uh just start by telling us where you
were born and where you grew up and went
to school
well i was born in a small city in
northern bavaria
which went off and went to
school then in another small city
northern bavaria hamburg
and finally studied then at the
technical
university of munich electronics
got my diploma degree in
1964. i was born in
no way excuse me in 1969
i was born in 1945.
and after 1969 did you go on to graduate
school
no i joined then dlr
i first started in an institute where i
was supposed to work on interferometer
technologies high frequency technologies
where after half a year i found out that
control theory would be even more
interesting
that's an area which which came up in
germany
more strongly around that time and then
i
i saw there's a vacant position in the
institute here which at that time was an
institute for
control technologies and cybernetics
and i got this position first as a
research person and i did my
started my phd then on digital control
which was a very new field at that time
because
what we called process computers were
just
rising at that time with digital
equipment's
pdb 11 and these type of machines
and yeah in
74 yeah i think i've finished my
phd officially
submitted at the technical university of
munich again where i had studied already
and in 1976
i became then a leader
of the automation group here in the
institute
because i was the only one who really
had really had experience at that time
with
with digital control with the first
computers
i was working on satellite attitude
control we had an air bearing
table where i could simulate the
reaction wheel technology and thrusters
for satellites and so on and
the other part of my phd was optimal
digital control of instable
airplanes control configured
vehicles ccvs as they were called
so these were the two fields which even
today are main fields of dlr
aerospace and aeronautics and what were
the challenges for
digital control of these kind of
aeronautical systems
well my challenges were
optimal control technologies what is the
best to
control these type of systems especially
time optimal control i focus on time
optimal control
with the restrictions of actuator limits
and so on
and another topic i was very much
interested was the the choice of an
optim
optimal sampling period because of
course
if you have enough computational power
you just
sample faster and faster until you are
near to a
fully analogous system which in a sense
is the best one
because you permanently
observe the system a digital controller
gets data only every
millisecond 10 milliseconds 20
milliseconds
and my question was if i know the
dynamics of the system
of the plant the control plant what is
an optimal sampling period
that you're just fast enough that you
can say
it doesn't make sense to become faster
and waste computational time
i cannot really improve the behavior but
if i
get slower with my sampling period i
may maybe worse in my performance to
find out these these kind of limits
so i think that's some practical
relevance
and the first applications were
satellites um
would you call those robotic systems or
what would you consider the first
robotics no they were not
really robotic systems at that time it
was just
a good field for for early digital
control investigations
um but then in i was it was around
76 77 um
that in the institute um we
had a kind of a brainstorming looking
around
what might be interesting applications
for
digitally controlled mechanical systems
in the future
that could be divert maybe not
focused only on aerospace and
astronautics
but what would be other interesting
fields and then
we found out that manipulator technology
we thought about underwater manipulators
for a while we thought about also
prosthetic prosthetic systems
and indeed then we try to start with
manipulators for
for underwater technologies for short
period
and then um yeah there was a special
event one of the
department leaders of bmw visited us
and his name was wolfgang wrightsley
and he talked with us about robotics
bmw at that time had only a few robots
these were abb robots abb is still today
one of the big robot manufacturers
internationally and
i explained him that our big interest in
while entering into this field of
robotics was
the topic of the institute that is
feedback control
i told him that we think that robots in
the future
should be very much sensor controlled
central feedback and i especially talked
about force control
and vision feedback and i told him that
in my opinion
we would be optimally prepared to
provide robots with these
capabilities and then i was convinced
that
it would have a chance to work there
intensively
in between five and ten years every
robot might come out of the factory
whether with force sending and with
vision capabilities
today i know that this was by far too
optimistic
even today most of the robots come out
of the factory
and go into the automotive factories
without censoring
perception and sensory behavior so
that has influenced me quite a lot that
i have become very cautious with
predictions for the future
because i'm a little bit ashamed that
that we could not do more in order to
push these things
forward on an abroad scale of course
there are improvements and
and uh i think in the late 70s when
78 or so we started to intensify
develop force sensors
but the reason indeed was that this uh
group our department leader of bmw
when he left our talk he said hey listen
i give you an abb robert as a gift
what you told me sounds very interesting
and
we think this might be a way for the
future we have only a few robots so far
but i will give you one as a gift and
then we were very happy because an abb
robert
you wouldn't have been able to afford
buying
such a robot and then we immediately
started
to first of all develop a
cartesian transformation because this
robot had
only four bit uh microcontrollers the
first four bit microcontrollers
had no uh floating point and and
nothing and and had no cartesian
transformation so you could control it
only by
by commanding the joints
separately and so we started to enter in
the coordinate transformation
we provided the robot then with
coordinate transformation which is
computationally difficult
using hexadecimal code very primitive
technologies and
yeah finally we had it and then we
immediately started
to uh yeah to enter into this field of
sensory feedback and behavior we
developed
a forced torque sensor i think the first
four stock sensor in europe at least he
wanted to commercialize it
already in the early 80s
was not a big success it was too
expensive at that time
but we were happy that uh first of
all we had a dedicated electronic box
but still the problem was that
when the sensor was mounted at the robot
wrist we had
to transfer the signals
via wires until to the electronic box
where we had then already an 8-bit
processor
and we could do all the computations
there but the thickness was so low
we had a lot of disturbances and it was
only later i think it was
already at the end of the 80s
that we developed then the first fastfox
sensors
which had all the electronics integrated
so there were no long wires and cables
to transfer small signals
and this work at the end of the 80s
was then already related a little bit
uh towards our next big goal
namely the first experiment in in space
robotics
because we are in dlr the german
aerospace research establishment
and it was not in the early days but
in the 80s then clear that we should
care
about the idea of sending robots into
space
instead of astronauts but
i from looking back today i must say
that
the 80s i would say between
1980 and 1987
where we had not so much as space
technology in mind
that in this period we did a lot of
interesting things
which made us well known then in the
community
one of the of the guys very well known
at that time
discovered us mike brady
i think it was around 1985
at the idripply conference in san luis
when he
when we gave a paper there on our ideas
of
working with robots guiding the robot
around
by by a force sensors and all the force
feedback schemes
and then we had developed a main machine
interface the control ball
that we could uh command the robot
intuitively by our forces
and if the robot had a first sensor in
addition in the sand
then we could exert forces in a
dedicated way onto the environment
so everything was directed towards
intuitive
interaction with robotics and
i think it was already in 1982
that then yeah
we really were then in a situation
where we could buy a second abv robot
the first one was a gift of bmw
we bought the second one we provided
both of these robots with forced torque
sensors six degree freedom for stock
sensors
we control these two robots in a
cooperative way so they jointly grasp an
object
and we controlled the motion of the
center point of this object
by a control ball from some distance
so cooperative robots with human
interaction and all these kind of things
we took robots uh by their gripper and
and pushed it against uh some
contour uh which they had to follow and
guided them around and
so all this smooth kind of thing
interaction learning by showing
that was done in the in the early 80s
and i think that's
this made us then well known
around 1985
where i was also invited to one of the
first international symposiums on
robotic research in governor in france
because this international federation of
robotic research was
a small group which really cared for the
most advanced robotic technologies
i think they were founded in 83
in britain woods in us
with richard paul and and and
all the big names and robotics mike
brady
so that was a very fruitful
period also we were a small group
and then as i indicated around 87
um we thought there might be a chance
that we go into space and we are
as kind of a space institute so this
might be important for the future
and indeed we were asked would you be
ready to send something
with a shuttle mission
a mission which was strongly connected
to developments in europe and germany
