okay can you start by telling us where
you were born where you grew up
yeah so uh i was born in
a small town in the northern part of
belgium close to the dutch
border and had a eventless
youth so i went to
primary school and high school intern
out i followed the
more scientific oriented curriculum
and until i was about 23 or so i just
did the same thing as my older brother
did
so i studied mathematics here at
university
and after that i did a master's degree
in computer science
and during my master thesis there
i did some work of the robots here in
the
in the mechanical engineering department
and that got me interested in
robotics and then i followed the
postgraduate master
in mechatronics which doesn't exist
anymore but that was
25 years ago and that was a perfect
preparation for a phd in robotics so i
started my phd research here in
in 88 at this department with professor
di scooter
who was a phd student himself
of henrik from person so i'm the third
generation of
robotics research here at the department
of mechanical engineering and learn
okay what was your master's thesis on so
the
uh well i did three master's thesis the
first one in mathematics was on the
special solutions of the einstein's
general relativity
uh second one in computer science was on
interfacing a uh
a robot that holds a ibm scanner robot
through a serial line using their new
technology object-oriented programming
languages mozilla 2
and then my master in mechatronics was
about
interfacing a cid system with a machine
to a large machine tool
in a company uh somewhere here in
belgium so
these were all already uh
steps in my in the direction of my
current research which is
combining software engineering with
robotics
that's the core of my research this
combination so
working towards better software design
but for mechatronics and robotic systems
and why did you shift into robotics from
physics
it's well it's by circumstances
so because you meet people and then when
i did my master's degree
here my latest supervisor was my
also my tc supervisor at that moment and
it just happened to be that he had a
european research project in robotics
starting around that time for which he
was looking for people and
that's how you uh roll into
a certain domain that you had no idea or
no ambition for
uh before or during your study so
by accident so your first robotics
project was discarded
no my first robotics project was called
first
it was uh the acronym stands for
fundamentals of intelligent robot
systems
so 25 years ago this project basically
taught to solve the problems that we are
still solving now
it was about the integration of vision
and force control
for assembly-like kind operations so
these are problems that are still not
solved nowadays
but at that time we didn't really know
exactly what the problems were
that was the first research project and
i was also
that's a european research project and
nowadays i'm still
heavily involved in european robotics
research projects
not just as a researcher but also in my
role as the
coordinator of european robotics
research network
i'm also looking at the other side
helping the european commission
by putting some research uh questions on
the agenda and
trying to motivate why european
commission should
fund this kind of stuff
let's come back to that and start with
your research a little bit more so
um what were some of the biggest
challenges that you've seen in this
the integration of vision and force
control from a sort of technical
perspective
uh from a technical perspective uh the
thing that
we've underestimated everybody is always
underestimating and still under
underestimating is that
[Music]
we as a human have so much knowledge
that we use
in making decisions or interpreting what
is going on
so much of this implicit knowledge that
our
robots or computers do not have so
in order to make an intelligent decision
we're using a lot of
knowledge and we bring knowledge
together
that we at this won't even not have
encoded in a formal way so there's no
way
our computers let alone our robots can
make use of this
knowledge because it's not there in a
form that they can use
earlier today i was in a workshop here
where we are working towards the
ontology of robotics that's basically
meaning that we want to put structure in
all the knowledge that the robot needs
how the different kinds of knowledge
relate to each other
and how you can represent them in a
formal way
and this is a huge undertaking it's all
a lot of things that are so obvious for
humans that
humans don't even think about these
things anymore
but they are not at all obvious for
roles and that's over the 25 years that
i mean
in robotics research that's the
recurring problem
and we always find out that we need more
and more knowledge to be integrated
so that's the major problem that i see
in the last 25 years of robotics and
also
the coming 25 years i think so there's a
lot of
progress being made in sub-domains
making machines like mechanical devices
making controllers for them
making them cheap and robust that's
rather mature we can do a lot of
computer vision things we can do
impressive things in the ai
but bringing together to solve problems
with robots
