well thank you for your interest in my
career in my history of my field i know
a lot of people
great uh so we usually start by asking
where you were born and where you grew
up and went to school
okay so my name is howie chosit
i was born in new york and i grew up on
long island
and went to john f kennedy high school
when i was in high school i entered a
variety of
science fair competitions
and one that's most notable was when i
was a senior in high school
i entered the duracell battery contest
and i was one of the national finalists
for building a
little robot that had a sonar sensor and
it would go around and avoid objects
well that was your first robot that you
ever built
so it's not clear you know what's a
robot so it's hard to answer what's the
first robot ever built
but since i was in junior high school i
used to build little
electronic controlled cars uh you know
using shoe boxes
as the body and motorized wheels to
drive them around
so maybe i would say around seven to
eighth grade is when i started building
robots
right and so um did you realize at that
time that
that's the kind of career you wanted to
have i realized at a very young age
maybe as early as five
that i was always interested in motion
how to make things move i was interested
in how cars moved on the highway how
animals moved
and then probably by the time i was in
the 7th or 8th grade i knew i wanted to
be able to program that motion
i can't remember exactly when i realized
that was a robot
but certainly in an early age i wanted
to work on on robots
right and then where did you go to
undergraduate
so i went to college at the university
of pennsylvania
where i majored in computer science and
engineering
and i had a second major in business
from the wharton school
um and who did you work with while you
were there when i was at the university
of pennsylvania
i worked with regina baichie in the
grasp lab
in working with her her staff and her
students
i learned a fair bit about robot vision
and um taking up the business degree did
you have aspirations to have a robotics
company at some point
so when i applied to graduate school i
wasn't sure did i want to become a
professor
or become an entrepreneur and start my
own company
i chose the path of academia i wanted to
become a professor at least become a
professor at first
however 10 years ago i did start my
first company
the name of the company is called med
robotics
they make a small surgical snake robot
for minimally invasive surgery
that robot uh was invented in my group
and then with the support of some local
economic development funds most notably
the pittsburgh life science greenhouse
we were able to kick the technology over
the fence from a university lab you know
to a company
and at that point we were able to
interact investors in fact enough
investment
where eventually we built a robot that
operated on a person
so i don't believe that as a university
professor
i could have single-handedly built a
robot that would then operate on a
person had to be through a company
and the people in this company did all
the hard work
not only building the robot making it
operating room compliant and safe for a
person but also doing all the necessary
documentation that it can
be allowed to operate on a person so in
my view
this is a good story of well me starting
a company and then
second when it was a right point in time
to kick the technology
over from the university to the
commercial side
and when you were an undergraduate at
the grasp lab um
what was it like to work there what time
period was that
what was going on there how did you know
i worked in the grassland
isn't that what you said or i didn't say
it oh you worked with regina
you but you you inferred correctly so i
was quite fortunate
to have had the opportunity to work in
the grasp lab
regina baichi's group working there was
great
i would say mainly because of the people
they're just smart hard-working people
who are willing to teach me
new math and new programming tricks as i
needed them
most notably was a woman named helen
anderson who
uh was a staff member in the grasp lab
she
not only taught me good programming and
uh some robot vision but i also got to
learn a little bit about
writing and how to express your ideas
from her
and that's where you started working on
vision systems there
when i was working in the grasp lab i
worked solely on robot vision because
that was my job
it wasn't my interest or my first choice
interest however i'm incredibly grateful
for that opportunity because i think if
i had been left to my own devices
that's an area of robotics i otherwise
would not have explored on my own
and then did you decide immediately to
go on to graduate school and
where did you go so i decided in my
freshman year of college when i was at
the university of pennsylvania that i
wanted to go to graduate school
i really love the academic environment i
like how people come together
and brainstorm my new ideas and then the
rigor it takes to prove those ideas
so for that reason i wanted to go to
grad school eventually
i went to the california institute of
technology caltech
in pasadena california my advisor there
was joel burdick and it's worth noting
that when i went
to graduate school my major was
mechanical engineering
that was a change from computer science
to mechanical engineering
that was a very hard and difficult
change for me because
all of the math and background that
mecha graduate mechanical engineers have
i didn't have but i have to say it's
been an incredibly
excuse me i have to say it was an
incredibly worthwhile experience
because it really set the pace and the
tone for the kind of work that my
research group does today
and what was it like working with joel
burdick working with joel burdick was
great
just a phenomenal advisor he has
well he's very down to earth he's very
kind but he's also incredibly smart
he brings an incredible perspective he
was able to direct me where to go
but on the flip side he gave me
