okay
are we ready to go yep so i should tell
you my
yes if you could tell us your life story
and
robotics finish where
okay well i was actually born in
danville illinois
and uh my father worked for general
electric so
every small town where ge has a facility
i
we moved around i grew up in cleveland
and baltimore and pittsfield mass
it's connected to new york
but let's see the very as far as
robotics goes
the very first start was uh my older
brother four years older built a science
fair
robot in high school so i was in eighth
grade and i helped him build this
uh sort of walking plywood box it was
pretty low tech this was 1967. probably
and so that was the beginning of the
fascination and then when i myself made
it to high school there was a science
fair thing and i built a robot in the
style of the
walking plywood box and
so i was the kid with the robot in high
school but that was like 1971 so this is
still going back pretty far
and and then i went off to uh college at
rpi in troy new york and um
in my mind i always wanted to build
robots in the basement my idea was get a
job get a real job
you know and then in the basement i'd
build robots to keep myself happy
by the time i interviewed for jobs
around 1977
there actually were robots in factories
they were starting to be robots and so i
suddenly dawned on me hey maybe i can
get actually a job in robotics
so i started looking for that and i
interviewed places that were using
robots like procter gamble and so forth
but i finally took a job at jpl in
pasadena because there was a research
group
doing research on robots i thought that
would be even better
so that was really the beginning at jpl
nasa jpl in pasadena and
my initial mentor was mark rayburt who
had recently gotten a phd at mit and he
went to jpl and he hired me
and i came into his little group and um
very first thing he did is showed me
this six axis
force sensor that vic shineman had
designed
and had a robot there they had a
shineman arm shineman had made like
three arms originally two were at
stanford one was at jpl
and mark said okay we've got to figure
out how to do something with this force
sensor in this arm
and that was the beginning of that and
we did a literature search and read
every
paper written about force control
at that time in the late 70s there were
only about a dozen papers as you recall
and they're written by people like bruce
shimano had written something
dr inoue from japan had written
something
and a few other folks not much stuff out
there
so mark and i worked for a year and that
led to this thing called the hybrid
position force control system
uh and we wrote a paper market i wrote
two papers on that
one in 79 and i think one in 81
and those papers were highly cited
and something i guess i'm proud of and
it was basically one of the
i think we were some of the early people
that were
doing things sort of in cartesian space
and formulating to control the robot in
cartesian space fundamentally instead of
in
the joint space of the mechanism and
that wasn't happening too much back then
um at the same time unbeknownst to me at
that time
this fellow osama khatib over in france
was doing something similar
in formulating the dynamics of the robot
in cartesian space and so later when i
met
dr khatib that's when we could marry
this all together and it became a
beautiful thing
doing force control and motion control
in cartesian space
so um but that was the start of it so
that one year with mark rayburt at jpl
was
was good my second year things got
shuffled a bit
at nasa and i had sort of a new mentor
who's this fellow named karl rouhoff
and he had worked at bendix
doing industrial robots um and of course
the industrial people
especially in the 70s were keeping
everything hush hush back then
rather than buy a robot from some robot
company
you sort of made your own robots so
bendix had their own robot group and
texas instruments i consulted for once
had
robots internally it was kind of a crazy
thing in retrospect that each
company would try and design and build
their own robots pretty soon that got
sorted out and there should be these
things called robot companies that make
the robots that they use
um but carl had done all this great
stuff at bendix but they weren't allowed
to publish
and no one ever knew about carl ruaff
but he was a great teacher i learned a
lot of stuff from him
particularly in programming languages
for robots and
all the geometry of how you set up
vision systems with robots they were
doing vision guided robotics and stuff
in bendix back in the 70s
and no one knew about it so basically
the jpl years were
one year with mark rayburt doing force
control and one year with carl rouhoff
doing programming languages and
i wrote this thing called jars which was
stood for jpl
autonomous robot system but it was a
programming language for robots
which was also popular back in the late
70s that was a legitimate thing to do as
research is to develop a new robot
language
which also at some point got to be goofy
um
there's a lot of ways they do it now um
but
back in the day we were developing new
languages every other week
so we did that and then um at some point
at
nasa most of the people i was working
with had phds
and my wife said john go get a phd
because you like this stuff
and i started looking around and it
turns out at stanford they actually had
more robots and more computers
than nasa did at that exact time
so i said i could just go keep doing the
same stuff with with better tools
at stanford and do it for n years and
i'd get a degree at the end too so
i went off to stanford actually
nearly went to mit nearly went to purdue
uh lou paul who's a well-known guy
was at purdue at that exact instant and
i was about to go out to purdue because
i
was so enamored with working with lou
paul
but just as the decision was coming he
called me and told me he's going to
leave purdue
so i decided not to go there just for
him and mit was attractive
