start by telling us where you're born
where you grew up and went to school
okay i was born in southern illinois
murphy's brother illinois
grew up in small towns in illinois i
went to
went to high school in normal and then
to
the university of illinois champaign got
a mechanical engineering degree
then i went up to minnesota to get a
master's degree
and i i went to minnesota because i
heard they had a good controls group and
a
good controls people up there and i
wanted to do controls and i got up to
the mechanical engineering department
and realized all the good controls
people are actually in
the electrical engineering department
and uh found
somebody though by the name of max
donath who was working in robotics which
was
about as close as i could get to what i
wanted to do and that was in 1984.
um and so fall of 84 was when i started
uh
reading the literature trying to
understand what this field was about and
it was a really exciting time in
robotics
some of some seminal papers had just
come out things like
hybrid force control craig and rayburt
uh
impedance control from neville hogan and
these kinds of things were coming who
are starting to come out
stiffness control from you know
salisbury and and
uh i remember artificial potentials from
osama khatib and
it was exciting and and uh every time i
read a paper it was a different way of
thinking about problems and then i'd
start to see how the people
like matt mason was were looking at
manipulation problems and thinking about
things completely differently than a
mechanical engineer did and so um
that was back i think the mid-80s was
when we thought
robotics was everybody was was still a
little uh
naive i think about how hard the
problems were and uh
i i while i was in in minneapolis got
involved with the honeywell
they were working on a darpa project
called intelligent task automation and
there were a couple different forms of
that one was a big vehicle that was
driving it i think it's out in denver at
an autonomous vehicle but ours was a
manipulation problem and we
worked on um
assembling honeywell microswitches for
the uh it was a
i think some kind of a switch that was
used in some military components it was
really just a robotics problem i
remember exactly it had
17 parts to it 15 of them were different
and i can remember
each of those parts because i worked on
the vision problem and trying to find
them in a tray and
locate them and then the idea was to
um assemble them into a complete switch
automatically and uh
we worked with adept technology and jim
maples and
and some of those guys we had uh a force
control the depth that
had force feedback gosh i want to say
was
we had a jr3 i remember the four sensors
i remember
uh a board that could do 16
16 megaflops i think you know these
things that just seemed like incredible
numbers
at the time which are nothing now and we
could do uh
you know getting to play with just
cutting edge at work and then and then
we
uh that also on that project where
people like stanford research institute
bob bowles and
global part recognition system
uh their relationships to a lot of these
people i had read about and you know i
think osama cathy was somewhat
interested
tom binford was somewhat related and and
i remember um
feeling kind of isolated at honeywell
because i would come in at uh
we're doing computer vision on a vax 750
and um
i would come in at five o'clock at night
when everybody was going home so that i
could have
the whole uh machine to myself to do you
know image processing and things and
then
and then when they came in to date i
would i would go home to sleep and
and then i remember
one of the bob's uh researchers
jim herson came out and jim worked all
night long
i learned how to hack i learned i
learned that it's okay to work uh
work these kind of hours that other
people do this too and uh
uh that was you know that and i saw this
side of
how to how to solve these problems and
how to work on them harder that was
that was exciting and so um
did a few things after that i guess and
then
ended up eventually i'd say
uh left the country for a while worked
overseas and then came back and worked
at motorola and software engineer
actually i was learning the
telecommunications industry this is in
the early 90s when
or late 80s when cell phones are just
starting to take off in the u.s and
digital community digital wireless
communication people had this idea you
could you could actually send digital
data over
uh wireless uh and it was a great time
uh for the
to be in that kind of community to be
working in that but i i realized i
really
liked robotics
and uh and i heard one of my friends had
gone to this robotics phd program at
carnegie mellon that it just started and
i was thinking about other schools i
think in berkeley or mit but he
convinced me to go there and then i
ended up
leaving what was a really hot field uh
data communication data
telecommunications uh
and think of this in like 1988 89 and
then
going into a field that was actually not
too popular at that time which was
robotics people had kind of woken up to
how hard some of these problems were
and uh and and so it went
went back it ended up in pittsburgh and
spent five years there so
so that was a whole lot of uh stuff you
did during your master's degree
yeah yeah um so how did so once once you
started working on these projects how
how did you get into contact with so
many people or how did you get involved
in the honeywell project was
that a grant that your advisor had or
were these projects that you were
doing as part of your with honeywell i
was uh
