback control system that
looks at an error measure of the patient
typically is
has some goal they want to reach to a
certain point or
follow some trajectory so there's a
measure of error
from the trajectory the controller will
try to push him to the desired
trajectory
the feedback is how it knows how far off
it is from the trajectory and then
it senses these errors if if there's
it also knows how hard it's pushing
because pneumatics
allow you to measure the air pressure
and force
on the patient because we can accurately
measure the force
and then knowing how far how hard it's
pushing on the patient
it knows what its contribution is
to the to the motion and the patient's
contribution
and it can also detect if the patient
isn't doing
as much as they could and it can then
sort of back off in a in a sort of nice
continuous way
and give the patient
higher higher more work for the patient
to do and less work for the robot
or vice versa if the patient isn't able
to do anything
then it'll help the patient more
and what are some of the challenges of
actually working with people
as part of building well
the that's why we have therapists who
are great with working
with people and it's kind of fun to have
engineers and therapists because they
both
the engineers usually are in the room
with the patients
their phd students of ours that have
built the machine and the controller
and there's kind of a neat interaction
that happens between the therapists the
engineer
and the patient to have all three of
them in the room
and but engineers
are typical that typically care most
about getting their
machine to work and the therapists
want the patient to be comfortable or
doing what they're supposed to do
so the
challenges are for these um handicapped
patients is just you know helping them
into the
device and making sure it's not rubbing
them the wrong way and
just sort of practical things like that
in terms of the technical side
like working with people um
yeah and i'm not as good at that as the
people that i work with so that's why i
work with these other people
i like building a machine but the
machine has to work with
the patients and the patients need to be
motivated
to to want to work do the therapy
and um it can be
a challenge and i'm
i'm just a engineering geek you know i
i say okay here i want to i'll fix this
machine
but the patients they they uh
well they they love robots in general
they see a robot and they're like oh i
i like that robot and then you try to
figure out well
did the robot really help them turns out
the main thing that helps them is
attention
if the therapist is helping them they
get
they get they do well with recovery
the robot's helping them they do well
with recovery
but not that much better you know
there's no real
big difference between whether the
therapist did it or the robot did it
they they need the attention and they
need to be motivated
they're motivated i think they'll it
helps them
but so i didn't answer your question i'm
not sure how to answer your question
uh
yeah exoskeletons are really hard um i
don't know if you
interviewed amy casaroon up at uc
berkeley
casarooni he's got
um he built an exoskeleton
for for the
soldiers with military applications so
they can carry big
backpacks but now they're being used for
they've
started a company they're selling them
for
paralyzed people as well so they can
help
with their gait and those are those are
a big challenge because they need to be
really light
and really powerful so that's um
he's using he's i think
he's used electric motors he's
hydraulics he's he's
anything you can but i haven't so i
we our arm robots are exoskeletons but
they're not mobile
exoskeletons in other words they fit
around the patient's arm
but it's not like they can carry them
with them
in their house like like you might want
to do
cassaroonies are mobile ones they go out
in the field
and in working with therapists and
doctors um have there ever been moments
when kind of the engineering
goals the therapeutic goals
yeah i mean
i think engineers
are not too cognizant about
how a patient feels about the machine
and they're mostly
focused on the design itself
and so you have to be make sure that you
say we don't care about the engineering
performance measures which might be like
how fast it can move
how much force it has how accurate it is
you have to make sure that they worry
about
how comfortable the patient is
and comfort comes in a lot of different
ways
a lot of these interfaces between the
machine and the patient
have they have to be soft enough yet
firm enough to hold the patient
and those are kinds of things that we
don't teach
you know engineers how to do so
and also they might want to make a
machine that moves an arm
past its joint limits and that's not a
good thing
if the machine because most of my
machines
go unstable when we're designing them
meaning that they don't do what they're
supposed to do they
do something really bad and um
which is fun it's exciting for me
so we a lot of times we break stuff but
we wouldn't want to
do that when we're working with patients
so we have a lot of safety measures
and just all the safety measures are
a big pain in the butt and it's kind of
necessary
for this kind of work so that's a big
problem i mean problem in the sense that