and i was accepted there but i finally
settled on stanford
and my thesis advisor was tom binford
who's well known for doing computer
vision stuff and he was in the computer
science department i was always a
electrical engineering student but doing
my research in
cs department were you at ee and rpi as
well yeah
there was an ee at rpi and at stanford
and um so the robotics lab at stanford
was this
wonderful place at that time
it had just a few years earlier been off
campus and there are a lot of these
stories from the real old days at
stanford ai lab when it was off in the
woods near stanford you might have heard
some of those stories
um when i got there it just moved to
campus it was in the basement of the
computer science department
it's a bit more mainstream but there are
all these fascinating characters there
and that's where i uh
also met osama khatib he just came as a
postdoc at the same time i started at
stanford
and ken salisbury was there he was a few
years ahead of me so he was working on
his thesis
and i got involved one of the first
things i did there was work with ken
salisbury on the uh
his three-fingered hand that he had
built tendon controlled hand
and i helped ken write the software that
controlled the hand and we got the
fingers to
wheel for the first time and all that
stuff that was a lot of fun and ken was
a great guy to work
with and learn from he was a mechanical
engineer so i was
starting to learn through osmosis more
about mechanics
i was pretty much on the control side of
things generally
um and the other thing at stanford at
that time they had their
robot control language um and i they
were rewriting it from some old
um assembly language into i think pascal
or something
back then and i was rewriting the all
the control side of that
and that was code that originally bruce
shimano had written and lou paul had
worked on
and other people so i was pretty uh
involved in all of that
and then let's see what happens next
at stanford i um
i took the introductory robotics course
like everyone else did
and professor bernie roth was teaching
that
and he was a fun guy to learn from so i
got to know
bernie and i would just take that class
every year even though i'd already taken
it for credit
just sitting in i was also fascinated
with seeing how someone
teaches robotics how one puts that
material out so i've
had this sort of growing interest in
education and how you
how you write about this stuff and how
you teach it and how you make it
interesting
and and what it is as a subject
because it's made up of some mechanics
and some control theory and some
electronics and some computer science so
it was kind of a neat thing and i liked
the way bernie taught it so
i'd go listen and then there was this
sorry how did he
teach it was different well you know i
guess
bernie's a lively guy you know from new
york originally and
talks with his hands a lot and is just
some kind of crazy guy
and fun to listen to and i always
remember some other students in the
background would go oh this guy makes me
nervous because they were like laid-back
californians and they thought oh this
guy makes me nervous to watch him teach
but for me it was like
great it made it exciting you know so
just kind of more on the human side i
think that you felt
uh bernie's humanity and and you enjoyed
being in his presence i certainly always
did
and um so there was this fateful day
when i heard bernie was going to go on
sabbatical the following year that
like maybe 1983 or 84
and i said oh who's going to teach the
course when you're gone and he right
away said oh you could
and i went and i was kind of but i said
yeah
right away okay yeah i'll teach the
course and the course was kind of a big
deal there were like uh
80 students in the classroom and it was
televised at the silicon valley
companies there are like another 80
watching it out there so it's a pretty
big deal
and graduate of course stanford and i'd
never taught before
so i was sort of a little bit terrified
and
i had nine months before it started the
next year
so that's actually what led to me
writing this textbook in robotics
because i thought okay if i'm going to
teach this
if i hand out written notes at each
class i'll know the material cold
because i wrote the notes and it'll help
me get through this adventure
teaching this thing the only book at
that time was really a book by
lou paul and that that's the one bernie
had used
so i drew on that quite a bit when i
wrote my own book
um but that's what i did i wrote i wrote
a chapter it was a 10-week quarter at
stanford and i would
give a chapter out each week of the
class and so that became the 10 chapters
of the first edition book later
it went up to 13 in the second edition
but
so i taught the class and that got me
kind of into teaching and as i said i
was
fascinated with how one teaches the
stuff and i wasn't trying to do that
well
um and it was right i think now this is
83.84
robotics is pretty hyped up like i
recall at that time
there were several covers of time
magazine about robotics and you know
it's going to take over the factories to
make all of our cars cheaper
and it wouldn't be weird at stanford in
the robotics lab to see some
someone you'd recognize like a national
news person coming in to try and
interview people
and i got interviewed once by i think
john stossel or you know some of these
characters that we're cruising around
and so it was really hyped up and so um
i was just teaching this class
minding my business with the notes and
book publishers started showing up
saying
i would like to get your notes and make
a book so i was flattered and i
and i hadn't really thought of writing a
book prior to that by the end of that
quarter i had
13 offers to publish the book
i don't think they would fight over
robotics book these days like that but
this was the good old days there weren't
many books
and it was hyped up and um so i finally
signed up with uh
actually i called asian wesley and said