let's see i think i was when i got to
minnesota as a master i was on a
fellowship and then i was
looking for do some outside work after
that finished and make some money and
you know somebody put me in contact i
think john crum who
is at microsoft research he uh
uh he had somehow gotten a position
there said oh they're hiring students so
i went out
and uh and immediately started to
abandon my research
uh at the u at the university because
the problems we were working on at
honeywell were
really exciting and and uh and uh
and so that's how i got involved in
there and that really opened my eyes to
to i think uh you know some of the
the real cutting edge work that was
going on on the west coast but also
their connections to the east coast as
well
you know coming from the midwest you can
get a
little isolated sometimes so that was a
good it was a good move to go to
honeywell and i spent a couple years
there working so
yeah oh okay so what did you end up
writing your master's thesis on
um
i think the title i probably have it
over here actually
uh optimal positioning optimal location
of
uh assembly tasks in a micro in a
manipulator workspace i think it was
um yeah i remember there uh uh
in 85 a paper came out at ikra
uh yoshikawa the famous manipulability
paper
uh that sort of uh gave a way of
analyzing
how near singularities you were what are
some of the problems with
with the way manipulators were
configured and i started
looking at read that paper my advisor
max stones suggested i look at it
because we were
working on a robotic assembly at the
time and
um i realized i needed to simulate
uh simulate robot motion and all that so
then i what did i do i
uh i wrote my own robot simulator i
remember yeah i wrote my own robot
simulator
really simple graphics and see um and i
used the equations that
lou paul published in uh i think it was
called the international journal of
robotics and automation at the time
on the puma 560 which was a manipulator
we were using
and it turned out those equations were
wrong
and i uh was too lazy to
to to sit down with a pencil and paper
and
rederive them myself to get them right
so i i heard about this
computer program that we do algebra
symbolic algebra called maxima
so instead of sitting down with pencil
and paper uh to to to uh
program or to to derive the kinematic
equations forward and inverse for
puma i uh i learned lisp
so i could learn maxima so that i could
learn how to uh
derive these equations um uh
symbolically on the computer
and then with that it's sort of all you
realize oh wow i can i can actually
calculate determinants of
huge matrices automatically i can take
you know i can reduce the computation
time computation was a really big deal
back then to try to reduce that to
reduce the calculations and
so then i figured out ways we could i
could uh
kind of trim the prune trees to search
for
optimal locations of these assembly
tasks and so that's
that's kind of how the master thesis
came out i thought about that for a long
time actually
did you ever talk to luke paul about uh
contact you know i i met him once
uh as a when i was a student helper at
an international symposium on robotics
research isr i met him once
uh i guess i i was really intimidated i
didn't have the guts to say
uh how come your equations were wrong
i'm sure i wouldn't have said that yeah
so and i remember yeah i remember after
i had
coded all this and it wasn't working
somebody said didn't you know those
equations wrong yeah
like everybody knew that i don't know if
that's true or not but uh
i'm not sure everybody so who did you
work with when you got to
carnegie mellon uh carnegie mellon uh my
advisor
uh ph the advisor was pradeep khosla
he was uh he's an electrical engineer he
was a young assistant professor at the
time
now he's the dean of engineering there
i started off again i was working in
assembly looking at assemblability of a
mechanism and doing cad based design for
assembly and then i was lucky to get a
fellowship from the
army and sort of made me a free agent
and so there's a
another grad student there they've been
working on visual surveying for a couple
years
and uh looked like a fun problem uh got
back to
trying to do fast vision uh computer
vision some um
again this is back in the early 90s so
a lot different than these days and how
quickly we could do computations and uh
and that was exciting i think
trying to get you know cameras to do
fast tracking of objects and then
um um you know bring that into the servo
loop of the manipulator and this is
again with
puma 560s we had three of them we used
simultaneously called the the troika bot
um and then i i thought oh you know i'd
be interesting i'd worked with force
control a bit when i was at honeywell so
i thought why don't i want to look at
the
how how do you do force and vision
together and i still have a problem that
still interests me
how is it that you decide when to switch
sensing modalities and
and how can you use them in
complementary ways and i still
you know still think about that and even
though today i'm working in the micro
nano world uh
still those kind of things this kind of
thing still are on my mind what do you
think of the hardest problems in that
area of relating force and vision
hardest problem well i think
in visual surveilling i think right away
you recognize the hardest problem in
visual surveilling was the vision
problem
yeah we could track objects but it was
you know it wasn't
under under artificial conditions but
but the vision problem is the hardest
part to solve uh
you know in force control it was it was
a