incredible amounts of autonomy
so i would say i was well supported and
well uh well directed or how
was the world so i was well supported
yet i had great autonomy
great and what was your thesis project
my thesis project was entitled the
hierarchical generalized warning graph
at the time i was interested in
getting high degree of freedom systems
like a snake robot to explore an
unknown three-dimensional space however
that problem was way too hard
so joel and i focused on
just having a point explore a
three-dimensional space
exploring a two-dimensional space isn't
that hard when things go into three
dimensions
there's all these subtleties and nuances
that one doesn't ex
normally expects to have as a difficult
problem
that's mainly because we are
two-dimensional thinkers by our very
nature
and were you working with some
theoretical models or did you have an
actual snake robot that you were working
with
so at the time i was not working with a
snake robot to explore a
three-dimensional space because we
didn't have such a snake robot
so what my thesis work did was derive
the theory
for how one could explore map
and then use that map for future
excursions into three-dimensional
environments
only using line of sight or sensor data
when it came time for me to demonstrate
the ideas for my thesis
i ended up using a mobile robot to
construct a special
planar case of the three-dimensional
structure that my thesis were
prescribed and when was the first time
you got to
work with an actual snake robot the
first snake robot i worked with
was the one that joel burdick and greg
churychian
then his grad student now a professor at
johns hopkins university
uh built before i was working on my
thesis project i developed
a local sensor-based planners that
allowed
greg's snake robot to avoid nearby
obstacles
when going from say a start position to
a goal location
okay and when was that where the work i
did
in avoiding local obstacles and i should
acknowledge was with
um let me say again the work that i did
in local sensor-based planning for snake
robots was also with a japanese
researcher nabaki takanashi
and this is work that we did in 1993.
so when did you finish your phd i
finished my phd from caltech in 1996.
actually it was march 3rd 1996.
uh were there any other notable projects
or collaborations
during your graduate work during my
graduate work i was fortunate to work
with a lot of other students who had
strong math backgrounds the two people
who stand out the most
are andrew lewis who's now a professor
of maths
at queen's college in canada and the
other is jim ostrowski
who works for a small company in the bay
area
great and did you go on for a post-doc
after your phd or
answer a slightly different question
sure during my time
as a phd student i was fortunate enough
to be selected to go on a program that
the national science foundation
sponsored
where i worked in a japanese lab
part of that program included my visits
to other japanese labs and in one of
those visits
i became friends with keiji nagatani
he's now a professor to hoku
university but he served as my postdoc
from
1998 to 2000.
and what kind of projects were you
working on in japan
when i was working in japan i worked on
a manipulation
project really it was a how to have a
single finger sense
objects as the fingertip rolls on the
corner or flat faces
the project that keiji nakatani and i
eventually worked on what was called
topological localization
it was using the embedded topology you
know the understanding of
here are junctions in your environment
your edges
that connect the connector junctions had
a reason at that level
on how to make a robot localize itself
right and did you develop other
collaborations
while you were in japan
oh and then that lasted right
uh and where did you go after that
postcard
so so japan was a summer program so okay
after i graduated from uh
graduate school i worked in japan in a
separate
interception lab uh on some
computational geometry you know some
fundamental math
and then i went to work for a small
company called nomadic technologies they
make mobile robots
while i was there i developed algorithms
to cover
known spaces after nomadic technologies
i started my faculty position at
carnegie mellon
okay and now that would have been 2000
or so i started my faculty position at
carnegie mellon in 1996.96 okay so what
kind of work have you been doing
uh since you arrived at carnegie mellon
so i arrived at carnegie mellon 18 years
ago
and i've been lucky to have had 13
amazing phd students 28 29 master
students
and easily 150 undergraduates work in my
lab
we do a variety of things but one way to
organize them
is by uh snake robots
and gates that make snake robot snake
robots work
medical robots manufacturing
and multi-agent path planning
so snake robots represent the core
of a lot of what my group is doing we
build
the mechanisms themselves which is
challenging because you want to build
something that's small
yet maneuverable and strong and of
course as
low cost as possible we also
worry about the algorithms the motion
control how do you coordinate these
internal degrees of freedom to get the
robot to go in some general direction
that you care
another important problem is now that
you can make the robot go in
whatever desired direction you care
where does the robot go
we call that path planning finally to
close the loop
there's a problem estimation this is
sometimes called the slam
problem simultaneous localization and
mapping how do we know that we're where
we want to be how do we know we're
executing the right controller
those were the kinds of problems that
the snake robot work inspired
so let's take medical robotics the
second big area of research that my
group
undertakes so we built a small
surgical snake robot for minimally
invasive surgery
the benefits of minimally invasive
surgery can be quite profound
it's less pain on the patient the person
can heal
faster and the person can return to
normal life more quickly
