so you can uh
yeah started just tell us where you were
born okay i
i was born in detroit michigan in 1929
um i grew up in
in that area and in northern ohio around
toledo ohio
i did my undergraduate work at the
university of michigan
graduating in february of 1952
i got married on that date
and after a few months i was called
active duty as a ordinance corps officer
with the united states army
i served as a guided missile maintenance
officer
for three years and
then i was fortunate to get a
scholarship for my
graduate program from hughes aircraft
company
i moved to california started studying
at the university of
southern california and
i received my master's degree in 1957
and then with further help from hughes
and their phd program
i completed a phd in 1963.
i joined the faculty at university of
southern california at that time
and in 1968 i moved to ohio state
university
in the department of electrical
engineering in both cases
and i was at ohio state university
until 1980
when i moved to the naval post graduate
school i retired from the naval post
graduate school
in 19 no in 2005
2005. so that's my educational
background
my research my main line of research
arose for my curiosity
at a very early age to
try to understand animals as machines
animals and humans as machines
and
that aspect of my research interests
got going in a really solid way in 1964
when uh i was at the university of
southern california
professor raikko tomovich of the
university of belgrade was visiting
and he got me very interested in the use
of
electronics to build improved
lower extremity prosthesis with
electronic joint coordination
that led to a general interest in
human and animal locomotion and to
a series of walking robots
which carried me until about 1990 i
stopped working on walking robots
after that my research was centered on
unmanned submarines
and especially on navigation
and uh mission specification control for
unmanned submarines
so i have there are many collaborators
i've not mentioned
at all of these institutions and i
received
um outstanding support from the national
science foundation
over a long period of time for my
research
and also from the defense project's
defense advanced research projects
agency
as well as many other smaller grants and
support from the universities i work for
so when was the first time that you
became
interested in robots
in what we normally call robots walking
robots
1964 but before that
guided missiles in those days were
considered to be a kind of robot so i
became interested in guided missiles
when i went into the army in 1952
and i worked in that field of hughes
aircraft company and what i learned
about
avionics and dynamics as it related to
missiles carried directly over into a
studies of walking was there something
in particular
that got you interested when you were
working in the army
about the guide missiles what kind of
posts did you no i was just generally
fascinated by
how it was possible to
imitate human function in a machine
i was involved in while in the army i
was involved in
ballistic missiles which got me
interested in inertial guidance
while working at hughes aircraft company
i worked on
air-to-air and anti-tank missiles
i found that fascinating and everything
i learned
carried over to the study of uh human
posture
and human walking
and animal walking were you aware of
cybernetics
were you interested in that yes yes
there was a book called cybernetics that
appeared with a
very well-known author uh from
caltech a chinese gentleman his name was
flown out of my head
and that was engineering cybernetics and
norbert weiner's book called cybernetics
was read by a lot of people then
yeah that was inspirational definitely
the chen
and what was the first uh robotic system
that you worked on the first thing that
you called a
robot if if uh yeah first thing we call
the robot was
a machine called the phony pony at usc
and actually george becky and i worked
on that project together
along with a wonderful graduate student
andrew frank who's now
on the faculty at uc davis and the phony
pony was the
i believe the world's first
electronically coordinated walking
vehicle
it walked in 1966.