we need a lot more integration because
the kind of knowledge that people are
using
in ai to solve ai problems is not at all
or only partially relevant to robotics
programs
so that's the kind of missing gaps the
integration between sub-domains that
by themselves have matured a lot
the integration is still a major problem
and also works in two directions
by doing trying to solve problems with
robots
we find out that people have
only let's say in the mechanical
engineering domain or in
the control domain have only solved a
part of the
set of relevant problems for that domain
so the the
kind of robot you have here with seven
degrees of freedom robot
that's more than just controlling seven
motors
the fact that they together form a robot
device
and it has a certain task brings in new
challenges
also for the fundamental scientists like
control or ai or just software
engineering because
a modern kind of robot system will have
the robot itself but also
half a dozen of sensors
dozens of planners things like this
the computational power to compute
everything we have to compute
it's not possible on one single pc
anymore you have to
bring together a dozen of
computational units from very embedded
ones
fpgas to desktop pcs and
also there there are software
engineering problems that people in
software engineering
computer science have not yet solved
because they were not
relevant or they just didn't think about
these problems so there are a lot of
hardware time problems but there are
also coordination problems
which piece of software does
do i want to run before another one and
things like this
also there is a lot of knowledge and
engineering that is still
unsolved you've done some work in open
source libraries
and these kinds of utilities yeah
that could have possibly aided yeah so i
think i was the first one in
robotics and also much broader robotics
that decided to make
open source uh an important part of my
academic research i still remember very
well
november 1st 1998
that was the day that i decided okay i'm
going to
take this open source that i've i was
using it for a long time already but
i'm going to take this serious and do
research about it i'm
going to use it in my research but also
using it because it fits very well to
research so research is about sharing
results and
improving about each other's findings
and at that moment it was
not done in robotics or mechatronics or
control
so i said in order to make better
progress in
robotics research the
together with the fact that software is
becoming an ever
important part of robot control systems
i decided that okay the open source way
is a very important way to
foster the research ten years ago i
started with the the oracles project
that was meant to make
open source software but for industry so
the project was
triggered by three companies here in
belgium not robotics companies but
machine tool vendors
that were confronted with limitations of
the
software to control software they could
buy from companies like siemens
and so they came to us and they said
okay we know that you're
doing something on open source can't we
do a project together
for to fulfill our needs and out of that
that was the stimulus to start
the oracle's project so from day one
that was driven by industry
paid by industry to to some extent and
also
with a licensing and development scheme
that is
industry friendly with some of these
also
very relevant performance issues
relevant to industry so articles is
still
focusing on real-time performance and
this kind of
stuff which a lot of the other open
source projects that you now see in
robotics are not focusing on so we still
have a niche there
which differentiates that project from
others
but in the meantime we combine your
ghost project with a lot of other open
source projects
because you need a lot of functionality
so what were the what were the core
functionalities that you started with
and how to be built up around that so
oracle's is still a niche project so it
wants to be the best one
in what we call hard real-time
component-based
software and so you'll have different
components
because there's different functionality
or you have different computers that you
have to connect
and the oracle's project focuses on
making all these things
heart real time safe to
allow people to get the last piece of
performance and determinism out of these
things
so that's only a small part of what you
have in a robot system
so oracles does not provide everything
that you need in a robot not at all
and this project also doesn't want to do
that it wants to
be the best in this niche so
nothing has changed in 10 years with
respect to that
goal and these ambitions we are
improving
in quality and also in in breadth of
platforms we support
and recently the the big new drive
is in providing better tooling to help
people to
use the software in an easier way or
more robust
but the core ambition and core
functionality is still the same
hard real-time systems
and you see it as compatible with ross
it absolutely is so one of the
we have a prt uh we are part of the pr2
beta programs we have p2 robots here
uh provided generously by my willow
garage and the
the reason why it's here is because our
contract with them is about the