lower hospital stays another side
benefit for minimally invasive surgery
is that i think medical care gets
disseminated to more people that
otherwise would not have received
medical care because now you have to be
in a
center of medical excellence you can
perhaps do more things
in in maybe in an office visit
the problem with minimally invasive
surgery is there's only two kinds of
tools
one of them is a rigid laproscope which
means you can
access only points from a line of sight
from the incision
the other kind of mechanism are
endoscopes they're flexible
but they buckle easily a small surgical
snake robot inherits the benefits of
both worlds it's both rigid
and flexible at the same time so if you
want to do a heart operation
instead of cracking the chest we can
make a small incision
in your solar plexus make a 25
millimeter turn one way a 25 millimeter
turn
the other way and voila we're behind the
heart
now as proud of i am of this technology
i also have to stress
this is really a team sport so for one
thing
my then postdoc he's now a professor at
the technion his name is elon wolfe
he was a medical robotics expert who
came to my lab
and really got me reinvigorated
into medical robotics my clinical
collaborator his name is marco zanotti
at the time he was a cardiac surgeon at
the university of pittsburgh
but now he's a professor at harvard he's
the one who was able to
look at what the snake robots looked
like then blur his eyes just a little
bit
extrapolate as to where they can go and
then give alan and me the feedback that
we needed initially
to really iterate on this design so alan
and i
spent you know quite a long time
scratching our heads trying to figure
out how to make this
build a small surgical snake robot it's
hard
how do you get all that power into a
small volume
most of the people in this community at
that point in time were trying to
develop
novel actuators mems electric polymer
electropolymer actuated muscles [ __ ]
remember my alloys
and that work is great it just wasn't
quite ready for prime time and making a
robot work
and then one day i sat down i just
literally just sat down and said i'm
going to figure this out
and 20 minutes later half the solution
came to me
and then i told alon my half he gave me
the second half and voila
we had the small surgical snake robot
marco was then able to give us feedback
and he was aggressive in getting us into
the operating room we started operating
on pigs
and the mechanism just iterated and
iterated and then at a certain point i
was very proud to say
that uh marco zenati elon wolf and i
we co-founded this company called med
robotics
and i don't think we could have started
this company without the
assistance of jim jordan he
is the chief uh investment officer of an
organization called the pittsburgh life
science greenhouse
the pittsburgh life science greenhouse
looks at small companies in university
research
and helps them understand the true
market potential of their technology
gives them some money but also makes
lots of introductions to potential
investors and to potential ceos
and it was and it was jim jordan's
vision that really got us to articulate
where this surgical snake robots can go
and with that vision and with you know
our great work ethic we were able to
attract a ceo
from boston um
i have to i wanted to say boston
dynamics but
from boston scientific so we were able
to attract
with jim jordan's help we were able to
attract a ceo from boston scientific
and then there the company was able to
take off so we were able to attract
uh first 12 million dollars in
investment and that brought us to the
first in human
operation where i was fortunate enough
to be present so i got to watch
my snake robots operate through a small
incision on this woman's heart
and she received a diagnostic which
otherwise would require a full
sternotomy
12 to 14 days she would have been in the
hospital except this time she went home
the next day
very little suffering uh that company
today is led by samuel strafache
and he's the ceo of med robotics and
he's just wonderful the breadth of
knowledge that he has
on the medical device field on what it
takes to make systems go
he just knows everything and he is just
a way of you know being able to talk
uh with people in all sorts of
disciplines you know bring
brings it all together and i'm proud to
say that
the company has received its european ce
mark
so this means they're able to operate uh
in europe uh with this robot and
we've performed on the order of 15 to 20
operations
in the last month since we've obtained
this certification
on a base of neck or base of throat uh
operation procedures which otherwise
would require
an invasive incision or
bad chemotherapy or the patient just
would have been told we're really sorry
there's nothing we can do for you
interesting so what was the big
breakthrough that you have that these
figured out and put together with a lawn
and then 20 minutes
the breakthrough that we had in
designing the small surgical snake
robots
was how we can get all
of the actuation off board the robot
so there's no motors in the robot and
we're able to marine at that robot
using four cables so literally using
four fishing wires
and six motors that you can buy from
radio shack
we were able to build a mechanism that
can follow an arbitrary curve up to a
curvature limit in a three-dimensional
space
and you can control the point along the
snake at which the curve
occurs the way the physician
or the user is able to control the robot
is he has a joystick and that joystick
steers
where the head of the snake goes almost
as if it's a
ball floating in space you tell it where
to go and it's going to go
the rest of the snake robot is what
supports that ball
so it's a follow the lever mechanism you
aim where that where the tip of the
snake goes
it goes and the rest of the snake
follows
um so tell me a bit about your work on
multi-agent systems
so snake
robots have many many degrees of freedom
in the parlance of motion planning that