why was it phony because it wasn't real
it's a real robot
so what's your definition of a robot
the definition dr becky used today and
his talk was
rather good i think a machine
that senses processes information
and acts acts physically within the
environment
interacts with the physical world
that's that's good enough i was curious
have you seen
kind of the definition of robotics
change at all through time
or yes i think i have
i think when i first began working in
the field
uh robots were thought of as humanoid
machines they
appeared in science fiction and uh of
course the
the word originates from chapex uh play
ru r
and if then as industrial robots
came into being the term acquired a
broader meaning and
um i think dr becky's definition is as
good as any for what
the contemporary notion of a robot is
and so after the phony pulley what other
projects did you work on
okay um the phony pony
was a very successful project
in the sense that it established
that a finite state machine could contr
could coordinate the motions of
a walking vehicle and that that machine
could be either synchronous or
asynchronous
it also showed us that that wasn't
enough
for any kind of useful vehicle we
thought it would be enough
to control lower extremity prostheses
and that's
turned out to be the case those those
prostheses
have come into widespread use only in
the past couple of years and
they do use finite state control so far
as i can tell
very much like what we postulated in
1966
but in terms of vehicle
that's not enough we realized
right away that underneath the finite
state control
we needed some kind of coordination
no that's not precise enough we needed
to have a continuous state space taken
into account
and we needed kinematic and dynamic
control of leg motion
in order to create anything create a
walking vehicle that might be useful for
something
the phony pony was nothing more than a
technology demonstration
very important it showed that finite
state
was sufficient to coordinate walking but
doesn't get very good results all by
itself
so uh the next machine built based on
the phony pony experience and
with wonderful financing from the
national science foundation was dubbed
the bionic bug
it was a six-legged uh 300-pound
walking machine that had
supervisory control continuous state
space control
of foot trajectories and which very
importantly
uh utilized force feedback to achieve
artificial
compliance electronic compliance and
used gyros for
attitude stabilization of the body it
was
a supervisory control machine controlled
by a joystick
but all of the leg coordination was
accomplished by a computer
that was the next machine and that
machine
produced a lot of basic results
and a number of phd dissertations
and provided the basis for the next
project which was the darpa
adaptive suspension vehicle before we go
on to
that one who worked on the bionic bug
with you oh lots and lots of people
it's impossible to give everyone credit
mostly graduate students mostly myself
and graduate students
one person comes out as a standout in my
mind
in that effort that's professor david
orr
ohio state he did
some of the most basic work but there
were many other graduate students who
contributed to various aspects of the
project
so the success of the bionic bug
which by the way i got the senator
proximier annual award
golden fleece award because of that name
it was
not well thought out and because of that
experience we didn't call the
we didn't use the word walking at all in
the description of the adaptive
suspension vehicle we wanted a dull name
and we found it and we were never
investigated
uh the purpose of the adaptive
suspension vehicle
was to scale up the bionic bug
to a useful size and what darpa asked us
to do
was to see if we could produce a walking
vehicle
capable of keeping up with infantry and
carrying a thousand pound
two thousand pounds pardon me so because
of the payload requirement
and it was intended to have a human
driver because of the payload
requirement it had to be a big machine
it was it weighed seven thousand pounds
and uh that was a really big effort
that effort produced 30 phds and about
an equal number of master's degrees and
i had a
my most important collaborator in that
work was dr
kenneth waldron who is now at stanford
and who still works on walking vehicles
what were some of the main challenges
both technical and
in terms of the intellectual
uh the biggest challenge perhaps
was finding a an efficient means
of applying um
torques to the or actually forces it
turns out linear actuators
of applying um with sufficient bandwidth
and energy efficiency uh controlling the
motion of 18 joints
and it required a very innovative
developments in hydraulic system design
and we succeeded we operated 18
joints with a a motorcycle engine
that was the biggest challenge the
second biggest challenge was
integrating
information from an optical radar system
to
coordinate stepping motions and on
eventualizing
we succeeded in doing that also
and then there were many uh challenges
that we could say were technological
rather than scientific
personal computers had just appeared and
that made the project
feasible we built the adaptive
suspension vehicle
just as soon as it was technologically
feasible it
had
as i recall 16
pc boards in it and one special purpose
computer
so that was a big technological
challenge
and that all worked
but before it all worked and you came to
success
were there some avenues that you turned
to
that weren't quite as successful oh sure
we tried
everything oh we tried everything uh