hey i've got 12 other offers and you
guys have not shown up because i talked
to some professors at stanford and they
they said oh addison wesley's the best
company to work with so i called them i
was getting cocky
and so as some wesley showed up and took
me to lunch and i signed with them and
they published the book
and uh that was a long and then it took
another couple years to turn the notes
into a
book so the book came out in 86 about
the same time i graduated stanford so
um the book was a big a big deal and a
lot of work
and then it did turn out well which is
good because i guess you could work just
as hard and have a flop um
the book in the late 80s and into the
mid 90s had something like 80
market share for people teaching
robotics um
and then everyone else started writing
books and there got to be a flood of
books and probably the market share is
down now i don't actually know what it
is now but it's still going it's in the
third edition
um so that was that was a good
experience writing the book
what was your book different from luke
hall's book
well hmm interesting
lots of little things that might be too
nitty to get into um
but i was definitely the thing that's
interesting about the book and it might
be wrong for some people is that you
know i was trying to teach this thing
in 10 weeks and you know so we do
all of dynamics in one week and we do
all of control theory in one or two
weeks
um and you know crazy stuff like that
now at stanford there's a three-quarter
sequence for dynamics if you really want
to learn dynamics you study it all year
and it's hardcore stuff
and i wanted a way to teach everything
in this
class even if you had no background in
mechanics when you started
so how do you teach mechanics in a week
and so i did it in a way that's just
totally tied into an amenable to a
serial chain of links
which the robot with most robots are um
and so if you kept in that little domain
there was a way you could formulate
dynamics and that you could make it
understandable within a week and it
built on the previous week which is
about
this thing called the jacobian matrix
it's all about velocity analysis of
robots
and that also was the way i did it was
all based on the serial chain
nature of the linkages and so if i
did just right i felt i could teach
veloci analysis one week dynamics the
next and people could follow that had
basically no background
so then the book mirrors that so that's
what i think i was proud of again my
interest in how you teach these things
and how you make it through and actually
bernie roth would always tease me
that he would say some sort of backhand
compliment like when you
take the class from john at the end you
you think you've learned something
because i had a way of sliding stuff in
and wrapping it up and getting these
things
across i think and then the next week
the students realize oh i don't know how
to do anything in
dynamics but you know um so
the book was that was what i was trying
to do with the book make it coverable in
10 weeks
and cover all these things and it was
also sort of a computational book
because back
at that time i was i was writing robot
software control
codes and working as a consultant in
those days you can get these high-paying
jobs in industry just because you could
do kinematics
which again these days you can't do that
so the book is also very mechanistic
like if you really wanted to sit down
and write your own robot control
language
uh you could do it by going through the
book i mean the book is not just
sort of theoretical like there's some
way to make this thing called jacobian
it shows you here's literally how you
write code to make a jacobian so
those are some of the things the book
hit on um
wherever most of your students from or
do you have a feeling for what
departments they
the students taking that class back then
um
i think it was something like 80
mechanical engineering
it was um listed as an mb class and then
sort of cross listed in other
departments
so and most of the book material is me
stuff and that's why it's kind of weird
because i was a double e
i was working in the cs department but i
wrote this book that's kind of
mechanical engineering
and around this time i also switched
advisors from
tom binford to bernie roth so the last
couple years i spent six years at
stanford actually the last
two or three i was with bernie as a
student and
so then i was sitting in the me
department so
that's what robotics is it's
interdisciplinary and sort of mixed up
and now along in there too uh one
summer i went and worked for
gm at the tech center in warren michigan
and uh the guy that hired me is named
steve holland
and another fellow there was bob tylov
was my direct boss
and they were in a way mentors not so
much on the technology side but uh you
know
sort of american industry and big auto
and what's going on with robotics there
and steve holland is still at gm and it
might be somewhat interesting to talk to
and so i was just there a summer and i
basically um
i think they were they were hoping to
hire me long term afterwards
which in the end didn't happen but so
they're very nice to me they sort of
bent over backwards i said look i'm and
that was just before i was going to
start teaching in the fall
and i said look i'm i'm really working
on notes for this course i'm going to
teach at stanford and they said you can
just work in those notes just come here
sit at gm but work on those notes that's
kind of what i did and i
wrote a paper along the way and uh paper
on adaptive control stuff
so that was one little experience at gm
and then back in stanford and so then i
was working on the thesis so
my thesis work at stanford was
on adaptive control with robots
and um there was a bit i had done at gm
but there was a different
bit that i mostly did at stanford um and
uh stuff i'm pretty proud of too
it's it's it's really you know to get a
thesis at stanford you have to do
something