integration of the
the oracle's heart real time thing with
the non-real-time
uh uh ros community which provides a lot
of functionality but where
real-time control is not a focus so
we have provided bridges between these
two frameworks and that's also part of
my research how do you make
systems out of components that come from
different vendors that were made with
different objectives
that's also a research domain so it's
not just
putting the software together because
you want to do something it's also a
research activity of mine what are the
biggest challenges in that kind of
integration
one of the major ones is lack of
standardization
other domains have gone a lot further in
standardization than in robotics if you
look at
let's say mobile telephony yeah you have
the
gsm standard or in the internet you have
the http
protocol standard or html markup
language standards
in robotics there's basically no
standards at all
so it's no two robot manufacturers
provide programming languages for their
robots that are
interoperable with the competitor no
standardization at all
and also something that's a bit
surprising to me also the open source
projects
are not interoperable so it's impossible
to
connect whatever component you have in
ros to whatever component you have in
oracles or somewhere else without a lot
of
glue code to be written to make these
things uh
work together and that's a bit of a
disappointment so the open source
community is not at all better
in coming up with standards than the
commercial
robot manufacturers who do you think
would be an
appropriate group to try to establish
those kinds of standards
well there's i'm i tried several times
already to
start activities there not just me but
also some other people
so i think we are now in our third
cycle of tryouts but i think now
it's going to happen so for example
the last european robotics forum that's
the
the annual gathering in europe of all
european robotic stakeholders there was
a workshop on
standardization and some things are
growing
there so it's not just in europe we also
have some contexts
in japan for example and some things are
starting now so there's
recently one of the results is the
establishment of the
retf the robotics engineering task force
which is very much inspired by the ietf
so the internet engineering task force
which is
a proven way of providing small
standards
community driven things so we are trying
to adopt that model
to also come up with standards in
robotics and it's
very modest in its current
aims but i think something will come out
of it and
we're now more completely thinking about
how to standardize
logging yeah so you get information from
your robots it would be nice to have
some kind of
standard format of how you format block
files
and the other thing is how do we
represent
motion and velocity in 3d space because
moving object in 3d space is a core of
robotics and there's no standard
representation on it so these are these
little seats that now there are
some sub-communities a group of people
that are interested in
doing these things and that it's very
important
it's robotics as a domain is very small
if especially if you look at the the
industry
the robotics industry that's let's say
order of magnitude 1 billion euros or
dollars a year
that's a very small industry compared to
embedded systems or
uh telephony or cars and so on that's
orders of money too small
so this industry is not
able or willing to drive standardization
it's an industry that's
that it's using technology to develop
somewhere else and integrating it
and if you compare this to a
communication or
car manufacturing these are industries
that can really drive
developments if the car industry needs a
new standard
for a new field bus in their cars they
will drive it that's not happening in
robotics they're using technology so
industry is not driving standardization
that's a problem in robotics
so um what was the mother after first
the other project that was second yeah i
came up with this uh
acronym it's basically trying to solve
the same problems i
don't remember exactly what seconds
stand for but something
i don't know anymore but so yeah so i
had two european
projects that basically covered my phd
and then yeah
now 20 years later i don't know exactly
that i
probably involved in my 10th european
project or something like that
for me as a person as a researcher
europe has been extremely important
that's not the case for most of my
colleagues here but
one way or another i've been very much
involved in european projects
and that's great i mean the
the research areas the universities in
europe
they have that's
integrated unified europe since a long
time already so the rest of europe the
political europe is falling a bit more
slowly
but from a research point of view this
unification has already
it's already a reality since a decade or
so
so we really are looking at students at
european level and
so europe is already reality a big
reality
in academic research who are some of the
other european
promoters that you collaborate with oh
uh
so i as as coordinated european robotics
research network i have a lot of
contacts and all of these are some form
of collaboration