means they live in high dimensional
configuration spaces
we're interested in other systems that
have many many degrees of freedom
so one such system would be a
multi-agent
system something where you have say 100
robots
each of which have to go from a current
location to some goal location
and what we want to do is we want to
find optimal
paths but do that in a short amount of
time
right now with multi-agent systems there
are pretty much
two extremes on a spectrum you can
either plan a
in a coordinated space in other words in
this multi-dimensional search space
which becomes computationally
intractable shortly after
seven or eight robots or you can
have every robot plan a path for itself
and when robots start to come into
collision
you create traffic control laws that get
them to avoid avoid each other
that's nice except one you're not
guaranteed or you probably won't get an
optimal solution
but even worse you may find yourself in
a situation called deadlock
where this robot's waiting for that
robot who's waiting for that robot
coming all the way around the cycle uh
everybody's waiting for everybody else
to make a move and no one's going to
make the move because they're constantly
waiting it's
deadlock everyone's deadlocked so
there's this sort of unbreakable
trade-off
what we were able to do was find uh
something in the middle and the way this
works is we have every robot planned for
itself
so every robot plans its own path but
only when they come
in within proximity of each other and
only the robots that come within
proximity of each other
we locally expand their search spaces to
account for
the two or three robots that are in
contact with each other
worst case scenario you get to a
bottleneck where everyone piles into the
same bottleneck
however on average we were able to
demonstrate that you get
computationally tractable solutions and
again
using the words from motion planning we
get slower than exponential
growth in the number of robots have you
been able to reapply that to the snake
robots
we have not been able to reapply
that algorithm directly to snake robots
to make snake robots find paths
more easily for each other but what we
have been able to do
was apply that algorithm to a group of
snake robots if we want a group of snake
robots to find
uh paths uh in in some location from one
place to another
and have you been developing other kinds
of snake robots apart from the
in non-invasive medical design
so a lot of times people ask me or make
the comment oh it's just a snake robot
it's one kind of snake robots but no no
no no
eskimos have 28 words for snow whereas
to us
it's like snow and slush and the same
thing is true of the snake robots
to me the medical snake robot which is
very small is a completely different
beast
than say the snake robot we have for
locomotion the locomoting snake robot is
used for urban search and rescue
most recently i've been using the
medical excuse me
most recently i've been using the
locomoting snake robots
for archaeology so i've been to egypt
and
and last month i was in turkey
the challenges for archaeology are just
like search and rescue except
everyone's been dead for 5 000 years so
there's no rush
so you can sit and take it easy we've
also
been developing locomoting robots for
inspection of nuclear reactors so a
locomoting snake robot
is one that uses its internal degrees of
freedom in order to propel itself
forward
it locomotes the reason why you would
want a locomoting snake robot
is if you need to go a very long
distance
beyond which conventional arm even it's
a fixed base snake robot can otherwise
reach
you would also need a locomoting snake
robot if you have
all sorts of mobility challenges just
threading through tightly packed volumes
and getting to locations that people
machinery otherwise can't access
that's the local that's the locomoting
snake robots so we have the small snake
robots
let's say we have the medium size
locomoting snake robots
and we built a large snake robot i know
small medium large
for manufacturing and confined spaces
so tell me about the archaeological work
did you
go explore some some pyramids or
so we've only gone on two archaeological
trips
the first one was in egypt in egypt we
first sent our snake robots into these
caves
off the coast of the red sea these caves
were very small and they were built by
the ancient egyptians the ancient
egyptians
they used to carry their ships from the
nile
to the red sea but they didn't carry the
ships in in their full
form they built the ships out of modules
nice and modular so they carried pieces
of their ships
they then assembled the ships sailed to
probably somalia traded ready traded
came back disassembled the ships and
instead of carrying them back to the
nile
they stored them in these little caves
so the bad guys won't steal
their uh their seat their sea vessels
the following year they'd come get the
ships reassemble them and and the
process repeats
now a lot of those caves are unstable
for people to enter
so the hope was that we would be able to
send our snake robots in
and find evidence of other ships
unfortunately we found nothing and the
main reason why we found nothing
was that our robots weren't good enough
uh every time we do a search and rescue
training or we did this archaeology
we find a challenge that we just
couldn't handle in this particular case
we had trouble
mediating the dirty the dirt
in other words the snake robots slid a
lot and we also had trouble going up
steep inclines
last month we went to turkey where we
went into these burial mounds
and there we had fewer challenges that
the robot couldn't overcome
but again we didn't find anything but
this time we found
nothing because there was nothing there
okay i also forgot to say something i
should have pointed out
we also uh sent our snake robots into
these caverns that were underneath the
great pyramid and again we found nothing
but we also ran out of time not because
we didn't find
nothing okay um and for the