kind of you know heavy and mathematical
at least that's what i thought at the
time and so that's what i did
so this was the most uh sort of advanced
mathematical stuff i did
so i started pushing myself um it's all
good stuff it was a control scheme where
the robot
was controlled utilizing a full dynamic
model
of dynamics of the robot and it would
learn the parameters that appeared
within that model
and that was different than there at
that point been 100 papers written on
adaptive control of robotics but what
was different is
a lot of the authors said oh the
dynamics of robotics it's too hard they
throw up their hands so
we can't possibly compute it we have to
just kind of adapt for it
but that would usually lead you down a
road where you get a low performance
control system we're trying to adapt and
keep up with every time the
arm change configuration is the
effective inertia each joint is changing
so they were just trying to keep up with
all that
the better approach that i was doing was
i had a structural model i said okay i'm
not afraid to compute the whole dynamic
model the arm i know that
the nature of the structure of that
model i just don't happen to know what
the mass of link two is
or what the friction in joint three is
um and so what i was identifying were
fixed numbers
as the arm move i wasn't trying to
update numbers changing with
configuration
and i think that gets you to a way
that's more performant
and also fits into some other control
ideas that were going on at the time
the model based reference control ideas
so that's what i did for my thesis and
addison wesley then
they were all thrilled because the book
did quite well
they wanted to publish my thesis so they
published my thesis as a book
called the adaptive control manipulators
and that
unlike the main book sold like 500
copies you know would only sell to
weird guys at universities whereas the
book sold a lot more to general students
so we did that and
to implement my adaptive control ideas
i asked brian carlisle at adept robotics
could i come over to your place and use
one of your robots and
do this so he said yeah so i went over
to adept and worked there
in evenings and broke one of his robots
once
he wasn't too happy but you know it's
research
science um so we did that over at adept
and then so i knew brian
for years had met him earlier at
conferences around stanford
um so he was a mentor in a way too and
then
he showed up later in my life again
after that so then let's see i guess
graduated from stanford and um
what happened right around graduation
time is the folks at berkeley invited me
to come up and give a talk so i went and
talked about my thesis
and um one of the fellows in the
audience is this guy named steven boyd
who's now faculty at stanford actually
he was just finishing his
phd at berkeley he's like a control
theory guy
and he sort of spotted an error in my
mathematics of my thesis
which was which he told me about during
the talk
so it's sort of frightening but he said
but everyone
knows the solution to this problem it's
been published in literature how you fix
this little flaw so we'll show you after
your talk so
they helped me fix that up that was kind
of neat so i got to be kind of buddies
with him and
some of the berkeley folks and a few
days after i gave that talk berkeley
called up and said hey we've got a
faculty slot for you here and so i was i
was sort of
flattered i really wasn't planning to go
into teaching i was planning to go into
industry
i had some buddies who wanted to start a
company in silicon valley
but i was so flattered that i said yes
to berkeley
and then there was about a six-month
period where i'm finishing my thesis at
stanford and telling berkeley i'm coming
um but as that went on my buddies in
industry kind of talked me into just
going with them we're gonna make a
million dollars with the startup
community in silicon valley so
uh sheepishly one day i called berkeley
and said you know i'm not gonna
i'm not gonna come after all and so that
was a hard decision because that would
have been a nice
path um so there's a fellow brooklyn
named ron fearing who's there now he was
from stanford also and
he basically got the slot that i left
open so i hope he appreciates that
he's there now with tenure and having a
great life
um and so then we did we started a
little company called silma
s-i-l-m-a and it was one of these it was
like the first company that made
3-d simulations of robots and factories
so you could program them offline in the
virtual world they didn't call the
virtual world back then but that's
what you'd call it now i guess so
simulate robots get them all working in
the computer and then press a button
code goes down to the real devices and
they do the same thing on the factory
floor so we
use cad models of cars and teach robots
how to spot weld
without tying up the factory so is the
next way to program robots because
back at that time and i still kind of
think it's true i used to say you know
the world doesn't need
a robot that's twice as fast or twice as
strong
it needs the robots twice as easy to
program because they were
robots were not living up to the promise
because to put in a robot to replace a
worker you'd have to hire
a higher cost programmer to get it to do
its thing and so it wasn't
working out economically um
so i think the action is in like sensors
and
software programming systems make them
easier to program and more tied into
cad and other factory automation stuff
so that's what we tried to do a little
company a little company went along
for 10 years and then got purchased by
adept
eventually so we became a division of
adept and that's when i sort of hooked
up again with brian carlisle
and he was a great proponent of sort of
pushing the technical side of robotics
in the industrial world because
industrial robot companies you know some
of them were pretty
stodgy they were coming from machine
tool building background