the so-called space lab d2 mission was
supposed to fly with shuttle colombia
and the space
people agency people told us they're
by some special problem uh we have a
free reich
would you be able to use this wreck if
you are if you are a fast
and i think there were only two uh years
of
time and i said well if we have the
chance we will try to send something up
a small robot
with force control with sensory feedback
and try to do
remote control from ground again
i have completely underestimated the
difficulties
of sending something in space is very
difficult
and we had interesting discussions with
nasa
because we said
we are fans of the mechatronic concept
what he would like to do is develop a
multi-sensory robot gripper
in such a rack and space lab in
the cargo bay of the shuttle and
mechatronic for us means the highest
integration of electronics mechanics and
computer science
so we have now microcontrollers we want
to build a gripper it should be a two
finger gripper
but we want to have a stiff force sensor
with all the electronics integrated the
compliant force sensor
um based on optical technologies nine
laser range finders
tactile feedback we want to have cameras
and so on
and and uh we had
serious discussions with nasa because
nasa said that's not the standard we
have in space
uh you should take out the electronics
put it into a box
next to the mechanics this is a
kind of yeah standard in space
technology
and then we said that would frustrate us
quite a bit uh
in case we would be forced to do that
maybe we dropped the whole experiment
and then we were very happy that nasa
finally said okay now we are interested
in your experiment
okay we give you an exception
permission what you have to do then is
to build a second script of this type
first of all you have to prove that it
works under
a serious condition because we and under
space conditions it's not the outer
space
inside the shuttle so it's a little bit
looser but we have
vibrations and launch and so
and because we had another problematic
story we said
we do not want to use the
the very expensive
space proven components you want to take
electronic components in us you would
say from radio shack we have
small electronic shops here we want to
test them we want to
vibrate some radiation and so on
but we want to make it with low cost
parts
and then finally nasa said okay try it
you have to prove that nothing can
happen nothing serious can happen with
astronauts
no you have to prove all of that
and you have to build a second gripper
and uh
we do it in a storage bay so that if
something does not work the astronauts
can take it out and
and mount uh the spare system
we agreed on all that and
and then there was another uh of course
um
a bad very bad story um
on the other side it gave us more time
to to develop things
time would have been to show from from
what i see today we would have not
managed to
to bring this system up successfully in
space but then there came the
challenger disaster and of course all we
were all were shocked but for our
mission the space lab d2 mission this
meant
that their launch was delayed
even a few years we had a longer time
the final launch then was only in 93
and so we had a longer time to prepare
to prepare this
experiment but we put a lot of new
technological things
into the experiment the remote control
the online remote control from ground
despite of six to seven seconds delay
these long delays were caused by the
fact that we had to go
via the antennas here up to a
geostationary
tdrs satellite down in goddard space
flight center
up again to geostationary satellite
down in white sands new mexico then
wire land communication to houston
there were approximately 12 computers in
the loop
nasa told us no one before has tried to
close such a control loop by the shuttle
and so the infrastructure is not really
available
and it was clear that the delays would
cheater
and indeed they were jittering between
five and seven seconds
but there were so many uncertainties and
indeed uh
imagine that we could not test this loop
uh as long as the shuttle was on ground
even not on them on the launch site
only when the shuttle was in orbit for
the first time we were able to test this
whole loop
so there were many many uncertainties
and risk in this
experiment but the operational modes of
the experiment were
thus that in our idea we would wanted to
prepare
all the control modes which we could
foresee for the next 20 or 30 years
and i think the results
yeah the they proved that we were right
we tested the online control tele
operation from ground
we tested the wealthy automatic
execution of tasks
uh it was clear that we would do that we
did
reprogramming from ground
and send up then the execution of the
task
command wherever the shuttle was and we
did
a teleoperation by the astronauts
locally the astronauts had a small
stereo tv shutter glasses they could not
look into the cabinet of the
robot while they were working with the
robot and they could control it with the
control ball
and also from ground we could control
the robot with a control ball
but of course with six seconds delay
there is not a real
useful feedback via the eyes while the
video
camera images so we had to prepare
predictive computer simulation with
predictive simulation
as long as the robot is in free motion
you can
indeed compensate the delays but of
course
you cannot compensate these delays when
the robot is in contact with the
environment
but for these scenarios for this
situation we prepared
all the technologies which we call
shared autonomy
shared control so for example when
disconnecting or disassembling a bayonet
closure
and remounting it on another place
we send up cross commands and
but the robot did not just execute these
cross commands
but use the local sensory feedback
the forces and so on to
modify these trust commands and we call
this shared autonomy not
the the operator has not the full
autonomy and also path planner would not
have the full autonomy
but the local sensory feedback refines
this cross commands
and then for example when the the
command from ground came
up turn the bionic closure the robot
felt
right center feedback uh if i just
turning
i'm jamming so what i have to do is a
screwing operation apparently
and so these gross commands of chest
turning
were refined automatically in a screw-in
command
and the robot really took out this panel
exclusion
so i think all these new
ideas and operational modes really
worked well
and of course the the biggest event then
was
the the fully autonomous grasping of
a free-floating object in this case
we could not bring a video system on
board
technology was not mature at that time
we took this as a challenge
and said okay then let's send the video
images down here
we had a stereo camera and let the
computers on ground
estimate the motion predict the motion
six seconds ahead
then we had the predictive graphics
deploy display
and we could decide do we want to grasp
the robot by this predictive graphic
display
manually by the operator or should
by by just pressing a a special key
should we
let the system try to automatically
grasp the floating object
and when the situation came uh it was
very dramatic
because the robot first took out this
floating object of a fixture gave it a
kick
and then it flew around in the small
cabinet and unfortunately it flew behind
the robot
and i thought it will never come back
because the time slots we had were only
20 minutes
and then after the 20 minutes other
people needed the video
line and so on so only 20 minutes and i
think
uh we waited a quarter of an hour and
and this small particle did not
come it was not visible again and in the
last minutes only
it drifted again into the
reach area of the arm and i knew we
would only have one chance i think it
was
one minute before the the line was
closed the video line
it came in the proximity of the of the
gripper
and then we were very nervous because it
was three o'clock or four o'clock in the
morning everyone was very tired
and then we said let the system do it
alone maybe
it fails but if it does not fail it
would be a big event
and indeed the computers really
estimated the
motion perfectly decided to graphs
predict six seconds ahead send up the
command and it graphed
successfully you cannot imagine what
kind of hello there was in the control
room
in that second i knew this was
pioneering work no one
wanted to believe that the astronauts
did not believe it
no one wanted to believe that and and i
must admit we had
a lot of good luck i even myself did not
believe that this would work
i've been talking too long now
um so who are some of the people that
worked on that project
some of the people collaborators
well here in the institute
i think the most important person in my
suit over all the years
in this area of space
robot technology and projects has been
mr land
settle who is
for us he is mr space robotics
because he kept all the connections to
the industry
and those all the regularities all the
um
i would recall that the regulations and
the
the formalities and uh but it's also an
excellent information
mission technology engineering he
keeps the group together and um from
outside at that time
people from austria
mr settlemeyer who is now in the
in a leading position at australian
friedrichsharpen
was very important
professor tikmans helped in the
in the vision part
this dynamic vision was
technology we used here
yeah and
this these were important uh
contributors other industries like
astreon bremen they helped
so this was was quite
quite interesting cooperation but made
me say it a little bit
at that time was that i had uh
i still have a good friend who was
one of the pioneers in tele robotics
tony baichie from jet propulsion
laboratory
and he had applied uh to nasa
uh for joining us uh with his
first reflecting hand controller so in
addition to our control ball
which the astronauts used on in the
space shuttle to control the robot
he wanted to bring his first reflecting
hand controller so that they could
