um
so we're just going to start with some
questions about you where you were born
where you grew up where you went to
school sure
that's the question okay all right so i
was born in belgrade yugoslavia many
years ago
i like to think of it as being born a
long long time ago in a land far far
away
so it's an ever-shrinking country and i
did basically my first 16 years of
life in formal education there and i was
interested in computers back then but
you know it was a very different world
and then i moved to the states and
everything changed
uh where did you do your undergraduate
so my undergraduate was at the computer
my undergraduate was at the university
of kansas in computer science
i also minored in neuroscience and in
commercial design
keeping it broad have you used the
commercial design
no i never have actually when i was an
undergraduate
i realized that my interests were really
somewhere in the area of what is now
called cognitive science and
neuroscience but back then was still
sort of under psychology and just
emerging as a new field and at the same
time in computation
and so i figured that the intersection
between those two was basically ai
artificial intelligence and so i studied
ai
but what i really was interested in
turned out to be robotics and only later
i realized that
and robotics are not necessarily subsets
of each other and
they have an intersection but they're
not the same how did you first become
interested in robotics
i became initially interested in
robotics as an undergrad when i was
looking for directed readings courses in
addition to my regular coursework
because you know one can take computer
science and then one wants to do
additional sort of more in-depth study
and so i discovered
a little bit about robotics and the
first thing i discovered about robotics
actually was industrial robotics
that turns out to be completely
different from anything that i ended up
studying or doing but it was my first
inkling of you know what robots could
possibly do and so that's what i started
to look
what kind of industrial robots did you
come across
so basically my first in contact with
robotics was
the directed reading class in which i
looked for robotics textbooks
and there weren't very many because the
field was you know still relatively new
and i found a textbook on standard
industrial robotics since i read about
you know our manipulator robots that
assemble cars pretty much and this was
before the era of dna sequencing which
is you know the next exciting thing that
manipulator
small manipulator robots did so i read
up on that
and i wasn't terribly enthused but it
was a start
and then you went to mit to study
artificial intelligence or computer
science
right so the big the big major thing for
me as an undergrad was getting accepted
into mit as a
for graduate school and so i went over
there and uh
back then there were the first year
students had the luxury
in computer science course six of
looking around in different projects and
selecting what would work for them
and we were funded for the first year so
i looked around and really even though i
had some interest in robotics i had
interest in ai i had interest in many
things
my i remember my application essay
talked about neural networks and expert
systems so that really goes way back
but when i talked to the faculty at the
mit ai lab
i realized that i was really very
interested in the work that rodney
brooks was doing and he was doing
robotics
so that was that was what determined it
and so you became a student
at that time so i became a student in
rodney brooks's lab and he was working
on
a completely new kind of robotics and
certainly was a new and exciting area
back then
which was reactive and behavior-based
systems and that's what ended up shaping
my
phd direction and then my work
subsequently
so what was the first project that you
worked on
so my first project in robotics my first
real work in robotics was in graduate
school everything before that was
reading
and so the very first work that i
actually did was my master's thesis work
and that was on navigation
ironically when i started out my
master's thesis work i was going to work
on underwater robots
and there was a whole lot of real
reality involved with
working with robots underwater and i
realized that my interest had nothing to
do with that my interests all had to do
with
recognizing places forming a cognitive
map being inspired by some neuroscience
literature
and so that i threw away all of the
underwater stuff and ended up working on
a
navigation master's thesis that was
on a robot named toto they got quite a
bit of fame later and and i was
fortunate to be known as you know the
person who did toto
and what did toto do well toto was a fun
robot because i was inspired
by uh finding my way around boston which
is as
many people know is laid down on cow
paths so that was a challenge and also
looking at neuroscience
evidence on how people or at least rats
might navigate
so i was looking at a very different way
of doing navigation that was
traditionally done in robot maps which
were cartesian
representations so i ended up doing a
topological representation sort of a
place cell
place topographic topological
representation of space
and that's what my robot toto did and
toto could
recognize places and go back to places
and build this very relational map
as opposed to an absolute cartesian map
and it was interesting because many
people later said oh