of course the people you collaborate
with in projects that's a smaller subset
but in total will be about 25 laps or so
in europe both in academia and in
industry
now i have projects running by accident
i think with the major
two major european road manufacturers
abb and kuka it also happens to be
two very complementary projects that i
managed to
to use and to profit from this one big
bigger project and also something that
is rather new in this context
is the uh the increased in collaboration
between
projects so that's something the
european commission
stimulating a lot but also me as an
individual
both as an individual researcher but
also has urine coordinated something
i'm proactively stimulating and it's
it's
becoming real reality if you look again
at the the last european robotics forum
there were a lot of workshops organized
by different projects and really
finding out where the synergies are so
that's a rather recent phenomenon
and that's a very good thing because
until
five years ago or so research projects
were islands
and they were doing something together
as a partnership and
there were some results at the end and
that was it but now
a lot of projects starts cooperate start
cooperating with other projects already
in year one
and that's very nice and also the
european commission is nicely
stimulating this and providing
facilities for that they also provide
funding for so-called coordination
actions
they are basically not research projects
in themselves
but money that facilitates research
projects to
do some things together so they have a
nice set of
instruments to stimulate
cooperation currently we also are in a
very fortunate situation that
is over a time span of about five years
about
500 million euros investment from
european robotics
that's a unique opportunity
maybe it will never happen again that
depends on
what are the results of the the current
project that are running but
we are now really at the top of the
opportunity graph let's say a lot of
money being put into
robotics research a lot of people doing
research
so there's now i think about 40 to 50
projects active at this very moment in
robotics and
we have never seen such a scale of
robotics research in the past
we will never see it in the future time
will tell
i want to talk more about iran but first
i just want to clarify what were some of
the
big collaborations that you are
influential collaborations that you had
before you became
um so one
uh influential collaboration not in in
size of money but in personal influence
was my first project
there was a person like mike brady he
was
at university of oxford that was one of
the
senior people in robotics and i didn't
realize it at that moment but that's the
kind of people that
give you vision and context and
and direction uh in a natural way so
these people say something yeah you have
to do it like this or this because that
doesn't work
and these are extremely good guidelines
uh it takes you a long time to find out
why they were right or so but
that's so from day one i had this
this opportunity to work with people
like mark brady
also here at the opportunity to be the
third generation
so there is some some
[Music]
advantage of continuity in research so
that's another advantage that i only
started to appreciate a lot later so
that was the internal collaboration
other interesting collaboration was
the first european project that i
got myself that was also called oracles
that was with only three partners with
kth in in sweden and
allows him to lose it was a very small
scale project
but the initial cross-fertilization of
these three groups
is still living up we are still working
now in our research
on problems that are that were
identified at that time 10 years ago
an initial solutions that were provided
at that time by this
interaction between the three different
groups so
for me it has been a very important
thing basically that started my
my software engineering research
in robotics that was a very influential
thing but like most of these things you
only realize this
long after the facts
and then how did your own come into
existence and
how did you become a part of that europe
so
i was not there at the beginning so
my senior colleague henrik von brussell
was one of the
founding members of europe and euron was
an idea that was uh that was
implemented and and driven the first
years by henry christensen who was then
professor at kth in sweden is now a
georgia tech
in u.s and he's setting up similar kind
of things in
the u.s but it was a group or a dozen or
so
senior robotics researchers in europe
that go together and said we should do
something to
make more a community in europe
so i was not involved from day one
i was involved after a year or so of
europe and then
i was first henry from russell was part
of the
euro board and then he gave me the
opportunity to
take his place and that's how i got
involved and then
when henry christensen moved to the us
then i became a coordinator but that
took
quite some time so i was not so ready to
do it but now i'm happy i
i did eventually yes and what
how how are you going about trying to
build that community
so the uh i think euron is a good
example
of uh how uh centralized funding from