compare our control ball
is a force transducer and the first
commander too not only velocity
commander
but does not reflect the forces tony
beijing wanted to experiment
what is the behavior of astronauts if
they have forced reflection
in space and zero gravity finally this
proposal was not grounded and even today
this
this makes me really a little bit sad
by the way there was another event which
gave us some delay uh not so much delay
as the challenger disaster did
but when the the launch
was coming tony beige by the way came
over here from jbl to watch it
in our laboratory and to to watch all
the robotic experiments
and that was one of the of the i would
say very well known or famous
launches of shuttle because i i think uh
one second
before launch there was already vapor
coming out of the
of the rocket the launch was stopped
was interrupted i think it was one
second before
and everyone was so disappointed i think
it was the only one who
who thought this is good luck we have
now another few weeks
in order to do additional software and
especially for the grasping of the
floating object we improved the software
considerably in this time
i think this was really this was really
the key
point that we had finally a success
that we had another few weeks not a
number of things
because it's so difficult to simulate on
ground
in reality a free floating object we had
no way to simulate this really
we had a linear actuator that we could
move such a small particle on a small
stick and and but not not really drift
let it drift we could move it a little
bit rotationally and
linearly but it was not drifting in
space
so it was so difficult to test the
division algorithms
but yeah this is life had a few weeks of
extra
time were there any other projects that
you collaborated with jpl
not really official collaboration not
really
we always kept close
contacts even today um
we have uh contacts to uh now the
planetary exploration people
brian wilcox
was very much very much involved in the
development of the athlete
stepping moon system
or planetary system with wheels on the
legs
richard dick and
all these very experienced people with
jbl
but tony paichi for me was
the together with tom sheridan
the pioneer in teleoperation and
forced reflecting tele operation and all
these concepts
blake hannaford carried this very gone
and later on
in seattle i think and um there are
others who were influenced by this work
but
yeah tony beijing really he had some
success i think he could bring some
force sensor onto the shuttle
manipulator and test it there
but concerning the force reflection from
space
he could not manage to bring something
up and as i said this makes me
a little bit sad we our next
experiments will be uh bringing a force
reflecting joystick up to the space
station
and together with isa the colleagues
from the european space agency
try to control a system on ground
from space but with the capabilities of
fossil fraction what were the
big challenges to the early
we did many
constructions with many constructions
designs
they were
kinematic or
structural designs how should such a
first sensor looked like
uh with some bars and and uh
strain gauge technologies there were
early designs in u.s i
i think victor scheinmann maybe was
the first one or one of the first to
develop such a force sensor
i think even until now things have not
changed
too much we hadn't make many trials
how can we maybe decouple the forces and
torques
so that the sensor is naturally
decoupled by the arrangement of those
the bars and strokes and and so on and
stokes
and but it's not quite easy and one of
the
problems with the force sensors always
has been they have a reasonable range
in terms of forces but
the range is too small in terms of
torques
because you have a certain distance a
load with a certain distance and
uh which is typically for a tool of a
robot
and then uh typically you get fairly
high torques con
compared to the forces so this
this is a major problem but uh of course
a lot of progress has been made as i
mentioned already
uh the electronics has been brought into
the mechanics in a
mechatronic way so there are no
big disturbances the signals are
digitized very quickly and
and the signals are much cleaner than we
had them in the early days
and there are two american companies
who are fabricating the sensors
we have some uh business success i think
it's still not a
big number so it's still not the
situation that all the robots come out
of the factory
with force sensing but i think there is
progress is going on where did you come
to the idea for the light robotics
that came and that started
with these rotax experiments that was
the first
remotely controlled space robot which i
discussed about
in the cabinet of the spacelab d2
mission
because we thought about
in such a project as i said
the time scale was was very difficult uh
when we got the offer to send something
up
uh uh it was clear that we would not
have much time so the question for us
was
what can we do by ourselves and what
do we have to leave to others to
partners industrial partners
and then we decided that we wanted to to
make the
multicentury [ __ ] by ourselves
completely
and we decided to develop the
whole teleprogramming tele operation
ground control or the autonomy and
shared autonomy concepts by ourselves
the only thing we really gave to the
industry
was the construction of a small arm
and that impressed us
there's not a big
accusement of of industry but they did
their best but
um we were surprised that the arm was
small
i don't remember exactly less less than
one meter
and uh yet it weighed around 40 kilos
the problem was that the company
tried to use fairly weak motors in order
to
save weight because in zero gravity
you don't have to compensate the the
gravity on earth
so the motors were fairly weak and with
the result however
that the arm which weighed around 40
kilo
still weight 40 kilo could not sustain
itself on ground
so it had to be suspended by springs
and that made it very difficult to do a
ground training
because the reachability and and
maneuverability was very small
and so i think um it was around 87 that
we
said to ourselves this cannot be
the story for the future we have to
build a lightweight arm
which should be the same on ground and
in space
and yet on ground should be capable of
carrying its own weight
not breaking down we should not use
strings
to suspend it so it should be very
strong
and we should have the possibility to
simulate
the zero gravity behavior
that it was clear that we should be able
to exert
torques in the joints which should just
compensate the gravity so that if
we push it it should fly away as in as
in
space so this
were the first ideas for developing a
torque controlled
lightweight robot and
that was the one motivation the other
one was
that in these early days
in 1985 when i was invited
to the international symposium robotic
research
i had the the first close contacts to
osama khadib
and i was very impressed by his ideas
um which
more or less were in the direction
that robotics of the future
should not be so much focused on just
prescribing
a position in cartesian space and
then translate it into the joint space
and
and just induce a motion of the robot
but i felt that his
approach was so fascinating
because um he he tried to go back to the
roots
and asking what what is the basis of
emotion
and the basis of of any motion in space
is the acceleration
by integrating acceleration you get
velocity and by
integrating velocity you get the
position so by
by setting um the roots into
acceleration you you have everything
your bricks
prescribe an acceleration in space
and by prescribing this acceleration
then you need the mass matrix of the arm
like newton's law and then we you get
the force and torque vector at the
gripper which you need if the robot
would be
an absolute loose system which you can
move around
and then you get the forces trucks which
you need here and then by the
transposed jacobian uh you can calculate
what are the
the torques which you need in the joints
so we really go back
from the basic idea of acceleration
you go back to the torques and the
joints
but with a classical robot you cannot
exert torques because
torques are to a major part eaten up by
the
friction effects in the gearings so you
would need
a torque sensor and torque feedback and
i think also marcotte
was the first one who recognized that
made experiments uh
with dr stewart fisher
which came from switzerland and
these ideas impressed me very much
and i thought we should try to build a
robot which
can realize all these modern concepts
and so i wanted to combine the needs
from space ultra light weight another
need from space was
minimal power consumption that was also
one of the
of the drivers for the lightweight robot
and the other driver was
the truck control concepts of carteep
and
yeah and and all these more theoretical
ideas behind
and uh and indeed the first
the first uh version of a lightweight
robot
that is hanging on the ceiling
was finished in time
for the astronaut training
so in in 92 when the astronauts were
trained
the first arm could be used it could
sustain itself on ground without
springs but it was not yet
perfect and and it had not really good
torque control at that time
we had made some construction errors we
had
integrated gearings with very very high
reduction
they were small very very high reduction
1 to 600
but it turned out that they were not
fabricable in a
reliable way the tolerances tolerance
needs were too too high in order to
fabricate them in a
reasonable way nevertheless the arm was
used for the astronaut training so the
our dream
uh at least for the external training to
have an arm
which could uh more or less do all these
motions without having strings hanging
around
this goal was achieved at that time when
was that completed
i think this first arm was completely
around 92 maybe 91
the astronaut training was the mission
was 93
in april 93 so the training was