so you must have done that that way
because that's how maybe women think
about space
or this i just thought that was funny
because i really did it because that's
because it was different from the way it
was classically done and because there
was neuroscience evidence for that being
biologically sound
were there other women in the lab where
you were working there were a few women
at the ai lab not as many as there are
today and certainly the trend
towards getting more women into computer
science and into robotics
has been effective but there were some
and i would definitely say that while we
were a minority we were not a silent
minority i i really
i mean i loved being at the ai live at
mit and i think
that was manifested for all of us
because we tended the average time to
get a phd
in my day was seven years and that was
because i think largely
people like to stick around and
were the other women also working in
robotics or other areas
as it turns out actually when i was
getting my phd there was a
disproportionately large number of the
women
at the ad lab in robotics so i think
there was a lot of interest and we see
this over time now that there's a lot of
interest in robotics
on the part of women researchers so
robotics has a disproportionate number
of women
compared to some other areas of computer
science and that's been true from the
start and that certainly
was true when i was a grad student did
you continue working on total for your
phd and did you start a different
project
no i rudely dropped toto when i finished
my master's degree and some people said
oh you should have stuck with that which
i thought that hurt what are you saying
did you not like what i did subsequently
but um
really the way that that things worked
out was that one would usually do a
master's project
and move on to something entirely
different for a phd in fact subsequently
people at mit realized that this takes
too long people are taking too long so
now i think it's much more streamlined
but
historically back when i was in the
program everyone did a masters in one
thing and a phd on a rather different
thing
and for me the phd ended up being a very
different thing and that was
looking at distributed robotics teams of
robots
i was very fortunate because my advisor
rodney brooks was
able to actually acquire enough support
to purchase 20 robots
so i had literally a herd and we called
it the nerd herd
and it was the herd of robots that i had
to develop algorithms to
literally get them to herd to flock to
follow to disperse to aggregate
it was a lot of fun and it was a lot of
work did you get a sheep dog
i was supposed to be the sheepdog and
the shepherdess and everything rolled
into one
and i always remember my late nights at
the lab
with big boots because it's boston right
so it was cold and i'd be stomping
around and some frustration around my
robots i never stepped on anything
um so apart from rodney who
did you study with anybody else at mit
that you found
anybody else they're very influential
well so there were a lot of great people
at mit when i was grad student there are
a lot of great people there now as well
i would say that the most important part
of the culture though was the peer group
so it was the graduate students that
were all really working
not together everybody had their own
project and group projects were
discouraged because you had to make your
own mark on the field
but we talked constantly we had these
play rooms large open areas and the
social dynamics
that made that our intellectual home
were incredibly important i think that
was the ultimate shaping experience
of the phd career of course the advisor
is very important and my advisor was
very enabling in terms of providing the
resources
and the guidance but in the end it was
the intellectual
culture around the rest of the students
and i think you'll hear everyone saying
that
and that's something that i think all of
us who became academics have tried to
replicate in our own labs
any names of peer students
oh my gosh so many names let's see of
people so people
who are active researchers today in my
own field
um cynthia brazil brian's casualty
um so of the other holly yanko so that's
in human robot interaction then we have
researchers envisioned like paul viola
i mean there are just so many i'm gonna
be rude and leave a bunch of people out
because
many of us are still in touch um people
are either academics or
they're doing research in some corporate
lab but i think most of us have
hung on to that passion that we had
any other intellectual sort of
inspiration like
theories or roboticists that you looked
up to or modeled your career after
well so when i was studying robotics
obviously you know i was reading all of
the work
um in the field when i in my total days
in navigation days um
one of the major figures in the field
that influenced my work was ben kuipers
and ben had done the original work on
topological navigation although in a
simulated robot but subsequently
i got to know him actually and he's been
a mentor for me throughout my career and
ben is just an
amazing amazing person so he's someone i
would single out
and i just want to point out that
recently we're at
stages of our career that i recently
lost a potential phd student to him and
this is the one that i could get over i
think the guy made the right choice
but otherwise no they should come to me
how many phd students have you tried so
i've had a lot of students in my lab i
love a big lab again i'm i'm modeling