but brian was always forward thinking
and trying to get things like force
sensing into the real world and so forth
so um what was with you at selma
i'm sorry who was with you at silma
silma the
the main technical guy was a fellow
named chris goad
who was a phd um
i guess he was a phd from cornell he he
came to stanford knit a postdoc so i met
him at stanford as a
postdoc and uh he's the sort of computer
science genius guy i mean if people ask
me what
who have i worked with who i think is a
genius um he's the first guy that comes
to mind
and not too many others really um
because he was just
he was you know he invented this new
language that we used at silma
called sil which in retrospect
that idea to invent your language and
basic company on it but
it was basically um java before the guys
invented java
and it was kind of part of c plus plus
before c plus plus
you know he kind of he was one of these
guys that if he'd been at the right
place
he was a contemporary of the guys at
minnesota plus plus in java and he was
their equal or better and so
he made this thing called sil we just
used it in our little automation company
it was a lot of fun and i learned a ton
about computer science by working with
him so
um yeah and then that became part of
adept
and uh adept was bruce and brian uh
bruce shimano brian carlin
so worked with them for seven years and
then eventually left the depth
and this is almost up to real time now
and
just a few years ago and then bruce and
brian actually left adept as well and
they have a new company called precise
automation now
so i left a little bit before they did
but there were some things going on in
the depth that made us all leave
so
that's the quick synopsis what kind of
stuff did you do at adept
what kind of projects or well it was
always in the context
of trying to do this offline programming
system
within the virtual world and um
the thing was it's hard enough to
program a robot
and that's what we're trying to conquer
this problem and make it easier to
program a robot
it's hard enough to program robots and
when you've got it there and you can
understand the 3d geometry of how it's
got to reach around this thing to get
the spot weld in here
when you're trying to do on a flat
computer screen it's not necessarily
easier you know it's almost kind of
harder so we're trying to make this
somehow easy
but are we are we getting there so i was
focused on how to make this stuff
easier and um so in the end
at the silma division of adept i worked
on a product called rapid
because it was supposed to be so rapid
to install automation
so and there there was just a lot more
there were it was kind of object
oriented
and things in the little simulated world
knew how to do certain things you could
take conveyor belts and kind of snap
them together and parts would know how
to flow onto them
we could simulate vision systems and
parts knew how to tumble
because some part feeding things have
parts tumbling and they come up in
different so-called stable states and a
vision system looks at them and if
they're right way up the robot can pick
them up
and i should say this is when i worked
with ken goldberg who's now at berkeley
he came out he actually lived in a crazy
uh trailer parked on our property up in
the mountains
for a while as we were collaborating he
had an algorithm that would compute
stable states of parts and so we i put
that right into this
thing called rapid that i had built and
we could simulate that also
there's a lot of knowledge in the in the
parts and how conveyors could snap
together how parts feeders could produce
parts and all these things and then
in the virtual world you could kind of
snap these things together and press go
and all start running
so it's very easy as compared to some
sort of tedious
programming you might do and then the
thing that people found out about
programming robots in factories is
there's probably like 10 percent of the
code has to do with robots moving and
picking what you think of as robotics
and 90 percent
gets to be controlling all the
peripheral equipment and recovery loops
if an error happens how do you back up
and when do you signal the human to come
fix it and
when you schedule the parts to get
re-loaded and all this sort of ancillary
stuff
so if you're just focused on traditional
robotics and motion programming
you're missing where all the difficulty
is so we were trying to address all that
and that's what i mostly did at adept
after they bought selma
with ken what kind of stuff were you
working on at jpl and how did you wind
up at jpl
um well jpl i uh that's when i was
just first looking for a job in robotics
and i interviewed at places i remember a
famous story interviewed at procter and
gamble in cincinnati
they were getting robots to work in the
factory line and
they were actually automating their line
that made tampons
and there was a problem with the string
not being the right length or something
and they wanted a vision system and
robots and i just thought
do i want to devote my life to working
on tampon production
and at the same time i got this offer
from jpl which is like research nasa
robots in space okay i'm going there so
i went out there and and the first big
project was the
hybrid position force control and
someplace there
is a video i think osama will have it um
of a a robot sort of shakily dragging a
pin across the surface and
putting a pin into the hole that was the
big thing back then is
robots were good in free space like
spray painting cars but
if they had to touch things and impart
forces on things they would just
break stuff so we wanted to for a robot
to put a pin in a hole or put a
bolt on a nut you had to feel forces and
not let them jam up
so the big famous experiment was i got
this robot to put a pin in the hole
and uh we had one hole with a big
chamfer so it was easy
one with no chamfer so it was harder
everyone could do that
and there's a video of that somewhere
and that's from like 1978.