one year before so i think 92
were these tests with the first lightly
droplet
when we went on
the first version of the lightweight
robot
maybe was finished five or six years
later
this version then we had several
modifications
i think we went to harmonic drives then
which are elastic joints but
we had some reasonable torque control
already
and so we could compensate for this
vibrations caused by elasticities and so
on
we had still classical motors
motors we could buy from the shelf
the arm did not look so nicely yet
you could squeeze your fingers there and
these kind of things
and i think at the beginning of the
new century then uh we
in the first years when we were
successful in in building up
first version of the third generation
which then was completely made again of
carbon fiber
but no longer with a grid structure but
with a shell
structure and and with our own
motors what we call the robo drive
motors
they were optimized with maybe two years
of
simulation optimized maybe they were the
the first robotic motors which really
were
systematically developed for robotic
applications so far
robot manufacturers have used the best
available motors for variables
we asked ourselves what is the typical
need for
a robot motor and we said well
one need is high dynamics we do not need
the high
velocities which the typical motors have
we do not have a few thousand
revolutions per minute the robot is
moving in this way
what we need is extremely high dynamics
low velocities and
yeah low weight of course high torque
and low power consumption
and in particular
an operational mode which consists of
permanently inversing the motion
back and forth permanently back and
forth
and we put all this into an optimization
criteria but i think it took us
two years until we then had a motor
where we said okay
it tries this design tries to optimize
our
criteria and meanwhile
we have founded a small company out of
that uh
building uh these motors in series and
they're quite successful
but this was the the key element for the
new lightweight robot
number three what's the company
the company's name is robodrive
it's still not a big company but yeah
they have
many inquiries from from all abroad
meanwhile so far they have
focused mainly on building the
livelihood systems
in cooperation also with kuka which has
licensed the arm
a couple of years ago and is doing
work for the research labs mainly
at the moment but now also starting into
automotive companies and so on
and who are the people that started that
company were they people who were
working in your lab
yeah they are it's it's a
kind of a model which we are
realizing here technology transfer is
not
it's not simple you made the experience
that it's extremely difficult if you
just apply a patent
gets a patent you have the technology in
the institute
and you find a company the company a
leader is enthusiastic
and you say okay you have get the
license
you have the description of the
technology try to make something out of
it
the company leader maybe is a fan of the
technology
and then he gives the order to his
developers
it often happened that the developer
the chief of development says well these
people from
research institute maybe they have not
so much experience we from industry we
have to
take this in account and this one and
often they try to reinvent
the wheel it's difficult for them to
identify with something
which they do not have developed by
themselves
it comes from from outside
uh would be a proof
that other people are also quite clever
it's it's psychologically not not easy
i think that we made the best experience
with
another model where we um first
found it or found a spin-off company
where the the person or the persons who
have developed this institute
and the institute they they found the
company
uh stay at least part time in the
institute
and care for their company until the
company has at least a certain size
this transfer via their the heads
from my present view seems to be
maybe the better the better one
and so and so we here in robert right
it's
the same model have there been other
spin-off companies
yeah there's another company sensor
drive
and they have focused a little bit on
the torque control
sensors not the motors by the torque
control
and they are working on force feedback
technologies they are
developing haptic interfaces and so on
these are not
not big companies but uh yeah they are
doing quite well they founded other
companies
which were immediately related very
closely to kuka for example
they are meanwhile a real part of cuca
there are no own companies
any longer ago
but that's already a long time back we
have founded a company
a small company which has developed also
jointly with the institute
uh 6 degree freedom hand controller
we controlled the this first base robot
as i said with a control ball
and and then the industrial or
commercial version of this control was
the so-called base mouse
in u.s at the same time there was a
another
company who had developed the space ball
we had some patent conflicts at that
time
but finally logitech took over both
developments
and unified them in their own company
and for a number of years it was a
sub-branch of logitech
and the space mouse today
i think is the most popular 3d main
machine interface
especially widely used in in computer
graphics and design and construction the
automotive
companies i think there is more than a
million systems in operation
and who are some of the individuals who
started these spin-off companies
their names the the one who
very much drove the this
space commander the space mouse company
was
banned combat the mechanical engineer
who was very much involved in the
gripper of the
of this rotex experiment
as well as the electronic engineer
uh who developed the space mouse
technology was
johannes dietrich who at the same time
was the
one of the leading electronic engineers
for the rotex gripper
he got while nasa originally was
a little bit conservative conservative
with respect to this
mechatronic concept all the electronics
in the gripper
uh johannes dietrich later on gratitude
resnick award
for achievements in space electronics
judith resnick was one of the
female astronauts who died in the
challenger disaster
and ferguson was the computer science
engineer for the space mouse
concerning the
the sensor drive company
who develops torque sensors and
haptic devices norbert border
was the driver and founder of that
company
and concerning the motor company
robodrive
manfred shiel is the head of this
company
in earlier years other companies came
out of the institute
i think it's already 20 years back that
multibody simulation company came out
the simpac i don't know how they are
called today they changed their name but
the simpac product is very successful in
multi-body dynamics and modeling
especially
in in the train
in the train area i was in the
automotive
area
and so you also have phd students
working here from various
universities and who are some of your
phd students that you've trained over
the years and
where have they gone off to to teach or
do research
any ones that stick out particularly
yes i think
a few of them are now in a position that
they can
push things forward in a responsible
position
for example one of the phd students who
worked in the early days of the
lightweight robot
on the motor control and the control
concepts
was alexander farrell
v e r l
v e r l he is now
head of one of the biggest
automation and robotics institutes in
germany
the fraunhofer institute for production
production and automation
in stuttgart
the institute is very much industry
oriented
so i think what we are doing is
different from them but
he's chief of this very big institute
another person
who had some industrial
career as dr copper
over a number of years he has been now
development leader of kuka
for a new kuka robot generation
also for the licensing of the
lightweight robot
dr cooper is now a development leader of
the new cooker branch
the kuka labs which is kind of
a new branch on advanced robotics
service robotics
in kuka uh
there is a there is a professor at the
technical university of hanover dr
ottmeyer
he was one of the key figures in our
medical robot development
just to mention dimension 3 which
became fairly well known outside
but who was your own phd advisor who
were some of your teachers
i think he's also one of the very good
names it was
professor gunter schmidt at the
technical university
he did interesting work in the area of
mobile robotics
there was an excellent control
theory expert and
in september we will have uh
the 50th anniversary of this institute
at the technical university
and uh i will have to give a talk and he
will also be there
so his uh is really one of the
very very good names in that area uh
during his period uh laser scanners were
developed
uh one laser scanner uh which is
uh by the
research assistant uh freely at that
time
is now commercialized by leica like
assistant like is a very well known
company in that area
and were there other researchers who
were working at dlr when you first came
here that you consider your
mentors or teachers yeah there was one
when i grew up when i came here to dlr
in that in that control theory group as
i mentioned that was one of the
strong groups at that time
and there was the only there was a
leading control theory group in germany
i think all the new
theories which which just came up in u.s
they were coming into germany here by
this group
because nearly uh everyone in this group
flew to us and started there in berkeley
typically in berkeley
and one of them was eckhart friend
f-r-e-u-n-d and
he was a very clever control theorist
and he got an offer then
to go to ucla
as teaching professor and i stayed by
the state i think two years in uh i
shared the room with him and his special
field was
uh control and decoupling of multi-body
systems
of multi multi-input systems so the
systems with
multi-variable multivariable control
systems
systems which have a number of control
inputs