contact uh uh going from non-contact to
contact states you know instabilities
and things like that
were really hard that was one of the
things that was i thought was kind of
cool was i could show how using vision
i could do really high speed impacts
because the manipulator knew if it was
getting ready to hit something i mean it
was so simple
but it was sort of like yeah i mean
that's it's not the way we do it when we
know we're getting near something we
we were changing our parameters a little
so that
that was kind of interesting i think but
yeah um
so so the vision problem and also a hard
problem was just having a
good enough environmental model we had
to have some kind of model of the
environment and uh
uh how do you create that uh where does
that come from how do you parametrize it
and then how do you prepare the system
for uh
changing from contact to non-contact
states and for dealing with these
uncertainties
so what were some of the first attempts
you made to do that kind of
environmental modeling
i think back this is back boy this is
back in the days of um
uh silicon graphics and there he had we
had some
machines that you know big huge machines
cost a lot of money that
do you know a little
uh solid models and and then uh there
was uh
gosh i remember right deneb was that a
company that had a uh a robot simulation
model
that uh that that so so i would
represent the
just as a boundary uh
uh boundary representations uh in there
so uh that was
so i would i would try to use yeah
commercial packages and kind of
break into them and use them use their
engines to
to do some of the computations and
what were some of the what was the
troika the first uh sort of material
robot that you were working with
uh no i worked with uh i worked with
adept robots in minnesota i had a five
we had one of the first five
axis of depths there i think well i used
to say the first
5x i don't know if it was but we
actually had an extra degree of freedom
on the uh
on the end effector that gave us a fifth
degree of freedom that was one of the
first honeywell we had one
we also had a puma hunting while we did
this kind of laser-based
visual circling kind of approach uh
there but those were the yeah the first
manipulators i worked with and then at
uh
in pradeep's lab at uh at cmu we had
we had the trike bot with three pumas we
also had the dd arm
uh the direct drive arm this is the
second one i think the first one was
out of takeo kanate's lab and pradeep
was a student there
and working on that and then we had the
second dd arm and
i didn't work on that too much i did a
lot of
real time you know we had a home brewed
real-time operating system called
cameron did a lot of hacking of that
and great way to learn
everything about uh you know from from
voltages and bits and bytes up to
jacobians and
manipulator mass matrices and things
like that so
and what was your thesis element uh
thesis was called something like
port-based agents
uh for assimilating disparate sensory
feedback that was
the idea of trying to trying to identify
components of this
complicated system that used several
different robots with force and vision
feedback and
represent those as as as these agents
that were port-based and then
how do you connect those ports together
uh to get
this you know more intelligent behavior
i mean a big focus of our lab at the
time
at carnegie mellon was just trying to
figure out ways to make robots easier to
program because
of course the thing we learned a lot in
the 80s was
you can build this nice piece of
hardware but programming it was a
nightmare
and the software and putting it all
together was was quite
uh was a challenge and so we were always
looking at different ways getting
reconfigurable real-time operating
systems doing iconic based programming
uh
trying to to take components of the
system and and represent them
you know this is back when c plus plus
and object oriented programming was just
starting to be appreciated and
what it could do and so you kind of take
some of those lessons from that
and bring it together yeah
and what did you do after you graduated
so
um i got about halfway through my phd
i had two kids my wife my wife my wife
and i had two kids during that time and
i realized
i was working on manipulators and
manipulators weren't very popular in the
early 90s and all the work had been done
and i'm like geez um what should i do
and um so towards the end of my thesis i
started thinking you know what if i took
all everything i'd done with force and
vision control and instead of
doing it at large scales what i did at
small scales like under
microscopes and i looked at micro
positioning and you know there could be
some interesting applications there
um and i remember going to pradeep my
advisor
was probably my fourth year of my thesis
i said you know what if we did this
what if we worked on this i'd played
with some microscopes and kind of got an
idea of what i thought some of the hard
problems were and he uh
predicts uh he he he wasn't interested
he was more
focused on other strategic interests and
so i said that's fine i'm going to just
finish this off and then i
sent out tons of applications for
faculty positions i think 40 some or
something and got almost no response
and but i was fortunate
to get uh been an offer from the
university of illinois chicago
uh the mechanical department there as an
assistant professor
and so when i left cmu after working on
these manipulators big manipulators i
realized
i swore i would never work on anything
that wasn't hot
you know that wasn't uh because i'm like
you know that's