what kind of robots were you using that
was a shine
uh i think at that time there were just
three there were two at stanford called
the blue arm and the yellow one
and then there was one at jpl which was
a longer one it was kind of special
and it was built on the front of a rover
this was the group of jpl which
is the great ancestor of the group today
that sent the rovers to mars
back then it was like a car sized rover
with this shiny arm on the front of it
it could reach down and pick up rocks
and
stereo cameras and vision stuff
so most of the group was doing like
rover stuff
and um and vision and there's just me
and mark horton on the arm
mark who else was in the in the group
um well there were these vision
guys um bob cunningham and ray eskenazi
you know where they are these days
those are the guys i remember well
tony baxi who's a well-known guy was at
jpl at the same time
there was a second there were two groups
at jpl there was the autonomous robot
group which i was in
and then there was like the tele
operator group and
tony bakery headed that group um and he
had done some
great work and dynamics and things that
we all knew and he was one attraction
for me to go jpl because i'd already
heard of him
he had a group each group was about 12
people i think
and there are sort of sister groups
there
and let's see now what else
well i was going to say going way back
to rpi
um i did undergraduate and then i did a
fifth year graduate
things your master's after five years
there was a project way back then
funded by jpl nasa at rpi for a mars
rover
and at rpi there might still be some
lore around about the mars rover project
because it was kind of well known back
then
1976 77 that era
and it was this kind of four-wheeled
vehicle we'd take it out and drive
around the campus of rpi
it was amazing because it was kind of
before there were like
pcs and microcomputers so it was all
reddit boarded you know
hard-wired chips to make our own
computer effectively
and had this laser and rotating
eight-sided mirror and collecting data
and looking out for obstacles
so it's an early example of something
trying to pick its way through a boulder
field
and i worked on that a little bit when i
was a junior
and then when i was in my fifth year i
was in charge of like the electronic
side of that thing
and there was a professor named steve
yarizunus who headed that
and he was a good sort of money raiser
and eurozone has got funding out of
nasa jpl for this rover
and that's how i eventually knew of jpl
and got an interview with jpl because
i'd worked on the rover they were
funding
at rpi and
that rover is featured in one episode of
this tv show called cosmos that carl
sagan did
and this was a cool thing when we were
you know master students at rpi two of
us got to go out to death valley
with the machine because we had to run
remotely from off camera
and keep it going and carl sagan was
there
and he filmed this episode where it
looked like he's on mars and this mars
rover drives around and that's the rail
where i worked on at rpi
and i met carl at the salad bar in the
hotel
and he started talking about how it's
interesting that biological systems
never evolved wheels
it's hard to get blood vessels and
things through a continually revolute
joint
so maybe rovers shouldn't have wheels
they should have legs
and uh so that was cool got to meet carl
and then mark rayburt at jpl
who was who hired me essentially and i
worked with on force control
i mentioned in my second year at jpl i
kind of worked with karl ruff on
programming languages
rayburt got interested in hopping
machines and started working on hopping
machines and i remember going over his
house one day for a picnic
and he has a pogo stick and he's like
hopping around his backyard
and he says oh it's just something i'm
working on he like wouldn't tell me in
the very beginning what was going on and
i thought he was just acting nutty but
then he got into doing like locomotion
and hopping and
was a cmu for a long time the leg
locomotion lab was his at cmu
and i think he then started a company
called boston dynamics
he's at mit now part-time not quite sure
so um yeah that's
another piece of the story there
so what did you do after
well after adept
um i worked for
well
as adept winded up i worked for a small
company called invenios
in santa barbara and it's kind of a
robot company they make
little tiny very high precision they'll
make a little stage that just moves in x
and y
and its total range of motion is like
two millimeters but it can do it to like
30 nanometers or something some crazy
precision
and i worked specifically on encoder
technology
to measure where this thing was and
i actually designed an encoder which is
pretty cool
um it uses a lot of old-fashioned
encoders our sort of resistor ladder
networks are just sort of
fixed our encoder was had a dsp in it so
it was programmable
and we could do all kinds of fancy
compensation and it could learn and
improve its performance over time and
sort of adaptive control was always my
thing since
the thesis so we made these high
precision encoders that
put out a million counts per evolution
and could tune themselves up as they ran
and uh so we did that sort of for little
robo-like things stages actually that
encoder got sold off to a company that
built a
two-degree of freedom camera positioning
systems for security systems actually