the ec
can have a sustainable long-term effect
so
euron was a project funded by the
european commission
during eight years and that
money gave us the opportunity to set up
meetings to build a network to try out
some things that work and do not work
but since 2008 there is no
funding anymore for europe but there was
a seamless transition
from the funded urine to the unfilled
one so now it's a
community driven network that lives
so it's not a problem to organize things
the network is strong enough to find
organizers to find
participants to find topics to discuss
so
it's a nice example of something else
the receipt money from the europa
commission and it's a sustainable thing
so in this respect i think it's it's a
nice
thing to be in and also as a coordinator
to a large extent it's a self-organizing
system so i don't have to
do so much things i have to leave some
ideas and
bring some people together and
do some practical things in the
organization of the annual
events and organize the phd awards
things like this
but that's not a huge amount of work
because
it's a tradition that people know and
understand and respect and contribute to
by themselves and how do you think
the european commission decided to give
500 years like how did that come from
i don't know exactly i i'm very curious
why but i suspect that it's like
many things that are going on in the
european level and i guess
the same for the american
senate and so on it's a couple of or one
or two
individuals that believe that something
has to happen
and then fight hard to realize it
and i think that was one of the major
reasons why
this funding scheme was there
currently we are working together with
european commission to
see how we could make a follow-up
program of
this same kind same scale
or even bigger so now i'm trying to help
to get
these ideas through in the past i was
just recipient of the result
i was not part of the creation so i
don't know the details
and within that do you see a certain
emphasis on the kinds of projects that
they're funding are the kinds of
applications they want to support
yes so it is definitely an emphasis and
that's also an example of
how a political organization can
give direction to research so
the current program is not robotics it's
robotics and cognitive systems
so the politicians decided that
it was important to bring the research
in cognitive systems
intelligence uh closer to
the robotics thing and in the beginning
i still remember
a lot of people in robotics were afraid
of this but now i think after a couple
of years that the program is running
everybody's
happy with it it's really been a synergy
thing not uh
or them or us now it's it's a synergy so
that's a successful thing that was
basically imposed on the community
from the top of course the european
commission
always listens to advisers and some
people like andy christie's and others
gave these suggestions but to most of
the robotics community it was a bit of a
surprise and
an uncertainty uh but it's it's been
successful or it
well the potential is there and i see
the enthusiasm of the
voice community that it's been a good
idea
and did you face a similar kind of
challenge as
a student interested in some of the more
cognitive aspects of robotics and what
is
apparently very industrially oriented
mechanical engineering that's one of the
misconceptions
people think okay i'm interested in
according to the assets in robotics so
i'm not i should not do anything with
industry and the other way around that's
not true
even in the purest industry context
cognition should be a lot more prominent
there
if you're making a better solution for a
welding role for example
the progress is not in making a better
robot but in better understanding
interpreting the process the robot is
doing
that's a that's cognitive science so
linking
your perception with your actions and
interpreting what is going on and making
the right
decisions that's equally valid and
equally challenging in a very industrial
context and in the more academic
context of making let's say the
artificial human
so a lot of the basic research questions
are exactly the same
so that's one of the my personal
aims or ambitions that i can bring in
this idea a little bit more in the
community that there's a lot of
interesting fundamental research to be
done together with industry
what do you think are the biggest
challenges facing
the european network of robotics or
robotics in
in order to get everybody together like
what are you what are the hurdles
at this moment it's not not at all a
problem of bringing
people together but i
expect as a possible problem is that
[Music]
robotics is it's not a science in itself
it's a science of integration
that means for uh robotics research you
have to bring in more and more
other subdomains you have to bring in
computer vision you have to bring in ai
you have to bring in
mechatronics design you have to bring in
planning in all these things
so i think the problem
is that the amount of
competences expertise and
components that you have to bring in has
become so large that
no student can understand them
anymore that's something we see
appearing already now
so new phd students in robotics are