that after my own phd experience
i have nine phd students who've received
phds from my own lab and of course i've
been on committees of many others
and then usually if you look at my lab
there's a slew of people who are
phd students a few post docs depending
on the level of funding
and then a horde of undergrads because
we love to provide that research
experience for undergrads and we love
their
enthusiasm and dedicated hours of free
or not
heavily paid work it's great training
for them and of course we help them go
on to graduate school so my lab it
usually has like
15 to more people in it at any one time
and are most of your students working in
robotics
so i'm i'm really really fortunate that
the psja students that have been in my
lab who have graduated
all of them are working on robotics and
over half of them are in academic
positions they're
faculty so you know examples including
chad jenkins at brown university monica
nicolas
who is a you see um i have to say that
again
um monica nichols who is at uh you seen
what why am i having this problem you
can edit um okay
not uc but um
you understand nevada arena okay so
monica nichols who is at university of
nevada reno
um then we have uh evan drum wright who
is at washington university
i don't even know if this is interesting
um also brian gurkey who is at willow
garage who started the whole
player movement which is now transferred
into ross which is the major
open source robotics programming
infrastructure
so i've just been incredibly lucky and i
don't want to leave anyone out but if
i say all nine then you know just cut it
but i have been incredibly fortunate to
have
great grad students and we're you know
i'd like to think we're still
in touch we're buddies dylan shell who
is at ut
austin yes what's part of what we're
looking at is mentorship
oh that's my big thing i mean i i think
i think mentoring is fundamental and i
think it's really a pipeline so
it's really important to both be a
mentor and serve as a
be mentor and serve as a mentor so my
students in the lab the grad students
are mentoring the undergrads but they're
also being mentored
by the ph by the students in my lab
where phd students are mentors from the
undergrads
and then they're also being mentored by
the postdocs and certainly by me
and then i'm a very hands-on mentor so
then i end up mentoring them through
to their postdocs if they have one or
their academic careers
once you're an advisor you're really
mentoring forever so i love it when i'm
writing 10-year letters for my phd
students and like you know
letters for my former students who are
you know applying or being nominated for
awards i mean that you know
can't do better than that so
how did you get interested in human
robot interaction
so i got interested in hri the same way
that i think every advisor should be
interested in things and that's through
students
so initially actually monica nicolescu
from my lab who was a phd student at the
time
had gotten interested in human machine
interaction and human robot interaction
and so she came and talked to me about
that as a potential phd topic
and then at the same time in a sort of
strange cosmic
you know alignment we were applying for
a large center
through the national science foundation
and while we were looking at a lot of
different topics
i was being urged to think about
societal relevance
of the work that we were doing and i
thought about what interested me in that
space there are many applications of
robotics that are societally relevant
but the one that interested me it turned
out to be really related to human health
and so that ended up being hri for human
health which then morphed into socially
assisted robotics which is what i do
today
so one of the major collaborations i've
had that started back in those days of
my early interest in hri has been with
bryce gazillotti
who works on robotics for autism which
is one of the things i do now
but that interest started after your phd
fascinatingly there were all these
wonderful students that i was in the lab
with and they were doing things that i
was doing things and then many years
later i realized hey you know
we have these fundamental interests in
common and so i got interested in autism
and started working on it
after i knew brian scazzellati and it's
been great now
to collaborate on cynthia brazil as well
but of course i think
a lot of it has to do with a common
mindset
we sometimes talk about whether we were
all brainwashed and so we all think
about the world the same way but really
it's it's the self-selection all of us
chose the same advisor and the same
philosophy
because we have certain preferences in
certain strengths and that's why we
ended up the way we ended up and that's
what makes us a
sort of a culture that works well
together
and do you do uh ongoing projects
together
we do indeed we're doing joint projects
we're doing
well you know how it is the first step
is joint proposals so we write joint
proposals quite a lot
um and we're actually very soon now
we're going to have a joint workshop
um a national science foundation
sponsored workshop um that's going to
take place actually at willow garage
which is sponsoring robot testbeds to
help robotics research
so interestingly even though robotics is
a huge field
if you look at for example the annual
conference icra which is just huge
or iras at the same time as a member of
the community i feel like it's a small
world and a really friendly world