that's where it became obvious to me so
i started looking at a few areas and one
was medical robotics i had seen a cmu a
great talk by russ
taylor when he was at ibm doing dog
surgery or
dog hill get dog hip implants and things
like that with ibm robots
that looks like a cool area of the
future but that's hard to get into
um and uh but i looked at that i looked
at continuing with what i was doing just
because i knew it but i
wasn't um and you know you looked at a
few different areas and then but i
started uh i found an old
probe station integrated circuit probe
station some basically it's a microscope
with some positioners on it and
so i got my hands on one of those and
started
um adding motors and
things to it and and this is back before
i had grad students to do this stuff for
me and i had to you know
turn this basically just an integrated
circuit manual probe station into a sort
of an automated system for
for trying to implement some of the
ideas from my phd thesis though but on a
small scale
and that's when i started working in
micro assembly and
one of the big motivators for that i
have to say was
iros uh one of the the two big robotics
conferences iras was in pittsburgh in 95
the same
you know almost i you know within days
of when i finished my phd and was
on my way to illinois back to illinois
as a professor and uh
two papers were at iros that i remember
specifically one was out of toshi
fukuda's group and fumiarai was the
first author on that
uh and i can't remember uh and and the
other was from ron fearing at berkeley
and i don't remember the exact titles of
those i have them written down but
both the articles both of those papers
at iros were on
uh the forces that are involved when you
manipulate small objects so as things
get very very small
you know in robotics at that point if
you're doing manipulation you thought of
two things you thought of friction and
you thought of gravity
uh and inertia you know you thought but
basically you know you've got forces due
to gravity you got forces due to
friction and then all of a sudden as
things come very small
uh because the volumes are so small the
inertial forces of gravitational forces
become negligible
friction becomes meaningless almost in a
sense because it's it's
you're looking at much smaller scale
phenomena and you start thinking about
things like electrostatic forces
um van der waals forces these kind of
more more chemistry
chemical kinds of forces that you're
used to learning about in
in chemistry or physics classes
and and you realize uh that our sense of
of how to handle objects is completely
different completely foreign made it an
interesting research
there's some interesting research issues
to be explored and that's what uh
fumi and toshi and ron had identified in
these papers and did
you know a nice job of communicating and
that was a good time for me to read
those papers i was thinking about
new directions i'd been thinking about
going this way and i realized
there was some there were maybe there
are some fundamental research issues
that that had some legs something that
was going to last a while
it also happened to be in the mid 90s
was the
kind of the golden years of mems
microelectromechanical systems
uh you know accelerometers and pressure
sensors were out there
uh airbags were in cars and were making
a lot of start these companies were
starting to make money
and people had all these ideas for for
new mems devices
flow controllers these things uh to do
projections of uh
video using little tiny micro mirrors
that moved and uh
crazy ideas uh uh out there uh
but there's a huge learning learning
curve to getting into mems you've got to
learn microfab you've got to really be
you got to have the facilities and so uh
but okay
the story the story i made was what if
we could uh and
other people made the same time too what
if we could instead of microfabricating
them with natural
the normal processes what if we could
actually assemble small things and so
started looking at that and um
and and found you know yeah there's
there's a lot of
issues to explore there uh i was back at
the time at the national science
foundation in the us when howard moraf
was running the
robotics program there and howard was a
great uh supporter
of young professors young people coming
in like me and i remember my first
career award proposal i submitted i
think like a lot of people you submit a
proposal that wants to solve every
problem
in robotics you think you're you know
i've got in lab and i'm going to do that
and i think
um my proposal did that it did a lot of
things but i called howard and asked him
you know about the review because it got
rejected
uh process and tried to get some
feedback from him and he picked out one
paragraph he said that people were
really interested in my proposal on
microassembly so then i wrote my next
proposal just on microassembly
and i think after that
got funded you know
five six seven proposals in a row never
got a rejection and then
um realized hey this is a good this is a
good research area i can sell it uh it's
got good topics it's interesting i'm
learning new things and uh people give
me money so uh
um and about that time then max donath
my advisor at minnesota called me up and
he said i hear things are going well we
have some openings up here would you be
interested and uh
famous last words it's never hurts to
send a cv and uh
so i went up to minnesota and after
three years in illinois chicago
and the great thing about minnesota was
india's it's got a really good
microfabrication facility first rate
good education of students for that