there are many alternatives for
mechanical design
and uh we settled on a particular design
that was dr waldron's idea that
worked out very well and
there were many approaches to
coordination we didn't understand at the
beginning
that legs in a supporting phase should
be
operated on pure force feedback mode
the bionic bug had used electronic
compliance artificial compliance but
the adaptive suspension vehicle
is what i think mark rayburn called
hybrid hybrid control
for legs in contact with the ground they
were operated in pure force feedback
mode
uh the position of the supporting leg
didn't matter if it slipped
it didn't matter but legs in the
off the ground were operated in
position feedback mode velocity and
position feedback
and we used jacobian control we never
used inverse dynamics on
that that was a big uh accomplishment in
the bionic bug
we did not use inverse inverse
kinematics pardon me we used jacobian
control
and so how did that then feedback feed
into
the asb same way except the
accepted applied
it was simpler the asv kinematics were
simpler
it used a linkage mechanism which the
bionic bug didn't
but
i think that's enough on that subject
and so you had mentioned in the
beginning this whole notion of looking
at animals and humans associated
right and how did those ideas feed into
some of
the work that you're describing okay
very much
so uh our experience with the phony pony
showed us that if we wanted a heavy lift
walking machine
and if it were going to be so big that
it couldn't crash
if if you have a 7 000 pound vehicle
that's
10 feet tall it won't sustain a crash
so it's not a laboratory experiment this
was an
outdoor vehicle and so
from studying animal locomotion we
understood that the requirements for
um dynamic balancing in
four-legged creatures was not something
we could match
at that point in time it's too demanding
so that told us clearly we should go to
six legs
then the question was what gates to use
so
we studied animal gates to get some idea
on that subject and prior
to that uh some russians besonov
in particular had shown
the optimality of a class of gates
called wavegates
and we use those exclusively on our
on the asv except for walking through
obstacle fields and there we use
what we call a free gate online
optimization not periodic
what particular animals did you look at
we looked
at grasshoppers and
they're the only animals in which we
actually did original research
and we discovered which was not known to
biologists we discovered that
grasshoppers switch gates when they
encounter
obstacles they
tend to pair their legs when dealing
with obstacles
and in ordinary walking on smooth
surfaces they typically use tripod gates
or some other wavegate
so we adapted that to our walking
machine gates
and what were some of the places where
you
tested out oh it was tested in an
outdoor environment
at ohio state university um
we also took it to uh in the latter
stages of project the
piedmont area of virginia and tested its
capabilities and the soft soils found
there
and did it end up going in was it
applied never applied never applied
john deere corporation um
advertised a six-legged walking vehicle
that i think was designed in finland
i think i think professor halme was
university of helsinki was involved in
that design
but no one bought any the only
the only successful applications i know
of up to the present time
of walking machines in the most general
sense
is the very great success achieved in
the past couple of years
in uh powered lower extremity
prosthesis they're now accepted
now paid for by medicare and the
veterans administration
so that was our original motivation
that's what i started out with
with tomovich our first paper dealt with
coordination of motion
for powered lower extremity prosthesis
and
our position was we thought that neural
feedback was not required
that the interface between a powered
lower extremity prosthesis
and a human being could be purely
mechanical it turned out to be true
and so after the asc
submarines
through the asb had a human driver it
was more like a pilot
if driving it was like flying a
fly-by-wire
airplane and uh it was very easy to
drive but we required a pilot
and i became interested in how we could
automate the pilot's function
so i got a good offer from the naval
post graduate school and i came here to
work on submarines
and i worked in two areas on submarines
submerged navigation and
mission specification and mission
control
so we did succeed in replacing
all of the functions of a human crew in
a unmanned submarine
i think we were the first to do so i
think we were the first to include
explicit mission planning and control
and i think we well we did it because
we're a naval institution we
replicated the division of
responsibilities in the submarine
electronically and led us to a
trilingual
software system
imperative and imperative language for
the
for what amounts of the work of the crew
physically
controlling parts of a submarine
lisp or some functional language for
coordination of the activities of the
members of the crew
so the bottom level we call the
execution level middle level we call the
tactical level and then at the top
level we use prologue
to specify an operational doctrine
and to write mission
mission orders reason for choosing
prologue is
we felt and i feel that it's an a
language that a naval officer can read
without being a programmer
so did you work with the naval officers
while you were
developing oh yes like submarine
officers
were the primary people who worked in
our
project here and there were many of them
30 or 40.