it's not the thing that
our students want to worry about it
seems also
kind of a it's an interesting
progression from you know wanting to
build things that are fast and
it's a lot of efficiency and then now
actually having to build things that are
you know people like to be in or that
motivate that
yeah yeah that is a big change but what
i want to do is
have you know really like cool ones that
people want to be and move fast anyways
so we're getting into other other kinds
of machines that might be more fun
like really like some of these patients
in wheelchairs we're going to try to
make some that will pop wheelie so they
can go upstairs and things like that
in a in a fun way try to get them
engaged
how old are the patients is there an age
range
to work on work with all age ranges
so except usually not really old ones
but
less than 70 for sure
any really good stories of catastrophic
pioneers
catastrophic failures
well i do remember the first year i was
teaching i had
the undergraduate project
where the students built a pneumatic
robot and it was just a
big arm and i wanted it to be big
and so the students brought their
parents it was display day the final
graduation day and a group of 10
students brought their parents into my
lab they turned on the machine
and it and they didn't have it the
control parameters set just right and
the arm just
flailed up and hit the lights on the
ceiling and broke the fluorescent lights
right down on the on top of the parents
that was one of our first
fun experiences
let's see we've had lots of
we had a another student
have a cable break while
they uh they were filming a commercial
for
rockwell and they were rockwell was
supporting him
his phd work and they're trying to show
rockwell's supporting student and here
he is working with this robot and a
cable breaks and the robot almost
almost hits him in the head but uh
it didn't it was okay there was probably
there's probably a lot of others right i
can't
i can't think of anything and the big
successes
well the big successes are i think the
gate robot
taking it up to ucla and actually making
it
hooking it up to a patient and watching
the patient
automatically take steps it's a pretty
big deal
what was that like i mean people maybe
now are a little bit more used to the
notion of robots and
kind of everyday circumstances but
that's
even that is maybe um i would think
pretty recent
so how did people react to having you
know is there a throng with people who
wanted to see
or were was anybody at all
kind of trepidatious about having to
interact with this robot or
i think i think overall people like
like robot like to interact with them
it's kind of engaging
i don't i think it's they see it so much
on tv that they're
like okay a robot cool you know
what about the therapists and nurses was
there ever any is there
ever been a discussion of whether you
know the robots would be
um changing their work
in yeah you know there's always a
question well the robot's gonna
put me out of a job but it actually
if you saw the physical labor that these
therapists were doing for gait
rehabilitation
that's not something you'd want to do
you'd want a machine to do it if you
could and then you'd want
you could watch so it's just changes
their
focus of their work from actually having
to do physical work the more mental work
and that the robot could
do the physical work so i think overall
it's
been a positive thing for for everybody
i mean robots are more expensive and
they're more complicated
that's the biggest downside to them
and who are some of the people that you
collaborated
with most or more most closely over your
career
over my career uh collaborated with a
lot of
people um i guess with uh
some of the dynamics stuff that i've
done
related to the weightlifting robots
that's been
frank park started he's at seoul
national now
steve dubowski i said still worked with
him
he's at mit
worked a little with us did you
interview him or
he's actually advising us oh yeah okay
we will interview him yeah
i've worked with mike mccarthy he's i
shared this lab with him
i mentioned dave rankinsmeyer
a guy in my department the nasa sederis
that was the optimal control
problem that we were solving
so
these these guys are probably not your
mainstream
robotics people they're more specialized
in different
areas are related to robotics
so i think that's that's all i can think
of right now
and you were visiting with a visiting
professor at mit
yeah yeah yeah that's steve that was
steve dubaski's
okay and i also worked with a couple
other
people at mit and also at stanford
right yeah that was with katie stan
okay so when did you go to stanford mit
could you tell us a little bit about
um kind of the atmosphere there who you
found there what it was like
what was different oh it's fun well well
that was i mean
um usma's lab is in computer science
so the there's a more of a
machine making smart machines
with more of the focus on algorithms
and i'd say they had a bigger robotics
operation
so it was you know they had more
machines and
i'd say overall you know neat to
hang out up there with them but i'm not
sure what you're
yeah i mean
i guess i've all the places i've been at
mit stanford ucla here
as long as you have a core group of guys
that are really interested
guys and gals that are interested in the