and then also good characterization
facilities as electron microscopy
facilities and
these kinds of things you need and so i
really was able to leverage that it
really took my my
uh work to uh the capabilities we could
do we could actually start to make mems
devices things like that
so that was 98 i think i moved up there
it was also that was also the year i met
a
um a young kid in china by the name of
you son who became one uh
eventually convinced to come to
minnesota and do his phd with me and he
uh
he did a lot of interesting work for us
in cell manipulation and we worked in
manipulating individual biological cells
so we moved from just manipulating and
assembling parts to
to moving into the bio area and other
people you know start thinking about
these lines and you just try to to be
there and and move into these directions
and then so
um i think 2002 we finally yeah i got a
system to work where we could handle my
individual cells we could make
measurements and uh
publish i think some of some of the
first work in that area that was really
uh
interesting um that also happened to be
and then i happened to uh
been about four years at minnesota i
happened to get a an email from
a place called eth uh and zurich wasn't
quite sure
what it actually was uh swiss
federalists do technology in zurich and
uh
um just an email said oh we've got an
opening uh
there's a professor who's retiring and
we've got an institute that you could
that needs to be uh taken over and we
think he would be an interesting
candidate for that
and the job comes with and they listed
you know seven staff positions
and and uh yearly uh recurring research
reserve you know and potentially you
know millions for startup and things
like that and you look at that and you
start to realize
you mean i don't have to be on a
three-year funding cycle anymore i don't
have to think about my next nsf and
whether that hits or not and what's
gonna happen and this will let me think
long-term and so
famous last words it never hurts to send
a cv and
came out it was june beautiful june uh
it was june 6th i remember it probably
uh
came out a beautiful day mountains are
out and interviewed
and you fall in love it's easy to fall
in love with this place on a beautiful
day and uh you see the facilities and
the people and it's a
zurich's a beautiful city and so i
eventually moved here and so i've been
here
nine and a half years or eight and a
half years now so
it was two thousand 2000 i actually
moved here
yeah fall 2002 beginning of 2003. so
okay yeah just to go back a little bit
um
so prior to this like eros 95 kind of
papers that you noted was was it your
sense there was much
um interaction between the men's
community and the robotics community no
people were starting to think about it
um you know there was talk i know back
in the 80s
actually when i was at cmu there was a
group in japan uh miora hirofami miora
was working on trying to make a silicon
i think he called us against silicon
dragonfly you know trying to make
something that could fly
out of mem's technology and a very very
difficult problem um
at that time though if you talk if you
went to the mems community and you
talked about assembly and i mean i went
to motorola when i was in chicago and
tried to convince them about this
i remember a quote from one of the
motorola engineers when i was telling
what i was doing and he said well if
you're doing assembly you're doing
something wrong
um you know that's not the way to do
this um
you know and it's like yeah i mean i
understand his point you know he's not
gonna
motorola is not gonna build a product
that's gonna be microassembled at that
point but
but there was still that feeling in
the mems community that uh you know the
point is batch fabrication the point
isn't to do this cereal thing
you gotta you gotta look at that so
other people like carl boringer and
i know ken uh ken goldberg and folks
were looking at
parallel assembly and ways of moving
several objects together
this is kind of the beginning of some of
the ideas in self-assembly and
out of that community so so there were
starting to be interests
uh in in assembling these small things
but it wasn't
uh but the main mems community they were
i mean they were riding high you know
they were they were the king of the hill
and you know in research in a lot of
ways and
huge numbers of conferences and a lot of
success
and you know also an industry with
seeing their products coming or seeing a
lot of the technologies develop for them
coming to fruition commercially so
and would you say that the micro
assembly sort of research area now is
more of a
sub genre of robotics or mems or a sort
of hybrid
i think yeah i think well i kind of
classify now as micro nano robotics i
mean
there there are somewhat different
fields but the people all people tend to
work in them
at the same you know um
but i think it's a subfield of robotics
more than anything um
but i think we've got more uh respect in
the memphis community than we used to
have and that's because of people like
fumiorai
and carl boringer who who are you know
first-rate engineers and scientists and
they go in there and they're
well-regarded and i think
you know i think you know at first
i mean like everything you come in you
don't know what you're doing you look
like an idiot and then and then
you know you start to understand the
issues and you start to speak each
other's language and understand why
why they have their viewpoint and you
bring that together i think it
um so we we you know we're not uh
i think yeah we're we're not a part of