it was a perfect environment for that
work and we did
operate our submarine in monterey bay
with a trilingual
paradigm a
sun spark workstation running
prologue on top we didn't use lisp in
the bay
i don't think i don't think so
but we use prologue at the top level and
then
functional programming at the next level
and
imperative programming running on a
separate processor we
separated the real time the hard real
time parts
ran on its own processor written in c
c plus plus i think and
the strategic level the function of the
captain
was written in prologue and ran in real
time with no problems
what was the hardest kind of officer
human task
to automate into their system
good question
probably i don't know it was a very big
team effort
it was hard to get two processor at that
time to get two processors
with different operating systems running
different languages
it was hard to get them all to work
together that's the difficulty i was
most aware of
not hard now i'm still playing with this
and
lisp and prologue run together fine on
my
three hundred dollar net book and at
that level
the physical submarine just looks like a
line printer
or a mouse or something else it's very
natural
so who are some of the people who worked
with you on this particular
project the submarine project
yeah i can really only mention faculty
in that case
my co-investigator and most of the time
the leader of the project
in fact all the time the leader of the
project was
of the main project was dr anthony healy
of the mechanical engineering department
who's now retired
so besides that
very important person up to the present
time
is professor brutzman uh who
is was at that time a naval officer
and is now a faculty member professor
donald crossman
who's a faculty member in the moves
curriculum
at the naval postgraduate school and
many other faculty and technicians
too many to name
ah okay well it led me to retirement
but i didn't stop at retirement
on a volunteer basis i still work with
the postgraduate school
most of all in the lab where we are and
what we've done
in this lab is is
adapt submarine
submarine inertial navigation technology
to
human foot tracking and that's an area
that shows great promise i'm
very interested in right now
recently i've been trying to revive our
work
on trilingual
we call it rational behavior
architecture
trilingual control approach
as a means of achieving transparency and
accountability in military robots
i still believe that a naval officer can
learn to read prologue in less than a
day
and would be able as a naval officer to
say yes
this operational doctrine is correct yes
this mission is correct
i accept responsibility for it that's
what i want to achieve
if we field lethal robots
military officers should assume be able
to assume the same responsibilities
as they assume with respect to human
soldiers or human sailors
and i think that requires a language
that can be understood
by any naval officer during court
martial proceedings
or whatever ensues for a normal officer
they would have to know
human fall abilities would an offer
officer even if they
were able to learn prologue wouldn't
they also need to learn the technical
availabilities of the system i think all
naval officers know about human
fallibility
go ahead what about the technical
fallibilities of the robots
uh sure they have to know
something about that that's a very good
question
knowing something about fall abilities
is different from knowing the details of
how
task is accomplished um
i suspect well i don't know how naval
officers are trained probably they
i'm sure they put their hands on the
submarine and they drive a submarine
themselves
so i think any naval officer who would
be
involved in
using autonomous submarines would know
about the physical fall abilities
of such a submarine he might not know
all
he wouldn't typically know all the
details about
say what could go wrong with execution
level software he might not understand
real-time systems but the whole idea
of task abstraction and language
abstraction is to allow
in this setting is to allow people with
different specialties to assume
responsibility at different levels
so a senior officer would in
an ideal world from my perspective and
prologue is just the current state of
the art as far as i'm concerned
no doubt better languages will appear
but an officer at the level of a
submarine commander
would say i accept responsibility for
mission specification and mission
control written in prologue
then an officer at the level of officer
of the deck would
have to learn lisp or whatever language
was involved
and say i accept responsibility for the
list code
it does correctly implement
functions like go to the surface
uh return home find a target
i sign off on that and assume
responsibility for it
and then um another person at a
different level would have to say
yes we've tested the real-time control
system in the laboratory
the control surfaces moved like they're
supposed to we've done
at sea trials gps
works i sign off on that it would be
three different people
at least and each of them would
understand