problems
and it's fun and
you know i i like working with everybody
and and i've learned it all those places
learned a lot so
i don't know i i'm not sure how to
compare them like actually i can't
compare them because they have a
personality that's
related to the people and
i don't i don't go to work with somebody
that's not fun
you know i want to do something fun and
so are they fun in different ways
oh yeah yeah so what are the what are
the different ways
well usuma likes sushi
um yeah i don't know i'm not sure how to
to answer that or at least i like to
drink beer with all these people if i
can
over the years where have you looked for
funding
funding for various projects well
i've mostly gotten funding from the
national science foundation
but for the rehabilitation that's the
national institute of health
and that that has been easier for me
lately to get
funding the national science foundation
so it's been a transition sort of
i think nsf has backed off from
funding the kind of stuff that i have
done over the years and they're
more into computer science
type stuff so that part is
for me it's has dropped off so there are
lessons in funding
building of actual machines or
pardon me what have they kind of gone
away from is it the building of actually
they never funded building up mechanisms
at least
the kind of at least the proposals that
i've written
they have funded in the past some of the
mathematical
aspects that i was interested in looking
at
but more recently
they're not they haven't been interested
in that so i've noticed that
it's more on computer science
programming stuff that i there's other
more qualified people to do that
they haven't funded my proposals in that
area so
i've been doing more of this
rehabilitation stuff
and there's a whole bunch of problems
that are still out there to be solved
with this so what are the in your
opinion
the big outstanding problems
well i think i mean
the biggest problem for robots is
is the actuators that's they're too
heavy they're too expensive
so it makes it so you can't
design machines that will
can work with humans easily and they're
too expensive so
um that problem hasn't that's always
been a problem with robotics and it
hasn't
been solved yet and it's
if unless that problem gets solved
um they're not gonna robots aren't gonna
evolve
to the point where you see them on in in
uh any of the movies that you watch
those robots that you see in movies are
strong
and they're light and they look cool
and the robots that we have today are
never going to be that way unless you
can make the muscles
strong and light and
there's lots of different actuators out
there but none of them
are strong in light so that's
that's the biggest challenge in my mind
i think
um the computational computer science
aspects of robotics has come a
long way and it'll still that still has
a long way to go
but it's going to get there because
computers just keep getting better and
better and
more powerful and cheaper and that's
been a huge
boost for robotics the cost has come
down
but the machines themselves are going to
need
these these muscles so
um if they can get them then they're
going to
you know if somebody designs a good one
then there's going to be robots
washing your dishes and doing everything
you want them to do and they won't be
too expensive
but if they can't then robots are
they're not going to
i mean it's going to be a very slow
progression
and they'll get smarter but they'll
still be really expensive and
people aren't going to be using them in
their household
and stuff like that and where do you see
these things being developed correctly i
mean i know
in japan it seems like they use a lot of
they develop a lot of
pneumatic systems pneumatic
or i mean everything all the robotics
are electric really pneumatics is a very
small
fraction of at least some of the
humanoids so i've seen some of
some there particularly at um like osaka
university and maybe some at atr
that are crazy baby
i don't know what they're called but
also they kind of develop
there are some places and i think ko
university that are developing different
kinds of
innocence muscles or different types of
actuators
that are more biologically inspired in a
sense
so where do you see these um these
developments currently taking
place everybody's working on them but
none of they all are
they all suck yeah i mean you uh
when i say they suck i mean that they
don't have a lot of force they take a
lot of
power to run them they get hot
they um there's just all kinds of
problems with them
so and that and everybody realizes that
actuators are important so they try
different things but so far the best
ones are electric motors
they're you know if you look at
any of the commercial machines out there
that they've got good electric motors
and they're also really expensive
because motors themselves have a certain
amount of
copper in them and magnets in them and
they need
power amplifiers and all that stuff
so yeah there's lots of people trying
different things
biologically inspired ones but so far
i haven't seen any anything that's going
to work it's going to really be the
i mean if i play with my cat and i watch
my cat
jump up you know five feet
that my cat's actuator actuators
are just beyond belief compared to what