so i feel like i know the people we know
each other um
you know we like each other and we're
trying to push the field forward
what do you see as the central problems
facing robot interaction
so hri is a pretty new field and we're
just trying to define now what
really the computational issues are what
the central problems are
but there's some really fundamental
issues that i think
are easy to point out one has to do with
the embodiment so
the fact that hri is about human robot
interaction in physical space
whether it involves contacts or not our
own work doesn't involve any physical
contact so it doesn't have to involve
physical contact
but something about the physical
presence and shared context
is very powerful there are interesting
effects that happen when a human and a
machine are
sharing a physical context even without
contact and that's very poorly
understood
so embodiment is a major challenge of
hri another major challenge
is real time social monitoring and
understanding
what the user is doing and then having a
dynamic that the robot can control and
influence
so that it's really not a passive thing
where you know there's no obvious the
human does something then the robot does
something
or the robot must do whatever the human
says but rather there's a real
interaction dynamic and it has to happen
in real time now and that's a real
challenge
and then there's another very
interesting challenge in hri which is
adapting to the user
because the interaction really won't
work unless the robot can adapt and that
adaptation may have to happen over a
very long time scale
so as we look at application domains
where the robot must might be in
someone's life for years on end
how that adaptation works is fascinating
i mean you know
half the marriages fail so clearly it's
a big challenge to adapt to people over
a long time scale
but it's truly fascinating and that's
just a snapshot there are many other
areas i mean they're going to be
i don't know thousands of hr
dissertations in the future with lots of
great work
what do you see as some of the central
problems for
distributed robotic systems
so when i started out in distributed
robotics back in the 90s
it was a it was not a very well
organized field it was you know pretty
new and ad hoc and usually what people
do in new fields is they try things they
do
algorithms often very greedy solutions
to problems just to get the first
solution
and one of the forces that actually i
think helped the field a lot was robot
soccer
because a lot of people are interested
in seeing robots play soccer
in real time in some interesting and
robust way
and so people came up with a lot of
algorithms and then as the field matured
people started to understand the more
theoretical and formal properties of
those algorithms
and as things became more formal and
solid that's about when i left the field
and i went into hri um not because i
don't like it i think it's great in fact
one of my phd students did a really nice
formal thesis on this
and in some sense i feel like it's
almost closure now you can really start
to do
scalable clean solutions to multi-robot
control
i think that's where the field is now
they're really interesting areas like
auction-based algorithms and
all sorts of issues on how to make
distributed control scalable a major
challenge in distributed robotics is the
lack of
small cheap affordable teams of robots
and so it's very hard to do
experimentation
and that was one of the reasons that i
got out of the field was that it wasn't
clear
how we could make a difference in the
foreseeable future where were the teams
or robots where were the teams of
light affordable aerial vehicles where
were the where's the smart dust
you know where were the bots and without
that you really couldn't validate
but it's coming what was your strategy
and approach
so when i was doing distributed robotics
again back in my day
for my own dissertation i was really
interested in local algorithms so
what people had thought about back in
those days was looking at
provable centralized algorithms so you
could say you know if you had a
centralized controller and it was you
could plan ahead and figure out what
each robot
kind of like each agent should do you
would do that and then you might iterate
of course that doesn't scale and with 20
robots there was no way to do that in
real time it's not an issue of
processing it's just there's too much
uncertainty
it's centralized control is too brittle
so then when you look at distributed
control then there are all these issues
that come up about partial observability
and uncertainty and
is the solution actually going to be
merely greedy is it going to be provable
in any way
and so that was very interesting so i
was one of the early people that looked
at local algorithms for distributed
control
subsequently people have looked at local
algorithms distributed algorithms
auction-based algorithms
uh one of the theses out of my lab was
actually an auction-based algorithms
these are very promising new directions
and so the field again has matured from
where we were but
it was a great place to be at the time
it was good to kind of get it started
and similarly for navigation um
what were the central problems of
navigation that you were facing
so navigation is a fundamental problem
of robotics i mean if you can't move
around without hitting things you can't
do anything
and that was the first robotics class
that i ever took which incidentally was