functionality at their level of
responsibility
how far do you feel that you've gotten
towards the school i think we're ready
to do it
we've done it we did it in the bay uh
in the late 90s and then
things happened in my life so that i
disappeared for a while
family problems took me out of
circulation for a while and now i
i hope we can get something going again
at that level
mps has a very uh successful and active
program
in uh unmanned undersea vehicles
but at this time the focus is not on
mission control
what is the focus what are they focusing
on i'm not well informed
it would be better to talk to somebody
in that area but i know that
they have more advanced submarines um
in the past few months they took
delivery of a
of a larger more effective submarine and
their concern is uh from the perspective
of the rational behavior architecture
their concern is with the tactical level
and the execution level
not the strategic level so far as i can
tell it's not a criticism
they know what they're doing in and
they're
pursuing their goals effectively what
were some of the reactions
when you succeeded and actually what
they saw
when i did what were the reactions to
your success
with actually getting things working
uh boredom
no one has picked it up it's been lying
there for 10 years
and i would like to get work going again
well that's not quite true
i am aware that there's a large
air force program to standardize
military uh language
natural language standardized natural
language
across the branches of the service and i
have forgotten
the name of the program exactly but
right okay let's come back
are we ready yeah okay okay as to why
this didn't catch on uh first of all i
dropped the ball it was for personal
reasons things happened in my family i
had to take time out
very serious things so i dropped the
ball
another thing was there were hardware
problems
it wasn't very easy
to combine a
hard real-time just pack computer
operating under os9 wasn't easy to
combine that with a spark workstation
running unix and it was only because of
the skill of our officer students
and don brutzman we managed to make it
work
so then quintus prologue went out of
business
and until five years ago or six years
ago there was no in my opinion no
really viable pc prologue around
that had the capabilities of quintus
prologue now there is
and it's wonderfully combined seamlessly
with common list
allegro prologue and common list work
together beautifully
so i've been doing simulation studies in
the past
few about a year and how did the
do you have a feeling maybe for how the
officers felt about it or
they were very enthusiastic and then
they went back to their normal duties
except for don brutzman who's still here
so no doubt there are other reasons that
it didn't succeed
prologue generally wasn't accepted
anyplace and so it fell out of fashion
that's a factor why do you think it
wasn't accepted
well the japanese fifth generation
computer project failed spectacularly
and that kind of poisoned the well for
prologue for
quite a while i don't think prologue is
the be-all and end-all it's just the
best language i know
that i believe can be read with a person
with no programming experience
and that's been so in terms of when
you've tried it with people
and your experience proof
not proves that to be so but this is
what you've learned from your experience
of actually working with uh
working with naval officers i found they
could read prologue code it's hard to
write it's not hard to read
prologue has only about 50 primitive
functions when you learn that
that's it and those are english words
the words like
abolish
now why am i having trouble with it is
you know what is the meaning of is well
we know what what is means in prologue
uh the words like assert the words with
common english meanings
it's remarkably easy to read not to
write
remarkably easy to read
so it has a built-in inferencing
capability
going back a little bit why did you
decide to go to ohio
ah yeah good question
they made me an offer i couldn't refuse
really they gave me
an opportunity to become head of a
research laboratory
which i was then able to use to greatly
broaden my
not not only my interests in
robots but other interests pattern
recognition
and those are the two main areas
robotics and pattern recognition
so it was very well supported physically
and financially
was there anyone else doing robotics or
vision at ohio when you got there
no not when i got there i
was able to attract some good people but
not at the time i got there
well who were some of the phd students
who trained bloody right ohio
oh wow there are too many of them
first second person whose name comes to
my mind is vijay jazwa
who did not go into academia he went
into robotics for general motors
but vijay was responsible for the
mechanical design
and construction of the bionic bug
he was an electrical engineering phd
student
who apprenticed himself to a machinist
for a year then he
physically constructed a rather complex
machine
and wrote the first real-time software
so he played an absolutely crucial role
there were many others there was a