outdoors and parking lots to look around
for
criminals or whatever so it was kind of
robotics but it was more encoders
coder technology they used that for chip
manufacturing or what what kind of
things you need for the
nano technology yeah a lot of um the
other
all these little fine automation stages
that they built um
another part of that company's business
was they had
it's called photostructurable glass so
it's a special glass that's been doped
with chemicals
and if you shoot a uv laser at it where
the uv hits it it changes the glass into
kind of a ceramic
and you can then very precisely draw
patterns and you can make things like
like
the optical disk portion of an encoder
so we would build the glass
disk part of the encoder with our own
technology and then marry it with the
firmware that i wrote the dsp and
make this incredible encoder
but they got into making uh all kinds of
things out of glass
at a very small scale so they would call
themselves a
nano technology company although it
wasn't quite nano was more like
micro but um further where the glass was
hit
and turned into a ceramic if you then
etch this glass in hydrofluoric acid
it eats away the ceramic part and leaves
the glass so you could actually make
things with little tiny channels in them
and there's a way that you make through
holes and
different things so we could make some
little microfluidic devices
and so when they sequence the human
genome uh
at least one of the ways they do that
they have a little glass plate with all
sorts of things and little channels
running around
and our company made that plate so that
was our big sort of claim to fame and
made a lot of money from that so the
encoder technology and everything was
sort of
in support of putting a piece of glass
on a positioner
with a laser pointing at it and then
moving this around under the laser to
draw these patterns so actually at that
company i wrote a whole
robot programming language once again
which was to
control the laser and the robots and to
do all this stuff and make it easy to
program nice interpreted language
see what was that called it's called irs
the neos robot system
and we had vision systems cameras
looking through microscopes to check if
things were in the right place and
quite elaborate running several axes
they also that company built a six
degree of freedom robot with
very tiny actuators and a parallel
mechanism with three legs coming up
and it could manipulate things over a
workspace of just a couple millimeters
maybe plus or minus four millimeters
and plus or minus 30 degrees but they
did very
fine positioning of optical fibers that
had to be aligned with a
led or something and then bonded and
that was a so a six degree of freedom
robot was
also supported in my robot programming
language along with all the stages
so i worked at that company for about um
i think six years
and then just a year and a half ago left
them
and now i work primarily on uh
software for radiographs of
animals so if you get your cat dog or
horse
uh x-rayed by a veterinarian it's
possible using my software
so i'm now doing image processing stuff
to present the best looking image and
markup measurement tools calibration
things so it's a kind of kind of
different field now
veterinary radiology and then i help my
wife with her company which is plastic
horseshoe company so it's
polyurethane horseshoes better for the
horse than the old steel shoes
and so we have these two little
companies going so i'm sort of an
entrepreneur and still writing software
these days so yeah
high school robotics um uh
was probably not considered cool it was
you know i was i was the kid with the
robot
ever since i see actually what happens
we
it's okay thank god for editing
the there were two science fair projects
we had to do that year
uh had to do one like the first half the
year and one at the end of the year
and as soon as the teacher announced
that at the beginning of the year i said
i'm gonna make a robot this is my chance
to make a robot like my older brother
had
but i knew that i was gonna take like
all year to do that so i said okay i
need some
something for that first project so i
made this lamoid thing
which i got an a on because the teacher
didn't know that i wasn't budding the
box genius
and so he gave me any of that and then
at the end of the year i bring in this
robot that had
you know four degree freedom arm could
walk could follow a light beam
uh could talk a little bit do some
various things then it was it like blew
the teacher away and blew everyone away
and then i was the kid with the robot
but it wasn't necessarily a good thing
to be the kid with a robot but
it turned out well in the end it worked
out yeah
well up until then actually i you know
as a in high school i thought well maybe
i'm going to be
a playwright i wanted to write things or
maybe i'll be a psychiatrist and all
kind of crazy
ideas but the robot thing i stuck with a
whole year every day go down the
basement working the robot
so i decided okay this stuff i'm kind of
jazzed by it so maybe it makes sense to
do this for a career
what were some of the important
conferences that you went to
and how they changed kind of through
your time
conferences uh well let's see
the the the big one was the ieee
robotics and automation conference and
that was kind of the thing each year
you wanted to go to want to try and get