and and well complicated
output complicated behavior and so on
and uh and he told me uh well i've
developed so much of a theory and i want
to apply that and
my idea would be to apply this of two
robots
robots were very fresh at that time
no one really knew much about them but
for in that that
is a topic of decoupling because you
want to control the single actuators and
yet you want to
have a certain motion to come out
we need to apply this technology to uh
robotic systems
well i was i was not so much experienced
and
i said well i will concentrate on visual
control unusual to these more
complicated things and then it was
as i said offered a position at ucla
i think state one or two then also
one year at the european space agency
where you had to do other things
and then he
got the offer by another country in
bavaria northern best failure
it was offered to build up an institute
for robotics in dortmund
and we always kept in contact and
he had an assistant i think it was mr
maynard
but that's not so crucial here
and but then he called me one day and
said hello
imagine i always told you that i will
try these things to robotics
we have now interesting talks with feed
vw
you must know that in the that was i
think at the
at the end of the 70s and at that time
vw started to be the only big
robot manufacturer in germany amazing
they wanted to build up robot lines for
their own factory
not so much selling robots but they
wanted
they were aiming at the
factory without people they had heard
something about japanese
factories and so on and
uh did not take too long that he said
get he called me and said can imagine
we have now a big contract from from vw
we are supposed to develop the control
system for the
for the vw robots yeah and then i think
that was the first big
robot event in germany a complete hall
more or less
fabricating cars
by robot hughes and the control system
came from from eckhart friend
and uh so with uh with long routes back
to the institute
and and the nice story about that is
that
eckhart frank was he was
then also very well known in u.s and he
was one of the founders of this
international federation of robotic
research
which is still active today and where
the next symposium which i
unfortunately i cannot attend is in
flagstaff
end of august and he was one of the
founders
with richard paul and mike brady
of this international federation of
robotic research so this closes
the whole loop
he was several times then reviewers of
our institute
he had founded his own company
and all of a sudden he was hunting
and when coming back from one of
his hunting events he died in his car
i think it was three or four years ago i
think it was he was not yet 65 he was
a little bit younger so dramatic
all of a sudden died and he was so vivid
and so active and
it's really it's really a big
uh big shame and and but this is
how life life works
um so um the developments with kuka
were there any did you have any direct
relations with kuka or were these
uh sort of industrial relations through
these spin-off companies
maybe uh i should i should mention two
things if you allow
the first one we tried to pursue the
the space robotics line of course
that was important and
uh immediately in and then
it happened all in the 90s in the 90s on
one side pursuing the space robotics
line
and the next exciting experiment was in
99
where the japanese colleagues
especially dr oda who is today at tokyo
university who was a project leader
and the japanese wanted to send up the
first free-flying robot in space
a robot standing on a satellite be
controlled from ground
and dr oda and his team was invited by
us
in 93 they were observers here in the
the control rooms they could observe
everything they were very grateful
and they invited us then to join their
experiment
they built it by their own sent built
the robot by their own send it up
in 97 and in 99
we went to cooper with our ground
control station
and we were allowed to control this arm
from ground
we did beautiful experiments again
pre-programming and reprogramming from
ground sensor-based
operations pre-programmed in virtual
environment on ground
but maybe one of the most
exciting experiments was the
maybe the first demonstration of the
dynamic interaction
between a robot and the satellite so
with a robot on the satellite you can
just move around we are talking about
swimming
motions like a cat is waving with her
tail
and thus the robot can reorient the
whole satellite
it's just the principle of reaction just
if you
jump out of a small boat the boat goes
to the other side
and this is the same reaction principle
and you can do attitude control and this
the
japanese were very nice and switched off
their controls their edited control
system
and we were around allowed to reorient
the whole satellite by
just waving around with the arm this was
a very uh interesting and and also
successful experiment
but at that at the same time in the
mid of the 90s we were strongly looking
at industry
and kuka uh to us was
still a small many robot manufacturers
more than vw
but they were near to us here and they
were just
buying out the control
box which they formerly had got from
siemens
they wanted to build up their own
controller
and there was a basic decision at kuka
the decision was should we try to set up
a known big team in control theory and
modeling and simulation
or should we rely on the dlr institute
which had the reputation that it was a
leading
control institute in germany i think
similar
decisions had to be made in abb
which i think at that time was
by far the leading european robot
manufacturer
abb decided to set up a
fairly big control team in their own
company
and kuka and the person of uh mr liebert
decided to rely on on our institute
i think it was risky because if a
research institute well if the head
changes if i would have left or
if conditions change maybe the interest
would have been less but
he felt that we were really interested
to help here
and it was hard work and what we had
promised or tried to promise was that
also inspired by this all this
work of osama khatib we said
we should be possible to compute
the complete dynamics of a robot system
which is very complicated
we think we have the technologies to
compute
this model in real time and
uh and invert it so that
for a desired motion that we really can
command the currents in the motors
so that the robot exerts this motion and
especially that
for example it dams the vibrations that
they are no longer so big vibrations
and that was the first big task
that the robot decides by itself
how much it can accelerate on a
path which is taught before how much it
can accelerate along this path
without overloading the joints so far
the programmers had to find it out in a
tedious work they
sometimes needed 14 days to find out how
fast they could move
on a certain segment of the path
without overloading the joints and the
idea was the robot should
know by himself how much he could
accelerate without overloading the
joints more or less
in in real time no one wanted to believe
that this is possible
we that the pentium processes came up
around this time
94 or so and and i think middle of the
90s we had the solution
we could show that the robots really
were able to do these kind of things
and there was a test installation at bmw
and i think within 14 days the complete
software
at bmw was uh was exchanged
by the new software including the robot
dynamics
so it was a big step and i think at the
end of the 90s
kuka won every competition be it at
mercedes beat
at ford in usa i remember
when competitors flew in their engineers
but i think
there was really a enormous
state a kind of a flagship state which
could guide at that time
of course later on the other robot
manufacturers came along with
comparable technologies but a lot of
people say and cooker
by themselves have said that this was
the
the key point for their rise up to
number three in the world
which they are presumably today three or
four or something like that
and since then we have uh indeed a very
very strong relation
uh with kuka it's not an exclusive one
but it's a natural one and we
we are doing projects together we have
licensed the lightweight robot
and and uh yeah the other
technologies they're interested in in
hands
grippers and another technology is
vision and so on
and this vw continued their research
into robotics
vw then switched over to they stopped
their own robot development
they switched over mainly to
kuka they recently had a big order i
think part of the
robots will be delivered by fanuc
so they are also not exclusively bound
i think they still have been considering
whether they should start up with own
robot production again but
on the other side uh it's clear that the
road manufacturers have so much
experience and it would be difficult to
never do all this work again and then
maybe compete with robot manufacturers
which
are not doing anything else and
manufacturing robots
and um you've already mentioned a few
but um
mercedes and bmw have also sort of
collaborated with google they've
ever tried to start their own robotics
research no i
as far as i see uh the only company
partly due to the history they have in
that field has always been vw
in thinking about producing their own
words
there are also some of the former people
that have outsourced a smaller company
they are
producing still robots for a small
section for specialized application
but not in a big big series
and have you done any collaborations
with researchers at
other automotive industries as far as
developing systems with their interests
yeah we had in these early days which i
mentioned which were very exciting
uh where kuka had not yet really
could own robots that was especially in
the 80s
we had for example remarkable
collaboration with mercedes
although also with bmw
at the hanover fair in 1978 already
we demonstrated the assembly of an oil
pump
that was a task that came out of a bmw
and we did this with our forest first
first track sensor
the assembly of this oil pump went