not from my advisor
but was from another very senior faculty
member tomas lozano perez
at nmit and we were all intimidated by
him
so when we took this class we all had to
pick a project and
basically you could do manipulator
robotics or with inverse kinematics and
dynamics
or you can do planar navigation and so i
did a
project on planar navigation and that's
what got me thinking about
the problems there which are you know
sort of the standard known problems
there's a lot of uncertainty the robot
has a partial observability of the world
how does it move without being too slow
and too sluggish and stop and go
locally as well as towards some global
goal those problems haven't gone away
but now
n years later for sufficiently large end
we have slam we have i think so many
algorithms
in navigation that if there's one thing
in robotics that you would get many of
us to say is
solved it would be navigation so that's
great to know
it's great to see that the field really
you know maybe is not quite closed a
chapter but you know come on we can
navigate autonomously
in an urban setting we can send robots
from la to las vegas it's pretty
impressive
how did you become interested
specifically in autism
as a sort of assistive form of robotics
when i first got interested in human
robot interaction for health and i was
immediately when i got interested in hr
i was really interested in it in the
health context
um i looked around to see where it can
actually make a difference sort of in
the near future like where
where was there a niche where people
wouldn't start to ask immediately you
know why a robot you know why bother
with this
and autism was a very natural niche
because there was already anecdotal
evidence
that showed that people had put simple
robots with children with autism and the
children
tended not always but they tended to be
interested and they tended to
sometimes do very wonderful and
unexpected things like show a social
response that was otherwise missing or
latent
and so there's already anecdotal
evidence that this was a promising area
and there were
a couple of labs that were working in
that direction namely brian's casualties
so that was very inspiring but
fundamentally for me the inspiration
for socially assisted robotics in
general has been where can you make a
difference
and when you see these kids interacting
with robots and and acting in a way
that others judges therapeutic and
beneficial
well that's that's all i need to know
then for me that's that's enough that's
what makes it interesting so
it's not just the the scientific
curiosity but it's the fact that it
might actually improve someone's quality
of life
that's why i've been interested also in
socially assistive robotics for stroke
because we have found that stroke
patients are very receptive to working
with robots and exercising and they do
longer on the task
with a robot than they do with a
computer or some other interface
we've also worked with people with
alzheimer's and
who would expect that a person who is
over 80 years old who has never seen a
robot
would really bond with our robots and
and improve
actually on a task stage to alzheimer's
which is pretty serious
so dealing with people who are
institutionalized and yet having them
bond with the robot and report things
like oh my buddy is coming tomorrow i
don't want to go shopping to miss
my buddy and these people don't go
shopping they don't even leave the
building so
it's really it has been just for me
heartwarming and encouraging to see that
there are a lot of beneficiary
populations for socially assisted
robotics
and for hri in general and now of course
we have to do the hard science of making
these robots
safe and useful um and you know either
improving health outcomes or at least
improving quality of life ideally both
and so what kind of
humanoid robots do you use
how do they fit into their applications
well there's always this limitation of
never having enough robots or never
having the right robots so
because the united states doesn't really
have a robotics industry as yet i mean
we have
i robot and we have a few other smaller
companies but we don't have exactly an
industry of commercial robots out there
on the consumer market
and as a result you don't you can't just
go to the store and buy a few robots and
play around with them so as a researcher
we're always limited to a few
different available platforms either we
develop them ourselves
so we have in my lab worked on
developing platforms and we have a
banded platform that
we have used historically that we
developed
there it is here's bandit um the problem
with bandit is with any
platform that was developed specifically
for for lab use is that it's not as
robust
or optimized as it could be
there are also commercial products that
we use such as the now
which is more robust and more optimized
but then it has other features that you
know i
might want to change like i love it but
i wish it were slightly bigger
you know in order to have a more of a
peer interaction with the user rather
than a sort of almost a toy interaction
it's great for kids but it's not good
equally for adults and then of course
there's the willow garage pr2
the pr2 is an amazing robust platform so
that you know there's a company that
really did it right
um and i love it but it's not a great
hri platform quite because it's dual big
and scary
so i like something that's smaller you
know ideally
0.75 percent of an average human height