manufacturing and confined spaces what
are some of the applications that
the snake robot is particularly useful
for
so the snake robot is good at getting
into
a tight spot and then say applying
[Music]
actually i'd rather not talk about the
manufacturing confined spaces in detail
uh let's strike that yeah i think the
sponsor might not like me talking about
it
yeah i'm sorry about that sure uh i also
should acknowledge we do build
other robots too i i should say so my
research group
is is quite good at building
a variety of mechanisms one of them i
should acknowledge
is born out of our snake robot work and
that is we're getting very good at
building modular systems
so our current snake robot can be put
together
without tools you know just using your
hands you can scream together as if they
were lego
but what's more impressive than the
mechanical connection
is the underlying software and
electronics that makes this happen
and as a result of that we're now
building other kinds of modules that we
can put together
so we built a tank tread module we're
building a legged system
again out of our modules but other
robots
that we've built we built a small uh
mobile robot that's you know yay big
this high off the ground
but it is very fast and it can maneuver
over
objects many times its size the idea
is that a lot of times when we would
take our snake robot to do some search
and rescue training
i couldn't help but wonder could an
articulated wheeled vehicle do just the
same
and that's that's the answer to this uh
problem
we built another robot uh excuse me
we're in the process of building another
robot
that we're going to be able to throw in
the air and then using its wheels it'll
be able to write itself and then land
wheel down
my interest there is one being able to
take a running jump and land on a
platform
but i'm also interested eventually in
building a spider robot
where the spider can run and then jump
and then land on a vertical surface
my research group this is in
collaboration with john luntz
at the university of michigan and bill
messner who's now at northeastern
we built what's called an actuator array
imagine you have a checkerboard but each
checkerboard has a pair of wheels
where one wheel rotates this way and the
wheel rotates this way but there's beads
on these wheels
so these wheels collectively can provide
a planar vectored force in any direction
so by so now you have an array of these
you can put a box down on top of it and
then you can
manipulate the box spin it around and
send it off it's sort of the next best
thing
in conveyor belts i'm trying to think
what other robots we've built
or the process of building because i
know i'm going to think of one more than
being embarrassed that we didn't uh
discuss it but i guess we'll just have
to leave it at that
so you mentioned spider robots um do you
actually look to biological models as
you construct these systems
or are they mostly engineering so a
common question
we get with our snake robots is do
are we biologically inspired is this
biologically inspired robots
and the answer is yes but i think just
saying yes doesn't do
the question justice we're biologically
inspired on multiple levels
so first we look at the snake we build
the snake robots
but then we just used our engineering
intuition
our underlying math to make the snake
robot
work as well as we possibly could in
doing so
there are times we can return the favor
to biology
and start explaining to biologists how
real snakes work
however this illumination is going both
ways
so i work with a physicist and a
biologist his name is dan goldman
at georgia tech and he
and his crew collect all sorts of data
on snakes and they draw
great conclusions and they draw
and they pose some questions which we're
able to
demonstrate or disprove on the snake
robot so the robot is being used as a
template
to uh uh answer some of dan's questions
but at the same time dan looks at the
snake
looks at the snake robot and says hey if
you just did something a little bit
differently
can we make the snake robot work better
and what we're doing now is we're
developing
algorithms that can take the
data we get from the snake biological
snake
sieve out the core principles and use
those principles to make the snake robot
maneuver in ways that our raw
engineering intuition alone could not
have
and um over the course of your career
what have been the kind of big
breakthroughs in snake robotics and
modular robotics so
it's kind of hard for me to point to a
breakthrough because a lot of the work
that we do
is happening continually in pieces and
pieces and pieces
so the only time where i thought
aha it was a tremendous jump forward
was when we conceived of the medical
snake robot mechanism in those 20
minutes
however there's just a lot of hard work
a lot of ingenuity a lot of
let's try this a lot of let's think this
out reason things out that happen
in a very peaceful this is what science
and engineering development
is i'm very proud of the series elastic
robot that we have i'm very proud of the
modular snake robot that we have
i'm very proud of the geometric
mechanics most notably the work that
ross had
in my phd student he's now a professor
at oregon state
was able to derive in our work so
i guess to say i'm proud of everything
but i can't
point to that other than the other than
building mechanisms
that one critical breakthrough
maybe there is none you know that's that
that's one reason why robotics is great
it's both multi-disciplinary meaning
that we have mechanical engineering
electrical engineering computer science
as well as psychology and other fields
but it's also interdisciplinary the
computer science affects the electronics
i have to make trade-offs between the
mechanical engineering the computer
science and so forth we all have to wear
each other's hats in order to make the
robot work
and what have been some of the sources
of funding over your career
for your research well first it's never
enough
uh so i've been very lucky