maybe 30 times slowlier
than the human workers did and
i thought that in a few years we are
doing this
at least as fast as the human workers do
but this is one of the
disappointments i had to realize
and these kind of things are today
coming back to us
that automotive companies say hey you
have now the
new lightweight robot could you assemble
these oil pumps automatically
we had projects at daimler very exciting
projects
for example closing the holes in the
cardboard is
by some rubber plugins
which the human workers do with their
human thumb we had developed an
inductive sensor which automatically
which sucks up this rubber parts and and
seeks the hole inductively and then
presses it in i think it's still not
realized in this way
we had used at that time
robots of the siemens daughter manotek
that's also quite an interesting story
sims had decided to set up an own
robotic branch
the company was called monotec and i
think the first
century interface was offered by monotec
in the first century
industrial robot sensory feedback was
developed by us
in cooperation with siemens especially
these uh
yeah inductive uh sensors in into
and rubber part plugins into
car frames but um after a couple of
years
siemens gave up the production of robots
demons is still discussing whether this
was a good
decision and whether they might enter
the field again
and one or the other way you know that
there
robot vacuum cleaners and things and
automotive
mobility systems and
in logistics and so i think siemens is
still
basically interested in all these things
but so far that decision has
been not to to enter again into the
classical
robotics area now we have
done other interesting applications of
that
in these early days like cutting a
rubber away from car steering wheels
with a automotive supplier which
fabricated 10
000 of the steering wheels per day and
whether
the women were sitting there with knives
and cutting office
with
well this is done today by robots but i
i see that
many of the things are coming back now
and are not perfectly
solved so far that's a little bit
frustrating to admit
uh and the the robotics work at frown
offer so when did that get started and
uh i know i was one of your
students
have you done collaborations
uh we always had good contacts uh there
it was an interesting story about that
when we started uh robotics in
um 75 or 76
uh fraunhofer and sugar was already a
name
in that field i think at that time
professor veronica
who later on became a president of the
front of a society
so the head of the whole front of our
association
he was the institute leader at that time
and uh there were a few other bigger
names in germany well
professor freund was was already
known at that time and
we are in berlin professor that was also
a fraunhofer institute for production
and that in arghan there were big
institutes for automation
so they were big names and more
production oriented
not so much towards development of new
robot systems
and of course we thought oh
we are very very small and and
um i really was was very worried when
my director who afterwards uh
promoted us and me very much it was a
long term
president of dlr's board of directors
professor krell
and he was he became a good friend i
think of daniel goldin
and when he came into dlr
i think that was around it was late
already i think around 85 or so 86
he invited all these bigger names in
germany
german robot and automation
and did it come to november i would like
to hear your opinion about
what this group is doing here
and to my
not surprised but i was really pleased
that
we got very positive comments also
these colleagues knew that we were the
newcomers
we had other ideas we had wanted to do
more
sensing more new type of robots and
and so on and and they knew that
maybe we would be competitors but they
were very fair
and said yeah this is a good group they
are doing good work
and this helped us quite a lot because
then professor krell
he pushed much forward these as base
robot technologies
he always was in favor of our work
when after this rotex experiment i got
uh
the leibniz award which is the highest
scientific award in germany which
gave us one and a half million euro
for free use that is we had to ask
nobody
what we are doing with the money uh this
was
uh the reason why we could start medical
robotics which is not a topic in dlr
we started in the early 90s then
the heart the development of an
artificial heart
and and many other things so
that was really good that
our big competitors really
said this is good work we have to be
honest here and
and that professor krill then
promoted us
sometimes in in life these kind of
things are of course important
what concerns by the way then the
the year 20 000 and later
just to mention the space robotic field
in 2000 around 2005
we started our third space robot
experiment
which was again today i can say
very interesting and and also very
successful
we sent up a small arm only two joints
into the uh
outer side of the international space
station
on the russian part of the of the outer
skin of the space station
this project was called rockvis it's a
small arm which stands in the background
this grey one
thing it's a mock-up it's a
laboratory model it has tick at the end
and it could move with a stick along a
contour which was also
directly next to the robot it was
supposed to draw springs
in that contour it could
follow the contour automatically because
it used
our lightweight robot
drives and joints including the sensory
control
and torque control
especially torque control and the
torques were sent down
so we could feed them in a force
reflecting hand controller
a joystick as the kids are using the
nice thing here is
that we saw that the infrastructure in
space
is still not suitable for doing online
teleoperation
if you go via houston it's
something like that until you're in the
shuttle
it's too long time so we did this
experiment with teleoperation
just when the shuttle flow over us in
this case you have only 300 kilometers
you have only a coverage time of seven
to eight minutes then the shuttle
disappears again
but when the shuttle is visible you have
only 300 kilometers
and then you have only a delay of 20
milliseconds
very very written and we there's no
difference between the situation when
you control the
the arm here the feeling is the same
as if you're controlling the space
station on the space station
and this we have done now over uh
five years nearly six years until
in may by our request the astronauts
disassembled
the the small arm brought it inside the
shuttle
and flew it back to earth
i think in may it came down to earth
land is in kazakhstan
it's now in russia and saint petersburg
and in a few weeks we'll have it here
and we'll look what happened to it in
six years in free space
there are only few technical systems
which have been in space over six years
and which come back to earth
and will investigate very precisely what
happened to the gearings
to the electronics how does the system
look like
i heard stories from the space station
that there are a lot of
hits of small particles that the space
station looks
not very good from outside and
we will we are very curious how this
small arm works like
but as i said we wanted to test on one
side our
roper joints that they withstand the
environmental
conditions over six years and
on the other side we wanted to
demonstrate the concept of telepresence
telepresence means i want to have the
feeling
as if i would be there but i cannot be
there because it's too long distance
it's too cold or it's too dangerous
concerning radiation
this is a very general principle and our
story is
this principle is the same which we have
to use
or apply in modern surgery
and so this is the other interesting
one of the other interesting topics in
our institute surgical robotics
you know that a group came out of nasa
in the 90s and the early 90s
they joined then stanford research
institute and later on founded the
company intuitive surgical
and they are now market leader with
their intuitive system
and surgery robots and this is exactly
the concept of telepresence
you're sitting a few meters only next to
the patient
but you want to operate in an area which
is not directly accessible if you do not
want to cut up the body
you want to to work inside the body
and at the moment we are using only
stereo vision feedback
but yeah we think that
haptic or force feedback would also be
very interesting to have the feeling
how stiff is the tissue
therefore we're working on a an unknown
system
the mirror surge system
which is fairly small and which tries to
realize all these additional features
like
force feedback but the basic concept is
the telepresence concept
and is that a similar uh motivation for
designing
this system behind the humanoid as a
telepresence
platform you mean the system here the
system here is more
stand on a standalone platform
more aiming at autonomy but on that side
we have shown several times
that it there's also a nice kind of
application where we cut it just here
fix it as an upper body somewhere and
then control the arms
via telepresence via stereo feedback
with
the eyes here and what of the hand
controllers to control them
we are using the same lightweight robots
as hand controllers
because due to their force
control capabilities they can feed back
the forces which are sent by the arms
can feedback the forces into the arm
which you use as a
controller this is what we did
and we have some now the
the robonaut system which is a kind of
an upper body
is at the space station we have a
cooperation with
colleagues from the european space
agency
andrei schiele dr andre schiele he
stayed with us
half a year and he has built a special
exoskeleton
which is a little bit even more natural
but on the other side it's
not quite easy to wear such a thing and
his interest is to bring it um to a
certain part of the space station maybe
to the columbus module
and then let the astronauts control the
rugged outer arm