that's what we would like to go for so
here's my pitch to willow come on make a
smaller friendlier cooler looking robot
for people so i think in general
roboticists today
are limited by what robot platforms are
available and that's
that hasn't changed that's been the case
for the last 20 years and
i'm hoping we're looking into a future
where we'll have more options because
that will
accelerate research do you think it's
it's even harder for humanoid robotics
than other times
interested in mobile robots
it's certainly harder to get a humanoid
platform or to get your
the kind of humanoid platform that you
want than it is to get a mobile robot
although it's it's not the case that
there are 50 different mobile robot
platforms out there
um there are just a few a handful but
there aren't even that many
humanoids in asia they're more but it's
often difficult to get them
in the united states and that is a major
impediment to research as well
so that also needs to change it's
interesting to see where the niche of
humanoid robots will end up
because i think a lot of research needs
to be done to understand that and to
understand it we need lots of different
platforms
to work with it's not clear that we will
need humanoids in all
areas of hri but we don't know that
until we study
how much of the hri is made up of
engineering problems and how much are
problems well hri is i think fascinating
in large part because it's so
interdisciplinary i mean in order to
understand the age the human
um you know you need social science
cognitive science neuroscience
oh gosh you know and then also ethics
comes in
you know sometimes things in in health
come in for people who are working in
health like such as my lab so
it's incredibly interdisciplinary and
sometimes it's the boundaries are
smeared and it's hard to tell people
will often tell us wow you're really
doing social science
and okay that's fine that's if that's
what it takes it doesn't really matter
what you label it
i think in general any interesting
problem these days any interesting hard
problem
is going to be interdisciplinary so i
think that's the appeal of hri
is that you're doing many different
kinds of sciences at once
but hri is also difficult for graduate
students because
the grad student has to have enough
knowledge of the different relevant
areas
so for example in my lab the grad
students have to not only know robotics
which is computation and programming
and hardware which in itself is hard and
historically was
hard enough now suddenly they need to
know about proper experimental design
human subjects
interactions getting you know
institutional approval for human
subjects the ethics of working with
human subjects
analysis of multimodal data video coding
so they're amazing experts by the time
they're done
and you're finding that it's it's harder
to find students that have those skills
that are ready to
come into your life
i find that since i'm doing socially
assisted robotics it's even easier to
get grad students and i think it has to
do with the
social with the relevance to societal
problems that
people basically understand very readily
that if they do this
the impact could be in stroke in autism
you know in in alzheimer's and a certain
group of people really find that
appealing and those are the people that
end up
being attracted to my lab so that's a
meeting of the minds
historically when i was working for
example in distributed robotics
students would come in and they would be
very interested because it's an
incredibly interesting
problem from the perspective of
computation and robotics and
you know theory but then they wouldn't
necessarily see where that would lead
practically like what what's will these
robots ever really exist and what will
be they used for
and people start to worry about what
some of the applications might be
whereas there's less of a worry and more
of a clear path with social assisted
robotics
what other areas applications do you see
a growth
for hri and robotics well i think hri is
huge i mean i think
obviously i'm biased but i think the
whole notion of putting people and
robots together
is the ultimately interesting
challenging problem because we finally
have the hardware and the computation
to make that possible we can hopefully
safely and interestingly put human and
humans and robots together in close not
necessarily contact like i said they
don't have to
be in contact but interesting things can
happen interesting social dynamics can
happen
interesting interactions can happen in
terms of physical interaction as well so
for example i talk to people who work on
physical rehabilitation or robot surgery
or all these issues that
they're also hri in a way i mean their
human machine interaction
in a very close physical contact and
then you have the social interaction
which is the side that i'm on
and all of those are incredibly hard
incredibly open-ended
like i said it'll take thousands of
dissertations and that's the future if
you want to think about service robotics
robots in people's homes robots in
people's lives
robots and hospitals or robots that are
more than just these
passive things that deliver trays or
monitor for for people intruding
that's all hri
um so when did you come to usc what was
the robotics lab like
i came to usc in uh fall of 1997
and at that point george becky who had
founded the robotics lab at usc
was still running the lab and he was
wonderful to come here actually because