the mems community although we
all of us working in it usually a lot of
us are have close connections to it so
but we're still
my home's robotics uh still uh i
consider that these are the main
conferences i go to
where my main interests still are so so
as a subfield how
how did it evolve and uh of micro nano
robotics and do they have a sort of
centralized conference
well we still kind of uh hang on to uh
uh icra and iros we still have our
sessions and workshops there i mean
that's
we i was a part of spie for a while the
society of
photonic or whatever uh whatever
it's optical something uh uh
engineers uh we we were part of that for
a while um
a little we we do have we go to mem i go
to some of the mem's conferences i go to
nano
uh you know i'm a trans editor of the
ieee transactions on nanotechnology
um but um
but it kind of um evolved
you know i i mean i think that the path
we took is similar to a lot of folks
where you get in you start to do
assembly
um i think we did we started doing more
fabrication and things like that than a
lot of other groups but a lot of folks
just
focus on precision uh assembly and
precision positioning which is a hard
and important problem for industry
um
[Music]
and then you get in there and then you
you start thinking smaller but but
one person that was ahead of all of us
in this i think was ari riccia at
university southern california um and
ari
uh before you know well i was stinking
micro uh ari's already three orders of
magnitude smaller
and he's in the nano world and he's
talking chemistry and surface
fort effect things things that at the
time i didn't know what the heck he was
talking about and uh
but he was he was seeing the potential
of work some of his programmable
uh assembly ideas of in the macro world
and putting them into the nano world
and working with a atomic force
microscope scanning probe microscopes
and automating those and bringing
robotics in which i think was a
uh i mean i i i looked at i thought
about it and i well that's
that's way too far of a leap for me but
ari was there working and he
he did a great job and has done a great
job in
pulling robotics into that and and
helping a lot of us see the potential
uh and he also does the not just the the
you know the vision the research vision
but it also hasn't done a lot of work in
helping to
make sure there's funding there so that
the research can continue he served as
uh editor-in-chief of the transactions
in nanotechnology to
brought to help bring that uh journal uh
up to higher standards and so ari was
yeah in the nano world i think was
really one of the
the pioneers of that so what was the
first micro robotic system that you
built
the first one would have been um
when i was at illinois uh in chicago i i
found that
somebody had in in a lab there was a an
old it was called a wentworth
uh probe station it had a microscope
probably a mitutoyo microscope on it
and some position manual positioners uh
and i remember you know thinking about
microassembly how can i get
i had i had a whopping 30 000
startup package uh
this is 1995. 30 000 wasn't very much
then uh yes
even but uh i i didn't have a lot of
money and i was looking how to get
something going and i heard
in one of the labs there was this
wentworth probe station
and no statement nobody doesn't belong
to anybody and in 10 minutes i was down
there
i think you know in half an hour i had a
heavy thing uh
had it did have a table we had actually
moved the whole thing into my lab
uh and i started then getting mechanical
drawings on it and we just we kind of
retrofitted it
with motors put on just dc servo motors
and bot control you know
low cost controllers and and took this
manual probe station for moving wafers
and probing them under a microscope and
then we uh
we i should say i uh got the system to
work and then and then
my students went with people like vic
vicker media barbershop vikramaditya one
of my my students and
and uh one of my my first real phd
student and then
you know i worked with him and taught
him okay here's how you do visual
circling how's how we track parts and
and we
you know and he he's smart guys at
seagate now
and he picked all that up and really
pushed things and then you train and you
know you get other students who joe was
one of my students he was interested
and i got some money and bought an
atomic force microscope ahead and
so the days where i you know did
anything to save a few hundred dollars
and i negotiated with the company just
to get
the key part i want i can't believe they
sent that to me nobody would do that now
they just sent the
the inner component of the afm the whole
fm costs a couple hundred thousand and
they just sent me the inner component
for like nothing
i can't i can't believe they did that
now that i think back about it but uh
nobody would do that now um but
[Music]
you know we started building our own
systems from scratch to do
micro and nano manipulation and um
and those but those are all manipulation
based systems um
uh then so what was the assembly problem
what were you trying to
actually build with that as a as a test
target
well some of the work some of the work
was just fundamental we were we were
trying to do things like come up with
with good models of microscope good
camera models of optical models and
microscopes
uh uh if you calibrate a
uh back in the day that psy i don't know
how people calibrate cameras these days
and
i don't hear that much about it but you
know there was sci approach ibm
developed a camera calibration routine
we all used
but the real problem with the sci
approach was that you had to have 3d