master's degree student named james
bucket
who did a wonderful design of the
onboard electronics
it was the bionic bug was already
very energy efficient it used
ac drill motors to power 18 joints
and it ran 18 of them on about 3
kilowatts which was
very efficient and that was due to james
bucket
there are many others i could mention
too many to try to recall
and what kind of computational hardware
were you using for the bionic body
uh at first a pdp
9 computer and then a pdp
10 and
then no not a 10 1170
from the pdp 90 we went to pdp 11
something and we ended up with an 1170
and that was in about 1980
and we had a whole megabyte of memory
which was stunning to
everyone and how much of the
the processing was you know real time
versus offline
all real time
what was the hardest part of achieving
that kind of real-time processing
properly partitioning the tasks and i
didn't
make any contributions there
the pdp 117 memory was partitioned
into 64k sections and
those computations had to be coordinated
and i made no contribution there
those are students students dinner right
what kind of vision systems were
integrated uh the
bionic bug had uh two
ccd cameras low resolution about
uh 100 by 100 pixels in each camera
and it had limited vision capabilities
we used a laser pointer to indicate
points on the
terrain by hand before we wanted to step
and it did
so that was a way of coordinating its
motion over uneven terrain
and that then was generalized in the asb
where we had
a real optical radar and could classify
terrain
that's where i first encountered
prologue by the way and i
i think i have not mentioned another
very important student
uh sean kwok kw ak
se young is the person
who in his phd distribution showed the
effectiveness of prologue
in coordinating and solving the problem
of non-periodic gaits
in online optimization of foot
placements and rough terrain
so i've forgotten the question that's
but i'm sure glad i mentioned his name
i learned about prologue from him and
just how you're doing the visual
processing at that time uh in the asv
okay um the
we as i said we're using optical radar
it was
made for us by erim corporation
and it gave us a
roughly as i remembered 100 by 100
range image at a 2 hertz rate
and we process the range information to
derive
uh average terrain slope so that the
vehicle could
adapt its body orientation to to terrain
uh in advance without waiting for force
feedback
that did a lot to give it a smooth ride
it was remarkably effective we also were
able to classify terrain cells
as suitable for footholds or not
but only in a laboratory environment we
never tested that
in an outdoor environment so if we put
cardboard boxes
on the floor the the
scanner we called it the laser scanner
could find the boxes and we could walk
through them without stepping on one
we ran out of time ran out of money i
left
everything changed and we never got
further than that
with the vision aspects of the problem
but but the
free gate problem is logically very
complicated
and we were never able to explain what
we were doing to anyone
except by writing a prologue then we
published it
it was in about 1988 or thereabouts
where did you publish in the uh advanced
robotics the
journal of the robotic society of japan
what were some of the other important
journals conferences where robotics was
being done
okay ieee transactions uh
most important of all in my opinion uh
transactions on systems man on
cybernetics
then later the robotics transactions
after that society was formed
that was maybe the most important place
to publish
but before that in
biomedical engineering journals
my gosh what was that one called i think
well there was the ieee transactions on
biomedical engineering
and um
other journals those are the most
important ones
and going back to the 1960s like what
were the conferences that
you were going to where people were
discussing robotics and did they even
call it robotics then
no the
first conference of which i presented
any results in robotics
was held in yugoslavia
and the organizer
was professor rykotomovic
and it was a conference on
um
on what was it called robots man and
systems romanci
i think it was called at least it came
to be called that
and uh first work i presented there was
on models for human postural control
that was another whole bunch branch of
research i i did
work with the otolaryngology department
at ohio state
and that was published in the ieee
biomedical engineering
journal dealt with a
possible with a potential diagnostic
tool for vestibular dysfunction
using a dynamic model for a multi-link
dynamic model for postural control
it worked but better means were found
it's not used today as far as i know
so do you remember any of the other were
there any other
really interesting robotics projects at
that romantic conference
oh many many that's where i became aware
of russian work especially russian work
on gates
and i had the very good fortune of going
to the soviet union twice
in 1974 and in 1976
i visited professor okadzinski's
laboratory
at moscow state university i gave a talk
there
and he and i adopted a common