there was an established robotics lab
there's an established interest
of course when i first came in the space
that i got had a giant
sort of sand pit because they were doing
space robotics with the jet propulsion
lab
who are great and i collaborate with
them but you know i did not want to sand
pit in my lab and imagine the notion of
sand and robots together
not so good the gears the sand the oil
no
so we had to strip the the whole sandpit
out and get rid of it and there was a
big backdrop of space that had to be
driving you know an image of mars that
had to be gotten rid of
so in a way it was great to come into an
existing robotics context because i
didn't have to fight the culture to
explain why i needed space
why i needed you know all the stuff and
at the same time
obviously you come in and you change the
culture you turn it your own way
so george was a wonderful wonderful
mentor um
for for recruiting me and then i
immediately teamed up with grove
sukhothmi who is not an hri
but is one of the wonderful robotics
researchers who works now on
basically sensor actuator networks so
the whole notion of basically ubiquitous
computing
in any environment whether it be you
know
in the ocean in the air in your house
and we historically did a lot of joint
work and so i'm hoping we'll reconnect
but we share a lab
and it's been great and then of course
there are other researchers at usc
stefan schall came the same year i did
we were hired
while how many universities hired two
roboticists in the same department in
the same year
so kudos to usc um and we've been
at the same department ever since um so
it's i think it's been great i mean
there's a real critical mass here
wayman shen working on space robotics
peter working also in reconfigurable
robotics
so it's great to be in a place where
there um enough of us
a lot of us doing different things so
you'd say the robotics factory has grown
since 97. well the robotics faculty at
ufc has definitely grown since 97
and we're still hiring uh we need to
hire more i think
you know we're not at the sky a scale
now we're not like carnegie mellon that
has many
many faculty or multiple faculty in the
same area of specialty so we
i think we have you know excellent
people in their individual areas
and i think we need to grow more i think
it's safe to say but it's just it's
really great to have
both the robotics colleagues but also
the interdisciplinary colleagues so for
my own work
what really matters just as much as the
robotics context
is the fact that you know for for my
work in autism we have the expertise in
autism we have children's hospital los
angeles that collaborates with us
we have the the body of families that we
can draw on for participants
and it's similar for strokes similar for
alzheimer's
that's really what makes it possible for
us to validate the work
what are some other labs and
institutions that you're collaborating
with
well robotics it's kind of a small world
even though again there's so many people
but you know there's certain
institutions that have the critical mass
so um the largest ones obviously are
carnegie mellon
and georgia tech and i've collaborated
with people from both of those over time
obviously i'm partial to my colleagues
at mit but you know that's just that's
you know some people never leave and
then you know we have similar
philosophies
as i mentioned brian scazilati at yale
um so
those are some of the obvious examples
but i think collaboration is sort of
it changes over time so wherever an
opportunity arises
either we will be contacted or we'll
contact people for example right now i'm
on a large
collaborative grant that involves usc
um upenn carnegie mellon mit
ut austin i mean it's just it's
huge and that's great and you know
there's all great people there are lots
of great people everywhere
what do you see as the big robotics
centers across the us
these days well so in terms of the
robotics critical amounts it's
robotics is expensive because it's
experimental it takes a lot of platforms
and platforms are hard to get
so i think places that become foci of
robotics research
tend to grow or stay where they are
and it's hard for newer places to
develop a large robotics program so
if you look historically where the
robotics work is done on a large scale
that hasn't changed it's it's you know
historically been carnegie mellon
mit georgia tech upenn usc
and then there are excellent smaller
programs in many other places so you
know there
obviously there's great work and
robotics going on at stanford but if you
look at the numbers of people you'd be
surprised that some of the very elite
programs in robotics around the country
are actually relatively small
and that's fine too it's not you just
have to have enough people it's very
difficult to be the single roboticist
anywhere because you need so much
infrastructure whether you're one
or ten and so it's very difficult to be
one but you know
three will do great so you know there
there's great stuff going on and you
know
there and also obviously there's
robotics going on at cal tech
that's great there's robotics at
university of washington seattle i mean
it's everywhere i don't want to even
leave people out i was just talking to
some folks at vanderbilt who are doing
robotics for autism as well so there's
i think it's becoming larger and
obviously we're going to see more
robotics as robotics
becomes more a part of the culture so i
keep waiting for that
consumer market robotic product after