what's out there for robots so
and then there's people who try actually
trying to take muscles from animals and
turn them into actuators for robots
but that doesn't work too well because
you need to you know
nutrients for the muscles keep supplying
but something like that might have a
chance
some biological a real biological muscle
have you ever worked with people
internationally
at all because it seems to me like
robotics in the us is often more
it is more focused on the software side
whereas for example in japan they're
very much
focused um on building so they build a
lot of
yeah i think you're right yeah i'm just
curious if you
have you had a chance to kind of i i
you know i i don't know anybody that
well
in japan so i haven't i've worked with
frank parker's down
in korea so he's got a pretty big lab
but um it's kind of strange you know
people
tend to keep their stuff
close to the best is that the right
way to explain i don't know it doesn't
seem like there's that much
interaction and collaboration what about
at
conferences do you find that conferences
are generally
more international or is there kind of
still
segregation among things that are very
popular with perhaps one group
well every it is a little bit of
competition between
all the researchers they're all trying
to get their papers published and get
their
work funded and perhaps start a company
so um i think
you know in general i don't think
i think that there's always isolated
groups and
so for me it's more fun to
sort of have an open dialogue about
ideas
but not everybody is that way
so i don't yet i don't think one
uh i don't think japan is more
close-minded about it than china or
anywhere else and
the robotic conferences are big
international conferences and they're
a lot of fun
but i can say that like for example for
the pneumatic robots
when people realize that i can make
these relatively cheap machines that are
pretty accurate there was
interest in their syllabus today
and this one venture capital firm
created a business plan they would hire
10 engineers a whole sales force
i would be the sort of the technical
leader but they'd also have a business
leader so they had a business plan they
had
this was 10 years ago they had 20
million dollars that they figured they
could get
and they wanted me to sort of lead this
operation
on the technical side and i was supposed
to do that while i'm
in the university and in the end
they said i get five percent of this
company
they expect it to go from 20 million
investment to 200 million
and then i have five percent of 200
million
but
that sounds great but it would take a
huge
it would have taken a huge amount of
work for me to
try to push that along and i just wasn't
i didn't believe enough that they would
meet the goals of the business plan and
it didn't seem like five percent of this
whole effort
was that big of a reward because if they
didn't meet the goals
i wouldn't get anything so it seemed
like
you know even if they only partially met
the goals
then i wouldn't get anything so there's
they all basically these venture
capital guys are not called their
nickname is vulture capitalists
and it's for very good reason they they
basically want your company
and if you don't meet the goals the
milestones that they put in
the business plan then they could
basically take
whatever your investment is and dilute
it down
to nothing
so to me i'd rather teach my classes and
do work on my projects
so uh in terms of students in pedagogy
like what's your recommendation for you
know people who are interested in a
career in robotics
how should they go about it yeah
uh that's a good question and i don't
know the answer to it
i i don't there's not too many companies
in the us that are hiring
in robotics there's not that many
companies
so um there's a lot of things related to
robotics and automation
and some companies are have specialized
applications medical industries
and things like that that might hire
these students
so what do you recommend that they study
well they they need to for robotics
that's what's cool about robotics is
that you get to do
mechanical engineering computer science
electrical engineering
get to do all of it and
they need to learn those fields
and it's challenging for students
because usually
you focus on just one of those three
things
but for robotics it's a general field
and you need to
do a good good job at all of them so
i i tell them to be as general as they
can
learn as much as they can in all these
areas
and i think there's a demand for any
student that can
sort of put together concepts from
electrical engineering mechanical
engineering or computer science
not just for robotics but for automation
in general
what do you see as the big kind of
growth areas for robotics
i i think i think household robotics
is a big deal in medical robotics
it was both of those things but
like i said it's going to take
cheaper more accurate machines
and right now the limitation is the
actuators
and it has been that way for a long time
but i believe that
even with electric motors they're
getting to be cheaper and
so i think any household robotics in
general or
they're getting to be a bigger deal and
and so
our medical robot we're building our own
medical robots
i think that's going to continue that
way
thank you thank you very much