almost never phd students in robotics
they are phd students in
some parts of robotics and most of them
have no idea what
is required to solve to make a complete
robotic system or
they have no idea where their research
can contribute to the full system
or what other research in other parts of
robotics or the other neighboring
research domain
which of these research results are
relevant to their insights that's a
problem i see
occurring now the
the amount of knowledge has become too
large
and so i see a lot of students
reinventing reels that i know
have been sold already 30 years ago but
in
another part of republic they are not
connected to
or in another domain that they don't
know anything about
one of the big examples i learned
recently in the last one or two years is
that
you have the concept of iterative
learning control
in the controls community which is
exactly the same thing
if you look at the algorithms and the
solutions as
reinforcement learning in ei there
these are two different communities they
don't know about each other
they're solving the same kind of
problems with the same kind of
technology
but they are not profiting from the
cross fertilization
so the problem is how to make a robot
learn how to move better that's exactly
the same thing as
a controls energy wants to make the same
machine
move better there are some differences
in what better
means so the performance images might be
different
but the techniques the approaches the
problems and the solutions are the same
so these are two sub-domains of robotic
state they don't
know about each other at all and there
are more and more of these examples
that people used to look at or or
put in the same phd that are now
different phds and these different
students don't
uh meet each other anymore something
where
we are aware of and that's something as
a urine coordinator that's one of the
important things i want to realize
to make sure that these breaches are
rebuilt again
if they have been lost
um were there any other specific
projects that you worked on
last couple of decades that you want to
discuss
yeah one of the uh the interesting ones
the recent ones that
at first sight were a complete
failure that in retrospect were
extremely seminal was the
the the roster project so i was not a
partner in the roster project itself so
that was a coordination action
roster standing for robotic standards
it had a very ambitious goal to
create reference architectures of
robotics
ontology of robotics and the structure
of the knowledge
and all of this kind of stuff
and yeah the hope or the expectation was
that they would
come up with some solutions in the three
years that the project was active but at
the end
that was not at all the case i was there
as an
expert a couple of times
but that project has now
created the insights and
the networks of researchers that are now
tackling some of these problems in more
detail
so that was one of these projects that
was a failure at first sight but
a godsend afterwards because sometimes
it needs people
or communities need a lot of time to
understand
what are the real problems we have to
solve
or to understand how big a real
challenge is
and that was one of these examples the
roster
project
[Music]
what were some of the like reference
structures that you tried to build on
that
well that's that's a good question so
people have been making robles for years
already
people let's say the the
the challenge of driving around a robot
or autonomous car
without colliding and in a decently
robust and optimal way to drive from a
to b
that's a solved problem or the thing
that's
a lot has achieved there but there's
still
no at least as far as i know i've never
seen
the reference architecture or
the cookbook the recipe of how do i
design such a system and
if i change this and this part of the
robot or of the task
how should i make
a variant of the existing systems that
can solve this thing so
there's something lacking in
consolidation of all this research
we've built systems that work but we
have not yet
consolidated this knowledge into
something permanent that we can teach to
students and say oh uh intelligent cars
that's how you do it and these are the
problems that are still
unsolved or the the things that's
changed from system to system of an
application to application
we're not there yet that's a bit
surprising
also we do not have any any
instruments to stimulate this so writing
papers on
systems or consolidation of
of knowledge very difficult to get those
published there are no journals about it
it's not what reviewers typically
evaluate or say okay but that's not
that's not
new it has been done already but it's an
important thing so
consolidate your knowledge in in best
practices or working designs
very few people do that another issue
that i think
has come up in the year on is the safety
of robots especially as they become more
and more
engaged in human interaction and human
environments
and i just wonder what your thoughts are
on how we might
build standards yeah so
uh i'm in in partnering the rosetta
project
and the rosetta project is basically two
complementary sub-projects and
one important half of the project is
indeed in
in preparing uh the future