and the zero gravity so that comes back
to the
to the experiments which tony beijing
wanted to make with force
feedback many years ago
um under sheila wants to bring the
exoskeleton up
and then control the robonaut arm
and but also controlling something on
ground
typically the robonaut
system at houston and and our just in
upper body so they are indeed
ideas to control the answers of higher
telepresence
and i've seen on youtube some amazing
videos
maybe that was uh five years ago or
something like that
i cannot exactly say five years six
years ago
i first wondered whether it uh
would look good to build up on humanoid
upper body
with the arms because originally they
were not designed for that
and of course when we are talking about
service assistance in household i always
say that
of course the arms and the upper body
has to be smaller
finally but people understand that these
are
development sequences and technology is
going on
um we found a lot of interest with
our new developments the so-called
variable stiffness approaches
with a with an integrated hand arm
system
which is no longer bigger than the human
hand arm system
which is no longer heavier than the
human endowment system
which has approximately the same
dynamics and approximately the same
grasping forces
and and it's
a more complex system because we need
before we are following the bionic
approaches here and we need a
we need two motors for each joint
similar to the human muscles where we
have antagonistic principle
always two actuators for one
for one joint but by this you can
realize
this effect that with the lightweight
robot also it reacts very quickly and we
made
amazing experiments where it did maybe
you have seen the video where it hits a
human head
and yet it stops immediately so it's not
dangerous at all
nevertheless you need a few milliseconds
until the sensor has registrated there
is a resistance
stop and go back so it needs a little
bit time
when the humans hit the table this is
different there is not first
the sensing of some aches and
bring it to the brain and the brains as
withdrawal the fingers but they are
inherently compliant mechanically
and this is a principle of this new
variable stiffness
control concept and the new arm and the
enhanced system which are smaller and
i think we will be able to build up a an
upper body which is not
bigger than the human one and which is
comparably strong and comparably dynamic
and what do you see as the major
applications
for robotics over the next five or ten
years
that's difficult to say i clearly see
from our cooperations with car
manufacturers
that a new generation of robots like
the lightweight robot need not be the
lighter but type of this robot
characterized by the soft robotics
paradigm
that this type of of robotics with all
their capabilities
so the robot can make itself stiff can
make itself compliant
has this sensing capabilities if it is
connected with the camera then it can
look where do i have to assemble
something
and then do the assembly and i see that
there is a big field
in assembly in the car companies for
example
so far the industrial robots are good in
spot welding in path welding
in handling parts but they have not been
good in assembly
where they do dedicated operations
where they have to to adjust tolerances
the car manufacturers they are feeding
the parts very precisely because
robots have no adaptivity they are not
flexible really
and the cost of feeding pulses is higher
than the robot itself
so this will end in the next years i
think
robots will have more sensory
capabilities but on the other side
if we say okay then provides a classical
industrial robots with force center
i think this is from my present day of
view from a present point of view i
think this is not the solution
because the classical robots if they
have a first sensor
they they have to go the four signals
have to go via the
position interface and the dynamics
which you can reach
and and the capability and the
performance
is not comparable with that of the human
arm with
its flexibility and compliance and
adaptivity
but it can be imitated by the
lightweight robot technologies become
because these arms can make themselves
very compliant
and when you see them assemble something
they are trembling a little bit and then
all of a sudden
the part is fed in and there are car
companies who have tested that
and it's amazing which kind of success
they have in
their tests in assembling gearings the
robots are
shaking a little bit and just the part
is amazing
this is even more than we have we have
seen in the past
so i think uh production assistance will
become a big story in the next year
also uh arms as i said which are not big
uh not so heavy
which are supporting human workers on a
mobile system for example
driving around or fetching parts or are
assembling something
much more flexible assembly
assembly than it was possible to up to
now
and well there have been a lot of
predictions for service robotics
in-house
in horses
irobot companies like irobot have shown
that there is a big market
especially for vacuum cleaners i
see also in the gardens a lot of robots
are moving around cutting the grass and
i think these areas will grow
there will be some time to go until uh
robots will be really helpful in
household
although i say there will be a lot of
people
in a few years which have enough money
to buy
mercedes but it doesn't make sense
anymore to buy a mercedes
and then they will buy a service robot
people who are lying in bed and who at
least
should be able to command the system to
to fetch some drink or
go to the refrigerator and take out some
prepared meal open it and not cooking in
the
the ultimate sense but just preparing
some meal these tasks are not so
difficult nevertheless you need
safety of course you need reliability
and
and uh and some kind of activity
adaptivity and intelligence and
and we see that the progress is very
slow
so i uh keep away from promising
something
i think that within the next 10 years
this system should be available for
simple tasks
not for replacing elderly care
not not replacing humans i think humans
will always be
necessary and important to talk with um
people lying in beta so no way to
replace that by robot but for
for the boring task overnight
anytime at night to fetch something as a
the system should be helpful
this is my prediction but i see at least
10 years until first
really helpful systems uh will be
available maybe i'm too pessimistic at
the moment but
in the past all the predictions have
been too optimistic
and what do you what do you see as the
biggest technical hurdles
or the things that are holding back that
kind of development within robotics
they are really manifold or at least
twofold
we had the problem in the past that
on one side uh yeah of course we tried
to focus on
on mechatronic design because we said if
these arms are so stiff and
and difficult to control and and you
will never have some uh elegant and
and uh compliant behavior and and things
which we do the the classical robotics
was always focused on
being stiff being very precise even if
robots cannot guarantee some absolute
position they could gather
some repeating or repeatability
precision and then they were
calibrating it by cameras and and i
always have said
it's not useful to calibrate such a
system with cameras if now the part
where
it it has to feed in something is not in
its place like a car
a frame is on a little bit other place
but does it help with the robot is
calibrated
but what is interesting is only the
relative position
so we need sensors we need central
feedback this is
the topic and
therefore
i think in my opinion the most important
requirements always have been provide
robots with
with much more sensory capabilities
makes them smaller makes them
mechatronically
nearly nearly perfect solve this
this side of the problem but this is not
the only part
the other one is really vision
look at the problems in vision we still
have
a lot of problems if the the lighting
the illumination changes if there's sun
coming
if you're on a fair the sun is coming in
vision does no longer work
robust vision would be very important
real-time 3d
vision is important low cost
for sensing maybe tactile sensing
collision avoidance and all this kind
and generalization
in combination with with perception
a door handle should be
recognized if it is similar to door
handles that have been seen before and
so on
mobile manipulation so the perception
and cognition part
is in the same way important
but i always say it's
you make an error if you just focus on
on one side
there has been um years there have been
years where we had the artificial
intelligence community who has
promised we solve every problem with
little bit mechatronics we can solve
that later on
it's available more or less we have to
do logistics and and
and ai and then the
robot community those who were working
on the real robots were frustrated and
said well
the ai people are promising too too much
i think
both communities and and i see them
growing together now a little bit more
than in the past
we need both areas the mechatronic one
and the software and and intelligence
and
cognition one only if they both
cooperate
in an optimal way we we will get out the
robots which will be
in the future and um you've used the
term microtronics several times you also
talked a bit about automation
do you have a definition of robotics and
do you see it as a distinct field or
subfield of
automation robotics
in my opinion definitely is is a
subfield maybe
one of the most interesting and
challenging subfields of mechatronics
only this closest integration of
mechanics electronics
mechanics optics electronics and
computer
science or computer computational power
and information processing
only his closest integration makes up
the robots of the future and therefore
we tried for example to
to integrate all the electronics in the
arm we have small
cable length and so on also with a
medical robot everything is