information you couldn't just give it a
flat
you know a bunch of dots they had to
have a there had to be a depth to them
in order to get this
algorithm to conserve and you to um um
the word is escaping you to the out to
uh to converge to conference and
conservative okay to get the
algorithm to converge and um so that
algorithm wouldn't work so then how can
we
calibrate a microscope you know that way
then we've got to come up with new
models so that is a fundamental problem
uh another one was
um you know we wanted to
do high precision positioning a lot of
people had looked at subpixel sampling
so we looked at okay how much
can i get you know can i get below a
wavelength of light
how far down can you go then with the
afm we started going and
looking at the mechanics of manipulation
in other words what are some of the
surface forces involved and how can we
quantify those and how can we model them
things like van der waals or when is it
electrostatics
surface tension if you've got a human so
a lot of it was
was was very fundamental work um
um and then i would get some industry
projects like i worked with seagate when
i was in minnesota and they had a little
uh
motor a tiny little motor they wanted to
put on the end of the head of a re
on the read right head to nano position
the read right head
well turned on that motor the design
they gave us needed assembly and
it had these little tiny magnets that
were
a couple hundred microns about a
fifth of a millimeter on a edge and
about a half a millimeter long and those
four of those had to be picked up and
and assembled um
um how do you you know that was a system
i had a telecommunications company that
came to me and wanted a micro micro
arrays of micro switches
can we design micro actuators and so we
looked at a lot of different designs
some of them were kind of
microassembly some of them didn't and so
we were kind of driven
you know research-wise nsf-wise was more
fundamental work
and then industry-wise we would try to
find interesting projects to see get
applied that seemed like a good strategy
at the time so
um so was there anything that you
when it was assembled you'd call it that
the micro robot i mean a micro motor is
a sort of component
yeah so we used it we just use the term
microrobotic system but when i got to
eth
this was remember this is in 2000 late
2002
all of a sudden i had
many many more resources available to me
than i had before and and um which is
why i came here
uh but but when you actually have those
resources anything what am i going to do
what what can i really do to make an
impact
you start to try to think long term
you just try to think of the things that
you thought were interesting and so i go
back to you know russ taylor for
instance in the micro
the robotic surgery talk that i saw back
in the early 90s
i was thinking of that and you know that
that's a field that
that's place that's a field that's going
to go somewhere
um so you're back at 2002 there's two
two products
just had just come on the market and
we're being uh they're in past clinical
trials i think and they're being
commercialized we're in clinical trials
and one was
intuitive surgicals da vinci robot
robots doing surgery while the surgeons
across the room tele-operating them
um and the other was the the given
imaging camera pill they swallow the
pill and it goes through your body and
takes
50 000 images over about eight hours and
saves them to a disc you're wearing and
uh and those are exciting you know i
mean these technologies were out there
um
and again it was like the mems uh um
in the mid 90s you know it's that it was
you could see these fields rising and
you know it's a really bad time to get
into a field
when it's when it it's it's rising so
you know that way when you realize
people have been in this you know you
don't want you you think
uh you know i don't want to uh i don't
want to just jump into this right now
i want to try to figure out where it's
going to go i want to try to you know
predict where things are going to be
heading
and um
so we started thinking about you know
where might some of these fields be
heading and it seems like well it seemed
natural you know eventually with
intuitive surgical you want to get rid
of
the robots off to the side you want to
just swallow the robot like you swallow
the camera pill you know you want you
want to think if i can make these things
smaller what might they do
um and the other thing i realized uh
this is when
one of my postdocs at the time guy
worked for me for eight years carl
vollmers he was one of the first people
to come
come here with me and i had an eth
apartment up the hill here
and he was staying with me for a couple
months till he found a place
a little one room a one-bedroom place
and um
and we'd sit around and talk about what
our idea you know and we both realized
you know people are much more interested
in the things we were building than in
the processes we were using to build
them
we're making these microrobotic systems
to pick things up and assemble
but people always got much more
interested in in what it was we were
assembling
and the other thing carl and another one
of my phd students sean guan had worked
on we worked on different magnetic
materials
for making micro switches and things
like that and
so we had expertise in how to assemble
small things we had expertise in
magnetic materials and
and small things we were thinking i was
thinking
medical robotics is the future in a lot
of ways
but i don't want to just do an intuitive
clone i don't want to do
i want to do something different why