norms uh standards in safety because
they're not there and so the the fact
that you bring out the roles
out of defenses and in contact with
humans physical and
emotional interaction with uh winston
and
rosetta is focusing on the physical
interaction that's not an easy thing to
do there are also a couple of other
european research projects friends and
and so on
so we are now learning as a community
yeah what are the relevant things that
should end up in the standard
and what are possible ways that this
standard could
could look like also another
important issue in this concept that the
european commission has brought in the
community
is els ethical legal and societal issues
that's something that no phd student no
researcher was really
considering uh seriously or didn't even
know about but now all the projects have
to consider els issues
it's something that the commission
brings in because that's the
first step towards safety standards or
or
ethical standards and so on so bringing
the
or or pointing the researchers to these
topics that they are also
important and so that started a couple
of years ago
everybody now knows what els stands for
that's the first step
and some projects are focusing on trying
to do something there
and it's going to be important but we
are just at the beginning of
understanding how to do that
what do you think are the big issues as
far as the actual ethical legal
sort of issues and what do you think are
the challenges for getting
academics and industry in europe
that's a very difficult question i do
not have a clear answer to that
but i have some observations in this
respect that
the els issues are not the same for
subdomains in robotics if you're
in surgical robotics you would expect
that the
els issues are the most stringent but
that's not true
because if a surgeon decides to use a
prototype robot and he says okay
i sign for all the consequences that uh
that can occur because of the use of
these devices and you're done
roughly speaking on the other hand an
industrial
robot manufacturer if
for example abb robot
is being used in application and
an operator gets hurt or killed then
this automatically reflects back
on the image of abb even if it's
probably not their fault
so the problem is somewhere else so
there the the els
are a lot more uh strict or or they have
a lot more
consequences than in in
in surgery things like that it's it's a
very
uh strange thing because the
perception of people is very important
and that also means that people are
accepting different risks of the same
device
in different contexts so this same robot
when used as a circular robot would
cause a lot less problems than using
this robot
for example in your uh in your home to
try to do your decision because if there
this robot breaks your dishes then
you can be sure that people will claim
reimbursements from the manufacturer
well if it happens in a research
environment or in hospital that's
the cost of doing uh of using the
devices
it's perception is is a very important
thing
and people put a lot of perception
in in the system in the machine
depending on how it looks like or how it
is called
so calling something a humanoid robot
that's gives a lot more expectation
perception
in the humans than calling the same
device
a tree structured robot and it's
a valid name so human structures or or
human natural they are structured in a
three
uh structure and that's basically what
they are devices
with the kinematics like a tree that can
move
and that's a lot less fancy and a lot
more
down to earth than calling it human eye
trolls
but this name makes people think that
these devices can do a lot more than
they are capable of and that influences
also dls els issues
because if if you give the device a name
that
looks a bit industrial or so then people
say oh but then you'll have to have
certification and so on
well if it you say it's a humanoid robot
it's a human friendly device and
people will go out and touch it and
interact with it
with that while the device is exactly
the same device equally dangerous or not
the name is so important and the name
also
that's important in the people that do
the legislation
eventually these are not the engineers
it will be
lawyers or other kind of people
what do you see as the big up and coming
applications
oh if i knew i wouldn't tell you because
that will be uh probably a billion
a multi-billion euro market so
i don't know
but i have some some ideas so the the
concept of a robotic
uh app platform that's
everybody talks about that so the
concept has
has proven to work with smartphones and
so on so in
principle it could also work for trolls
that means now
if you buy a robot as a company you also
buy
the applications from the vendor of an
integrator
while in principle nowadays it could be
that you buy
an app from an independent third party
on your robot so
that's a business model that is going to
happen one way or another
it it does not exist yet
because yeah it needs some time but
that's something i
i see happening that will it also means
that the road manufacturers have to open
up
their sensors a little bit more so
that's a third party can indeed
make an application there but that's an
evolution that is going on so all the