a paper ready for
so that was certainly i went to that
many years in a row
because i worked kind of on the control
side there was a conference called the
acc american control conference
and the paper ken salisbury and i wrote
about the hand actually won the best
paper of the war
of the conference award that so that was
memorable
and then there was let's see there was
this international journal of robotics
research
started up and they had a by invitation
only
sort of symposium thing they did each
year and so
when i first got invited to that that
was good like i made the inner circle
and that was actually held i think right
around here in monterey once
so um those are the ones i remember ieee
acc
international symposium robotics
research
and how would you define a robot and has
do you think that
you know the notion of what a robot is
has changed at all through time
well what i i guess my standard answer
to that
and this is back in the day i wrote the
book so
maybe it's changed now a little bit but
um
[Music]
it's always been a great thing it's
always been some sort of
programmable machine right so it's
basically it's a programmable machine
but i think when you cross the line
between it being
hard automation and being a robot just
has to do with how sophisticated that
programming is and certainly if the
thing has a sensor on it and can do
something based on the sensor then that
probably crosses a line and it's a robot
but it needn't have a sensor i think to
be called a robot if it's programmable
and it's a machine that moves around a
bit then
i'd say it's a robot but there's this
fine line because
back in the day there were all sorts of
fixed automation being driven by plc's
and i wouldn't call those robots they're
just too
sort of hard-coded too simple in what
the in the software aspect of it
so that's my vague answer and what about
where do you where you see robotics
going
in the future what do you think are
going to be some of the important
challenges or
well i still think
and this has held for about 20 years now
or so
that the name of the game is
trying to integrate sensors fully and
integrate them in a way that
and make robots easier to use you have
to you have to program to tell the
machine what to do
and to for it to do its job and probably
to do it in a way that's not too tedious
as far as how we have to explain what it
should do it needs to use sensors and
make some local decisions on its own
so i think the name of the game as i
mentioned before
robots don't have to be twice as fast or
twice as strong they have to be
two times easier to program and get them
doing useful work
and i think maybe the linchpin to that
is the successful integration of sensors
and using that so
i'm really fascinated by some of the
work on manipulation
the guys that really like matt mason was
one of the original guys doing a lot of
this thinking
how you how robots feel things how they
can
push slide and just manipulating the
3d physical world and how they get good
at that
and then early on i thought well our
only hope is to make some sort of
adaptive or learning component to it
because it's going to be too hard for us
to
teach them everything about how to be a
being in this world they have to learn
it on their own kind of thing
so that's i think that area is still
ripe for progress and it's still the
right thing to be working on the sensors
ways to program them ways they can learn
it on their own
all aimed at making them easy to use
that'll bring in the cost of using them
and then
they'll do more things for us what about
in terms of
i mean you seem to have worked mostly on
industrial
kinds of robots um so now there's a lot
of discussion of having robots in more
uh even more unpredictable spaces like
you know the real the outside world
outside of labs outside of factories
kind of
with regular people in regular spaces
um does that have a different challenges
yeah i think that's that's crazy hard
i mean getting robots out of factories
and things is
really challenging so it's you know it's
fun to see people trying to get that to
happen
um my point of view it's still so hard
to make it happen properly in factories
when you've got a controlled environment
that
wow to try and take them out and put in
an old person's home to help them or
something like that is a big challenge
so um yeah i think that's the way it has
to go
but it's one more it's harder than what
we used to do back in the day
um nice structured environment factory
life's easy life's good all right and
george becky today was even talking
about military robots which
you know are a whole different ball game
but
yeah mark rayburt got military funding
for his hopping robots because
wheeled robots can't like run through
jungles necessarily so they wanted to
build hopping roads and hop over down
trees and all this sort of stuff
just go with crazy unpredictable things
but those robots
needed to be mobile and hop around and
get through strange places but all they
did in the end was probably surveillance
which you can imagine that that could
work um try and have robots do that
stuff plus be dexterous and be able to
interact with things and
do physical tasks that's really getting
tough
any other questions
is there anything that uh you'd like
um well i think let's see
i think we kind of covered it i went
through my whole
life there if we get on everything
okay