in the arm people are still surprised if
they see the big system which are the
market at the moment with big boxes
if they say uh yeah can it really be
that everything is in the arm like in
the human system i think this is
important and this is the mechatronics
but this does not yet make the
intelligence it's only one part of the
story
but no side should forget the other part
they are equally important
and for young people who are interested
in a career in robotics what kind of
advice do you have for them
i i would advise and by the by the way
to
to finish your question there are other
interesting uh
mechatronic systems for example i say
the cars of the future
they are mechatronic systems they try to
avoid an accident
in fact however there are also becoming
robots
mobile robots not another manipulation
robots
but they are also becoming type of
robots so maybe
the story is that all mechatronic
systems tend to be
kind of intelligent mechanisms be it
classical robots be it automotive cars
or beat
airplanes and unmanned aerial vehicles
everything is more or less robotic
but um what was your question last
question
um
i often get the question what is the
best way to study mechatronics i say
it's very difficult to overlook this
area in the same depth in all fields
maybe
it's not possible of course mechanical
engineering is a
important basis i recommend that they
really
go deeper in one field but try to get a
deep
understanding of the other fields i'll
give you an example i
in my lectures at the technical
university they are
in the area of computer science also i'm
not a born computer science
a guy but i tell them uh
what i'm missing maybe it's not a
specialty of munich there also other
universities have
taken the university have a problem i
say the
education in computer science often is
not
really prepared for mechatronic systems
because the we call the informatics guys
they are good in logistics and languages
and
and network designs and network behavior
but but they're always accustomed to
systems where you you have to wait a
little bit there is an
internet or be it a computer network
you have some priorities and things are
connected to each other and you get some
response
and if the response is reasonably fast
they think it's real time
what we need in control and especially
in robotics
is dedicated sampling rates
every millisecond in in our robot joints
every few
microseconds there must be a control
algorithm which runs
we cannot wait until annette says well
unfortunately i'm a little bit busy now
i send something later on
and this is what many of the computer
science people do not understand
the the understand and they and they
often do not hear
enough lectures about the description of
dynamic systems
some of them have not seen a real
differential equation
some of them have a low very little
understanding of
what mechanical inertia is
what it means to activate a motor
when such a motor responds how how fast
the sampling rate should be in order to
control this perfectly
and that's the sampling rate should be
absolutely reliable
these are the deficits some of the
computer science people have
and and so it would be very good to have
this basic
understanding uh everywhere and then
focus in one of the areas but you need
to understand the other fields
maybe have you make some practical work
first also
you need not be the ultimate expert but
you should you ever deep understanding
that's my recommendation okay great
is there anything else you'd like to add
or anything that we missed
well i think we have
yeah i could mention that
um just a
comment i have uh part of the institute
in berlin the optical systems
and i see also how closely they
they are related to our mechatronics
work
for example we are modeling the world in
3d
by flying with airplanes and cameras and
this
cameras are then normally
mounted on a a platform a stabilization
platform which compensates
the the motion of the of the airplane so
you have
an inertial sensors you have actuators
we have the cameras and then you have to
compute the 3d
models out of the camera images so
everything comes together there's
all in mechatronic mechanics optics
electronics and computer science is
together there
and and even the experiment which i
mentioned which we did in japan
with these satellite attitude control
with the robot arm comes back to us at
the moment
because maybe you have seen internet
there was a
cooperation with digital globe
modelling the mount everest from space
and we did that with a small company
here 3d reality maps and digital globe
made a big
press release with that and the pictures
were taken from the
satellite
worldview worldview to satellite and
typically
this if you if one orders um
pictures for 3d modelling then the
satellite is
has to be reoriented first you look
there and then
this way when it comes over and then the
other way
and this motion of the satellite
typically is caused by controllable
magnetos
which rotate with a few thousand
rotations
and they cause vibrations and this is
bad for the pictures
so what people would like to have is are
is a mechanism which orients the
satellite but then
there is no vibrating uh mechanism and
this is what you can do with the robot
arm and
well we try to make it simpler we make
such an experiment
we will use our robot actuators
but only three of them not another full
robot
but actuators which rotate around
zero uh velocity to just exert the
torques as as in a robot joint
and we will take the robot actuators of
our likelihood for that
these rover drive motors which i
mentioned
so all these things come come together
here
including the development of an
artificial heart
where we also use the small lightweight
robot
actuators in an artificial heart what
you need
is low weight
minimal power consumption and
beating heart can be done by just
yeah inverse motion or something like
that but
you have the same challenges as in
robotics so it's
a very general concept mechatronics and
is the
the artificial heart project within dlr
or is that a spin-off company as well
yeah this also oh yeah i forgot that
that's a
remarkable spin of company recently
there are already 30 people that are in
that company
dualis and they have strong relations to
u.s groups
they get their their venture
capital at the moment from u.s
they are joining u.s companies that are
also active in the area of artificial
hearts
now that's oh yeah a good set you
mentioned that what's the name of the
company and
the people the company here is
another question that occurred to me so
what uh i know that uh ernest stickman's
worked with you early on in the early
days of dlr and
you've had some other collaborations
what was it like working with them
um well the
when he was here i was too young and and
at that time when in dealer he was
specialist on
on optimal uh maneuvers and paths for
uh for rockets and and re-entry vehicles
and uh yeah orbital
orbital maneuvers and orbital path
planing was his topic
i think only when he went to the
bundeswehr hopefully he
went into the field of image processing
but but his approach was
much inspired by control and and and
dynamics
the dynamic vision which he created was
based on the fact that there is a
dynamic model
and that you can estimate this model by
kalman filtering ourselves
you can estimate the motion nothing
happens
uh unexpectedly in nature and technology
have always a dynamic motion a car or
a satellite he did experiments with
satellite control and so on
it's always based on dynamic models so
that's what i liked it was
deeply inspired by this institute which
later on
or already at that time was called the
institute for flight system dynamics
that was the original name of our
institute
until 92 i think or something like that
and as i said he was then very much
interested in this
in this robot experiment in space
and actively his son collaborated with
us
his son was just finishing his studies
then
and he had another doctor and doctoral
student he forgot his name
and uh and they worked with us on that
project of the
free flyer
and then uh on the car uh
we had not at that time we did not work
on
autonomous cars we are today working on
on robotic cars
by the way yeah i forgot to mention one
thing
we have so far been talking only on
arms and hands
um of course we are also very much
interested in in planetary rovers
and the last years we have intensively
been working on
on supposedly it was the first european
project for mars
mars rover the exomars mission
i'm a little bit sad that at the moment
it looks like that
the mission will not be flying
there were in the last year there have
been discussion with nasa
to make a joint mission out of it to fly
an
uh a nasa rover and a european rover
we have been working as i said on the
european rover we have provided the
engineering model with our
motors but it looks at the moment that
there will be one only one rover
and probably or maybe it will be only uh
nazi rover like the mass science
laboratory something like that
that would be a very pity um and they
would be very unhappy and i know that
the jbl people have some interest to
to collaborate with us and and maybe
that we are would do the
the navigation and then path planning
and
and control and they would uh develop
the mobility and the rover itself
it's not decided yet and on the other
side
germany is a little bit focusing on moon
so we are studying
mobility on moon and there's also the
google
lunar x-prize maybe you have heard of
that and
we have joined one of the teams who
wants to fly privately to moon
that would be a big fan for us but
we are yeah intensively working on rover
designs at the moment
which team is that they're called
part-time science
scientists pts
but of course there are a lot of um
in um ethic basis
or uncertain things financially you need
the rockets you need
it's kind of you need a lot of money you
know redwood occurs also
red whitaker yeah exactly
correct yeah okay
uh anything else you'd like to add no no
i think we have we have
wrote about everything you know