road manufacturers are now
already providing or working on
interfaces to their systems
that are a lot more open than what they
used to have in the in the past
that's something i expect as a kind of a
market
which applications will be the killer
application
that's difficult to say but that's an
evolution i see some kind of
app market so the important thing is
third parties
making applications for them for the
robots
what kind of advice do you have for
young people who are interested in a
career in robotics
how young are you thinking of high
school
high school then high school
kids i would never say that there's a
career in robotics
robotics is not
a big enough domain it's
a signs of integration so i don't see
robotics as a
as an endpoint of a career or an
envision of a career
no use because it's so complex and it's
so
versatile so i think the traditional
engineering masters engineering are fine
robotics will come later i would not
support
i'm not so positive about having a
master in robotics
i think it doesn't make too much sense
because
robotics says the science of integration
requires you to have
expertise in other subdomains before you
start applying them
in robots i've seen many places
especially in computer science schools
where they bring in robots and they say
okay that will stimulate
people to for software engineering and
so but if i then look at the results
the results are awful i mean they are
learning wrong things so they want to
solve
the robotics problems as an example of
object-oriented design that doesn't work
because robots are asynchronous
concurrently running distributed systems
and that's a lot more complex than
riding
a java program that makes
some things move so i think robotics is
not
something that you would advise to high
school people
master students graduates that's another
thing
so so what should they study
they would want to get a degree in math
or computer science
whatever whatever but you
it's an attitude so you have you should
not come to robotics
and say okay now i have a degree in
computer science and i'm going to do
more computer science in robotics or
have a math degree i'm going to do more
math no
you have to come with an attitude and
say okay now i've
been trained in this but i have to
train myself in a lot of other domains
in order to make progress
that's the right attitude be
open to learn other domains and
the better ones are able to reuse their
skills
and their models and their way of
thinking efficiently also in other
domains and so you don't need
if you have a five year master in
computer science you shouldn't need five
other years to master the domain of
mechanical engineer or control that
should take only a year or so
but nevertheless it's a year but that's
the right attitude
finding the the uh synergies with
those domains because that's where
robots is going to make progress
all right is there anything else you
want to add
let me see probably yes but i
i don't think of something uh
now oh yeah so this is one thing i'm
always complaining about
to the press that's the uh
they're not helping us as
teachers or educators or researchers in
robotics so
the the common press they are
stimulating or implicitly putting
certain perceptions in the general
public's mind about what robots can do
so they always if they come here
to film something they don't they are
not interested in filming reality
they are interesting in filming
suggestive things
so that it looks like this stupid robot
is intelligently
stirring in a cooking pot or something
like this so they are
giving the general public and
students the idea that most of the
problems have already been solved and
there is something like an intelligent
robot but that's not
all the case so in my robotics classes
i'm spending a lot of time in in
debunking myths and saying to students
or
letting students understand that no this
does not yet work
because these and these are the real
problems that have not been solved it's
not because you see something on the
movie
that suggests that a certain problem is
being solved that it's so
also solved so in the beginning of my
first
lecture i show a couple of videos and i
ask students
what do you think is inside this robot
and
always uh students think there's a lot
more insight
than what is really inside and then
later on we study uh
the things that are inside and i think
oh
you never realize that this is so
complex
because most of the things that robots
do
uh are so obvious for humans and we
don't think about that
that takes a long time to realize okay
what can be solved and what is the
complexity of
the things that people think are simple
while the
things that people think are difficult
are
really solve problems so most of my
students think that it's a tremendously
difficult problem
to make a robot walk without falling
that's not such a big thing
making the robot and so on it is but the
control algorithm to
not to fall that's that simple
that's the kind of things that people
have
very wrong impressions about
and i hope the press sooner or later is
going to
change their attitude and help us
instead of
making our job more difficult okay
is there anything else no i think it's
not
that's fine okay