to have attracted funding
from the national science foundation the
office of naval research
the army and darpa
i've also been fortunate to receive
funding from
industry however i don't
know if industry wants me to report
where
my funding is coming from so out of
respect
i'll just say industry and
are there differences in the kinds of um
the work or the ability to share
the results of your research depending
on where the funding is coming from
with my industrial research
actually i'm going to answer a different
question and i'll get back to your
question
in all the projects on which my group
works
we always work with a stakeholder in
that field so when we're doing
our medical robotics marco zanati with a
cardiac surgeon
when we were doing search and rescue
robin murphy who's
a roboticist but also sam stover a
rescue worker
you know one of them is one of us one of
us is one of them when we're doing when
we used to do car painting
we had jake brasslaw from ford again
he's worked with us non
non-non-stop so i have this
i've been very lucky to have attracted
collaborators
who were very aggressive in getting me
into their worlds
and very willing to come sit and hang
out in my world
and because of that we end up developing
joint results
joint results lead to joint publications
so using industry as an example
i have co-authors who are my industrial
collaborators
since they're co-authors they have to go
through whatever process they have to go
through
in order for the paper to be published
so
that is the only hoop through which i
have to pass
and i've never had a problem passing
through that hoop
um and medical robotics is becoming an
increasingly
um hot topic and uh emerging area
how how do you having been in the area
for a long period how do you see the
kind of historical trajectory of
medical robotics over your career
i believe the futuristic
medical robot isn't going to look like a
robot
right now we have this notion of using
conventional robots robot arms
navy robot snakes converting them into
something that's of medical use
and then going from there i believe
what we're going to do is we're going to
see more implements more tools become
roboticized become more intelligent
and what this is going to do is it's
going to offload
a lot of the burden from surgeons to
perform procedures
and we're seeing this trend already take
for example if
40 years ago if you had something wrong
with your large intestines
you underwent surgery they looked at
your large intestines and said
hey you have this terrible inflammation
it's crohn's disease it's colitis here's
your prednisone and off you go
today you have a colonoscopy a
non-surgeon
performs the procedure a non-surgeon
performs a minimally invasive seizure
in fact colonoscopy is so in fact
in fact colonoscopy is so minimally
invasive and so low-cost it's now become
a diagnostic
not just a therapeutic tool and we have
non-surgeons
performing the colonoscopy in fact we
now have medical students performing
colonoscopy
so i see a trend in where more
specialists people who have not had the
same
access to resources and perhaps medical
training
being able to perform what was once
surgical level care
but outside of the centers of metal
medical excellence
in regional hospitals in office visits
even in the field
and these procedures are going to be
done by more intelligent tools
but by med techs physicians
specialists where i think surgeons
are going to have a role because we're
always going to need surgeons
is they're going to do the more complex
procedures
and i envision that surgeons and
specialists
are going to form new ways to
collaborate to invent a whole host of
therapies
otherwise we couldn't get so it will
have the
benefit of a surgeon but with the
invasiveness of a specialist
so in terms of the uh the research side
of medical
robotics have you seen more research
over the you know previous decades
coming from medical conferences or
medical
instruments and devices conferences or
has most of the research come
you know conferences like this and
robotics or has it been very
interdisciplinary all along
i think the development of medical
robotics and mental devices has been a
little bit fragmented
so medical devices are not necessarily
robots and they're still coming out the
more we can do
with a device the better off we are you
know if we can get around using the
robot
that's probably a good thing because
it's a simpler mechanism
in terms of the development of medical
robotics
we have industrial development and we
have
academic development uh
some of that is cooperative you know
intuitive circle
does a very good job reaching out to the
academic community
and either sponsor research or director
research in the hopes
of bringing some of those ideas back to
their robot to make a better system
other companies which are smaller don't
have the resources
or perhaps the time to reach out to
academic work so
the smaller companies still aren't
necessarily directly collaborating with
academics
however the smaller companies are hiring
the academics
in fact i believe the future innovations
are going to come
from small companies and perhaps some
applied
very applied academic units because
they're small they're still maneuverable
they don't have the inertia
and that's where i think most of the
change is going to happen
great are there any other um
collaborations or
students who've gone on to do work in
robotics that you'd like to
discuss
let's see i
did i get all my collaborators i
yeah i should mention vijay kumar
a little bit um
so i i've been very lucky to have a host
of collaborators
and friends in the robotics community i
used to work a lot with al rizzi
on the interface between controls and
path planning
and he and i did a lot of work together
on car painting
he ultimately left academia and went to
work for boston dynamics where he has an
incredibly successful career
i do a fair bit of interacting
with vijay kumar on the multi-agent
work he and i bounce ideas off of each