the roomba
maybe something in the health space that
will actually sort of open people's
awareness up to
the potential of this technology and
then i think we'll see many more
programs
why do you think there's so few
commercial
things like the roomba and businesses
and industries
trying to get into it in the u.s the
answer to why we don't have more
consumer robotics is very
straightforward
entrepreneurial efforts in this country
fail at a
larger than 95 rate that this is well
established it's very hard to be an
entrepreneur
it's risky it's pricey and you know if
you're not in the sweet spot of
where the funding may come from and if
the economy is not good
you know the odds are very very poor and
so robotics first of all it doesn't have
an established
consumer market to begin with so this to
sell this to let's say a venture
capitalist is very hard
even though the promise is there and
also there is no federal support
necessarily for this other than the
small sbir programs
right now there's a relatively new
cross agency cross federal agency sbir
which is a small business program so
maybe that'll help
but in general if you look at the
robotics field
in the united states compared to let's
say asia korea and japan
in korea and japan there's a lot more
entrepreneurial effort in robotics
because it's supported by
their government so they take less of a
risk
and have a lower barrier to succeeding
and you can see the results
so in this country many of us sage
older roboticists have gotten together
and we worked with the whole field to
put together the robot roadmap of
robotics
um so the roadmap of robotics sort of
spells out the potential areas
which are all areas of obvious major
impact including manufacturing including
service robotics you know health
robotics is huge
and then you know there's been lobbying
to try to convey
to congress that there is great
potential for our field that it isn't
just
esoteric research with some toys and i
think it's starting to pay off
it doesn't help that the economy is not
at its best because one doesn't
typically innovate very well with a
bad budget but i think robotics has a
great future
and we're starting to see that federal
agencies are starting to kind of come
together
and carve out budgets and
it's very political you can cut it all
um
so if there was a breakthrough that
could revolutionize robotics
oh gosh a breakthrough the
revolutionized robotics well you know
there's the standard answer is we need
better sensing we need better robots
sure i think that's always true so you
know when i think about
again my own world socially assistive
stuff
we would like robots that that run
longer that have better energy
supplies the energy thing is very
fundamental for putting robots and
people together that's not even a
robotics problem
per se i mean roboticists are not even
working on that
much to do with robots skin and you know
tactile
ability for interaction that again is a
materials thing that needs to be
developed
a lot to do with the manufacturing the
process of actually
turning robots into being appealing and
robust so these are just practical
things that i think most of our field
if any it's not even working on it this
this is outside of our field yet
badly needed and then of course and on
our side of the world
we're all grappling with how do we deal
with limited sensing
and robots that need to be safe and
effective in real time
i think the problem of real-time
interaction and with humans is
especially interesting
because you're on what's called social
time so it's not
it's not like surgery but it's also not
like playing chess it's not an arbitrary
time scale
and we still need to develop algorithms
that can deal with that so
there's no shortage of both
computational and physical problems
but i'm not worried about the
computational stuff i think you know
that's sort of i understand that world
i would love to see more robots better
safer cooler physical systems
what what do you think the next big
robot will be like
self-driving cars well certainly
self-driving cars are coming
because you know if you have google
supporting an effort like that you know
something good will come out of it
i think we need more platforms like the
pr2 but smaller and for different uses
so we need we need more places like
willow garage to develop
robust platforms so that we don't keep
doing one-ups in people's lives
and that will fundamentally change
change the world because then you can
you know demonstrate that look you know
here are these robots for for the
hospital or for the school
um i think it's actually interesting
that they're now there's quite a
surge of remote um what i want to say um
like
remote presence robots or this whole
notion of remote presence platforms that
have a
maybe they navigate sort of safely and
they can be tele-operated and they have
a screen
and that's a start of putting machines
in people's homes then you can
you know kind of pull back from the
remote control and have them become more
autonomous
so i think those are the inroads we're
making i still believe that there's a
huge
killer app in the non-killer non-defense
zone of health
and i think maybe the way to go there is
from simple platforms
roomba-like that are cheap and
affordable and safe because they don't
do much
and then you know enable them to have
some hra capabilities
so that's that's my hope
tell me what time it is because i'm
getting a little panicked about being
late for my own
thing