configuration
for our walking machines so we could
share results that worked very well
and what was some of the work that he
was doing or some of the other russians
that you encountered
um okay okasimsky was definitely doing
basic research
he wanted to demonstrate that
computer coordination of a six-legged
walking machine was feasible
and hoped that there would be an
application
he did succeed in such a demonstration
he was hampered by the very poor quality
of soviet computers at that point in
time
they're to control their walking machine
they used
in part a very large antelope computer
huge analog computer and it was limited
in
adaptability by that constraint
so i guess that's the answer to that
question
were there other russians yes yes there
was a group
in leningrad who i also visited uh
professor ignatieff uh i
never saw one of his machines walk so i
don't know what happened to his work
okay's efforts were successful
and there was a group in tbilisi who was
interested
in walking machines for forestry
applications
they did have a small scale model
walking but with mechanical coordination
not electronic
after the late 70s i lost
contact and i don't think that
they were very seriously involved in
walking machines after that
there was no i never heard of a project
in the soviet
union comparable to the adaptive
suspension vehicle program
in the united states what about
elsewhere in europe or
japan in finland uh professor halmay
at the university of helsinki i believe
uh i know he worked with rama reppala i
believe is the firm
and uh i think it was that work as far
as i know that led to the
at the same time we were both assistant
and
he invited reiko tamapic from
the university of belgrade because he
knew of tomovich's work on artificial
hands
uh purely by chance
when i took my language exams for my phd
i
took a french exam and a russian exam
and for the french exam
i took a i used a translation of one of
tamavitch's books called
repetitive analog computers so i already
knew
about him when he came to usc
and because of that we became acquainted
and he had just published a paper
on uh creeping gates for
um the possibility of using
caterpillar kind of creeping gates for
a robot a machine and i was very
interested in that
so he said do you think we could build a
quadruped
i said yeah i think we could well first
he said a biped said no
that's too hard he said how about a
quadruped i said i think
so so we started working together
that's how it got started and what were
some of the other
works that were influential that had an
influence on you and
how you approached okay
there wasn't much going on at that time
i had a connection with rancho los
amigos rehabilitation hospital
and through that connection i became
better aware
of the existing state of prosthesis
lower extremity prosthesis
and the functional requirements that was
important
and it's very pleasing to me that that's
come to fruition now
in in applications of clinical
applications
um much later
japanese research i became aware of
japanese research and
had a joint research project nsf project
with the portland harbor research
institute
this was in
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about 19
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it was in 1992.
the japanese had a machine called aqua
robot
which they constructed specifically
for the inspection of seawall
foundations
and they wanted to improve their machine
and we wanted to work with
them and we did work together and it
looked promising
until the japanese economy tanked and
they lost their funding
so we had several years of good
cooperation
including a
at that time a japanese
professor at the post graduate school
yotaka kanayama
so we did have a good
cooperation going with the japanese but
they couldn't get any more money so that
was the end of that
however i learned things from them what
are the future challenges in robotics
right right that's a very hard question
robots are here to stay they'll become
more pervasive
so maybe what
it might turn out that the biggest
challenge is what dr becky was talking
about
today
we don't have there does not exist a
field called robot
ethics we don't
understand very well
how to assign responsibility for
the mistakes that are bound to occur so
i think the biggest challenge is
that is the interface between humans and
robots
very very big challenge there of course
there are many others
and technologically speaking i think i
see actuators
is the most serious challenge we have
nothing approximating natural human
muscle fiber or animal muscle fiber
that's lacking altogether so that's a
huge challenge i don't see
any anything on the horizon really that
i know about
those are the two problems i would
single out
what do you see as the the most
promising kinds of applications
and the kinds of things we'll see robots
doing more commonly
i think it's pervasive again i like what
george said today robots will be
everywhere
we're going to have vehicles
operating on highways without human
drivers i'm sure of it
and that's a very dangerous kind of
robot so liability questions have to be