other we
our students talk to each other and
we've been and we serve on each other's
you know thesis each other students
thesis committees and we've been able to
generate
uh you know you know some nice ideas in
the multi-agent path planning world
right and what's it been like working
out oh sorry i was like i forgot
also i have to acknowledge also uh i do
a fair bit of work with robin murphy
on search and rescue robotics the truth
is
i would not have done anything in search
and rescue robotics if it hadn't been
for robin
and that's been primarily the snake
um and what's it like what's it been
like at carnegie mellon
robotics
uh this is one body of work we didn't
touch on which i think is worth
mentioning
so one of the
things excuse me one area of work on
which we're
trying to expand the benefit of
minimally invasive surgery
is recreating the situational awareness
for physicians that is lost
when you go from an open procedure to a
minimally invasive one
in minimally invasive surgery you're
essentially operating through straws
and that's all you see
what we've been doing is in the past
starting with the work of keiji nagatani
who was my postdoc now professor tohoku
university
we did a lot of simultaneous
localization and mapping
slam for mobile robots
and we were able to transfer and then
build upon the slam results
to do slam in the body we call it body
slam
and the reason why this is an important
topic
is that we can simultaneously
map out the anatomy as well as localize
the robot
to the anatomy when doing minimally
invasive surgery
so the goal of this work would be
imagine you're watching the movie the
matrix and you want to be able to
spin the heart around and get this
vantage point or you spin it this way to
get that vantage point
when doing your minimally invasive
surgery and i'm very proud to say
that my collaborators and friends russ
taylor and nabil saman russ is at johns
hopkins university nobel's at vanderbilt
university
the three of us together have a very
strong
project in what we're calling concurrent
situational awareness where we're not
only trying to
improve the situational awareness for
the physician
but we're also trying to improve it for
the robot so the robot can do more
things
for the situational awareness and
we have a very successful collaboration
that and we just recently got funded
through the national robotics initiative
to advance this work
so in the next four years you're going
to see great things coming out of
this group i just interviewed russ
what's what's he like as a collaborator
well
um let's see
the fact that i'm hesitating means i
have to come up with the right set of
words
and the reason why is russ is an
incredibly special person
he is your best friend
and he can be thick headed
and sometimes it's great that he's thick
headed
but he is thoughtful
kind and supportive he's just a
wonderful person
to deal with but there's always that
exterior you have to break
however one thing about robotics is it's
a team sports
and the personalities among nabil saman
rush taylor and me just match perfectly
so russ and i can argue like cats and
dogs
and then two minutes later an observer
would never even know we were just
arguing a minute later because that's
the kind of dynamic you know
we were able to develop russ has this
incredible breath of knowledge that he
brings
to the table and he's quite humble about
it too you know he is the father of
medical robotics and he's the one who
started all this
so i find it an honor and a privilege to
be working with him
and when to hear him say kind things
about the work
that that my group does nabil saman
is probably the nicest person in
robotics he's just
a nice guy um to spell his name it's
n-a-b-i-l-s-i-m-a-a-n
nabil saman he uh
i think is the most up-and-coming
researcher in medical robotics i think
his group generates
the most number of neat medical devices
as well as algorithms uh to control them
he he's just a wonderful academic
because he's
theoretically grounded and at the same
time he can interact and work with
industry
and the three of us just have this nice
rapport
and complementary uh skill sets that
allow this collaboration to work in fact
what's unique among about this
collaboration is we're we're different
universities
and yet we talk directly to each other
students you know as if
you know as if you know as if his
students are mine vice versa
great and um so what's the environment
that occurred in mellon like
carnegie mellon university is a special
place especially for robotics
it's a small school but we're big on
robotics
so you have that small school feel but
yet that critical
mass more than critical mass to work on
robotics
i would say my collaborators
colleagues my friends in the department
although we all have varied interests we
all have a deep respect
and a deep understanding of the other
interests in fact i would say take a
step
further we have a deep understanding of
what we don't know about each other's
interests
so when i have a problem with vision i
can go talk with yasser
marchelle or avanov depending on the
particular problem i have with vision
if i have a problem with um
singular value decompositions i talk
with my vision
friend fernando why would i have
problems with singular value
decompositions i'm now using the
analysis
the vision people have been using for
years in our locomotion work
in fact machine learning is very very
big at carnegie mellon my collaborator
jeff schneider he and i have been
working together for seven years
on applying machine learning techniques
techniques that were developed
to understand how galaxies form or for
drug discovery we're now
building upon those techniques to
control snake robots
and just having these world-class
researchers
who around you the expertise is amazing
but the next thing is is
the the spirit of collaboration is very
high
uh at carnegie mellon in general and in
the robotics institute
uh finally people just work hard and uh
knowing that your colleague is working
very hard you know in some ways is
inspiring but it's also
uh relaxing because you're not doing all
the work
the other thing about carnegie mellon
that i also should stress
are the students are phenomenal we
get amazing students who are theorically
grounded
and yet want to and are very good at
making robots work
and these are students at all levels we
have the best masters phd students
but our undergraduate population is also
very unique
with undergraduates my lab we actually
employ
probably the greatest number of
undergraduates i don't know
probably the highest number of
undergraduates and my undergraduates go
off
and do amazing things after they leave
my lab mainly because they were amazing
and i just was able to give them an
environment in which they can
grow just a little bit more but my
undergraduates published papers
they've had their work appear on the
cover of usa today you know they
they just are great uh through the work
with these undergraduates i've been able
to introduce
a new course undergraduate an
undergraduate robotics course that's a
pleasure to teach
and recently with my colleagues reed
simmons
on most notably at carnegie mellon we
prescribed a new major in robotics
so there were very few places where
you'd have
uh enough undergraduates
to be so interested in robotics that it
can justify
my teaching courses in robotics because
that's what i really want to teach
uh as well as have access to a talent
pool
to further advance the robots that we're
developing
and then there any other specific
students that you want to mention
or who are still working in robotics or
have gone on to do other
robotics things so let's
go in order my first student erjon ajar
works at intel
on microcontroller automation
my second student i have 13 students i
don't know if i want to go through all
the students
all of my phd students either work in
robotics
or they work in a field let's say
automation that required a robotics
background
in order to enter half my students
are working in academia and the other
half are working in industry
one such student sergeant staff he
started
a toy robotics company and now it's
been morphed into a robotics company
that patrols
warehouses and supermarket aisles to
take automatic inventory uh i just had
another one of my students go start
a company in the bay area
that fly has pilots flying over farm
fields and using vision algorithms
to figure out where you should put the
fertilizer or
place the water what you know what part
of the field needs attention
and that company is just doing
phenomenally well what's the name of the
company
tara avion t-e-r-r-a-v-i-o-n
two of my students i went to work for my
medical device company
uh med robotics so that was nice at
least to keep the talents
local with me uh
and one of my students works for mitre
which is sort of in between industry and
academia
but i i have to say i have been very
fortunate to have
you know these great hard-working people
who are also as humble as can be
and i might add socially and emotionally
better balanced than i'll ever be uh
you know work in my group and it's it's
been quite fortunate
i recently started a second company and
two excuse me three of my students and
one of my staff members
uh work in that company and can you tell
us about that
that company is making a modular robot
actuator
which one can put together in different
configurations to make a robot that will
be robust
you know good enough for uh
real use field use or industrial use
great um is there anything we missed
didn't cover
anything let's see no i think
i don't know i'll think of things
afterwards of course uh
i'm proud to say that the work with dan
goldman's group in my group
is going to result in our first
publication in science in two weeks
congratulations yeah that's that's
pretty great
and again it's one of those things that
we could have done it without him he
couldn't do it without us
although uh i think we needed him more
than he needed us
anything else carnegie mellon's great uh
robotics is great
uh i'm good so the question we end with
is what's your advice to young people
who are interested in a career in
robotics
well first whenever you give a talk make
sure the videos work uh before your talk
because if you're going to be
interviewing or giving a presentation
you have to make a really good first
impression i don't
uh so that's that's one
it's very easy for an older person to
tell a younger person
go do what your heart says go do what
you like
you know i i got that advice then and
it's hard to follow that advice because
i think younger people either
don't know what their hearts telling
them or at the very very least
they are afraid to try something new
so my advice is of course follow your
heart
but if you're not sure about that
whatever you do
try and find something else to do too
i'm very fortunate that regina baichi
forced me to learn robot vision i'm very
fortunate that when i was in college
some of my friends got me to practice
taekwondo these are things i normally
wouldn't have done it's different from
robotics just try and do something else
too
and follow your heart okay
i wish i had better advice for young
people
oh i have another piece of advice for
young people okay
so two pieces of advice for young people
one make sure your presentations work
my other piece of advice to young people
is don't be afraid to admit
you don't know something often
we're asked a question and we feel like
if we don't answer it
we're a failure it's okay to say
i don't know it's okay to say hey let me
think about that and i'll get back to
you
that's fine i think what may trouble
some young people is they think they
know it all and then they're asked a
question that they don't know the answer
to
and that just rocks their world get over
that
we know very little as as it is and it's
okay not to know something
because that will be the opportunity to
go learn something new
okay i'm 30 advice thank you very much
hey thank you if you're interested