resolved there
um military robots is obviously going to
continue
i understand that this year the united
states air force spent more money
on unmanned aircraft than a procurement
of unmanned aircraft than it did
of banned aircraft for the first time
those aren't robots yet but they will be
increasingly so
so i see explosive growth in military
robotics
and explosive growth in civilian
applications
i really like the idea of
robots as assistants for home health
care but i think it's very far off i
think that's a really hard
problem what do you think are some of
the potential
social implications of all these
different types of robots and these
different kinds
huge huge they could make us redundant
they could if we assign enough
responsibility to robots
and if we give them enough independence
which is a very
very dangerous subject
we could become redundant
i think we probably will do you see that
as something
has that been something this knowledge
been something that you've
been able to work into how you
how you develop your work at all
no i don't think it has anything to do
with anything i've done
um no
do you think i mean today one of the
questions that um
professor vikki brought up was this
notion of
engineering education and how some of
these ideas about
the societal aspects of it
or the ethical aspect so it could be
brought into
education and design how would you see
that
i think it's a legal problem
i don't see engineers doing the job
of of
lawyers and judges
i think my feeling is the engineering
community has a responsibility to
escalate the means by which we
communicate with robots
so that it approaches natural language i
think that's
not hard to do i think we can do it
right now
if we decide it's important
of course i'm speaking only of text i'm
not talking about
spoken communication so you mentioned
this notion of robot ethics as being
something that's going to be a very
important
aspect of robotics in the future so
how would you see it so in the sense
then the engineers would
be interacting more with you know judges
or some other people
like any other people
like any other product
it's lawyers who work with juries and
judges to determine
liability for injuries
or death of human beings as a
consequence of the functioning machinery
i don't see robots as being much
different in that regard
except for the ability of robots to act
more pervasively and more
autonomously
is there anything that you'd like to add
before the end that you think we missed
yeah i think it's
i think it's vitally important
when dealing with potentially lethal
robots whether they're automobiles or
military machines
or robotic surgery i think it's very
important
to have the top level of software
written in a way that can be discussed
in a courtroom
and i think it's doable today
do you see a lot of work going in that
direction no
i'd like to see a lot why not why do you
think it's not a it hasn't become a real
issue till just now
and as dr becky pointed out the
drones in afghanistan aren't robots but
they
could become robots at any time
the air force and the government decide
to do so
and that causes that to jump right out
in our faces we
must face issues of transparency and
accountability
involving human lives or injury to
humans we have to face it
right now and i think we're not
i don't i think it's too new
well good luck with your work thank you
thank you very much i'm delighted to
have a chance to talk to you thank you
very much
to talk to you thank you okay
i've actually and just in terms of what
you're saying about this language
developing the language i've been
hearing that
um that theme coming up recently
so have you you have anything do you
have any familiarity with prologue
no but i'm gonna check it out
yeah i've done some for a lot of
programming good excellent
what what compiler did you use oh it was
this was uh 1992.
maybe quintus perhaps it was on a pc
oh it's on a pc that's surprising it was
that or
maybe it was turbo prologue it might
have
yeah because it was a runtime
compiler okay well
uh there are many forms of prologue now
but there is a prologue standard there's
an iso standard since
the year 2000 and that's important in
the future prologue i think
when i say prologue i should probably
use quotations about it
around its logic programming that i
think must be used
yeah i also have a chapter on liability
for
becky's book that he's editing on robot
ethics good for you
so yeah maybe i'll come out how are you
on the list
i did list i did list in graduate school
okay so you you know about
uh common list and object-oriented the
c-loss object standard
yeah a little bit and um yeah i was
working in mathematica
so actually it's very list operated
languages
lips allegro lisp and allegro prologue
works
blendedly together and i think they've
got it right i think it's a mistake
to move object-oriented programming into
prologue it confuses the picture it
makes it
if you try to do that it makes it hard
to read prologue
and the idea of prologue is to tease the
logic out of the quote and
expose it on top but something better
than
will develop i'm sure