don't we see if we can make really small
things
and cut the tethers and so that's when
we first started making true micro
robots things that didn't have tethers
that moved on that were moving
without wires and um
uh that was you know 2003 we started
developing these ideas uh burke yeshen
moved
out here had about six or seven
when i came from minnesota to zurich uh
i think about seven or eight people came
with me counting family my family i
counted when 17 people moved from
minnesota to here when i came and uh
so we started thinking where are we
going to go with that burke yesterday
came out we started thinking you know
magnetic fields just make a lot of sense
because you can
project them over a certain distance
doctors are comfortable putting people
in magnetic fields
and we didn't know anything about
magnetics hardly except we materials we
knew i mean we knew a little bit uh
so burke built a uh
planar system
that took a little millimeter sized
nickel
micro robot that we micro assembled and
used external magnetic coils to drive it
through this maze
and move it through and we're like oh
you know maybe we can do something we do
the math and it's like yeah you're not
going to get one of these things to swim
through the heart
but you know if you can get near it you
might be able to get
just generate some motion so you know
you do physics modeling
um and so that was interesting we
started getting this vision of small
micro robots in the body and
and we thought we were the only person
with a vision
and then we found out what silva martel
was also was working at uh
he was a cold polytechnic at the time
and he had this idea of using mris to
guide
little particles it was good for us to
find that out it lit a fire under us to
move quicker and
so we um
started going along i started thinking
of how we might use these i i went back
i
like russ taylor comes up greg hager is
it at uh
hopkins was uh working with russ they
were thinking about eye surgery i also
talked to camera vera at cmu who was
working on a tool for doing
eye surgery and they were telling me
about how the forces are you know the
forces weren't known cam was saying we
should use some of these
manipulation devices we made some of the
force sensors we used to try to measure
some of these and quantify them and
um so we started looking at eye surgery
and we thought you know this would be a
good maybe this is a good
place to start so for for several years
we've been looking at how we might make
things that can
move through the eye you know we call it
a micro robot it's it's
it's a hunk of metal with some
functionalization on it and then the
whole robotics is really the
the field the way we generate the fields
on the outside but the the math for that
is
is pure uh redundancy control of
manipulators uh stuff it comes you know
it's stuff that's 25
uh going on 30 years old now a lot of
the fundamental work but but it's done
in a different way um
but that's when we started thinking yeah
cutting that's and that's when we start
making real micro robots and and now we
just keep going in that direction so
so it was the so you did the one that
went through the
magnetic maze was kind of the first one
what are some of the other
systems that you built well so we were
we were uh
we did that we were understanding uh our
models
uh we were just really doing physics and
trying to understand things and then um
uh allison okamura at hopkins i was
visiting there once and she says i've
got this really great student
he i think he would he would really uh
be great in your lab
jake abbott and so
jake came out and he spent three years
in my group and my
instructions to him when he got here was
you see what burke did with the planer
robot moving into the maze we want to do
that in 3d
okay since you know going from 2d to 3d
is often
trivial right so but seldom trivial
really right so um
uh and then uh jake uh he he started
basically at his own little team here
and started thinking uh how we might do
that and
came up with i think some some some
really interesting
technology we got a patent on it and and
uh
actually it's we've licensed it now to a
to a startup company that's trying to
using this technology to build
biomedical devices um
and um what's the company the company's
and scientific it's uh it's an eth
spin-off and
uh it's uh it's um
three of my former uh students are uh
the the the core people on it one's
one's the ceo one's a cto and the other
is the guy who's
basically product development he's
trying to figure out applications for
this
so when did they start out last fall so
so they're very new and uh and uh but
the idea now is you know you get old you
get along in your career and you get
you get to be my age you start thinking
do i need to publish another paper i
mean i really don't need another paper
but i do want to see the technology uh
you know in the real world at some point
and that's what we've got to do uh
either license it to somebody and let
them take it or
or see if you can like this is a this is
a bit of a leap to use some of this
stuff so we're
going to try to do it on our own and
partnering with other people there so
have there been other startups that come
out of them yeah so there's another one
called femtotools and they're successful
they sell product
they've got a five employees right now
they're growing and they basically this
goes back to our manipulation this is
where we got our start back in the early
90s
early 90s early 2000s this is back to
you sun
he he got a one of our force sensing
device that could make measurements of
scales that
couldn't get anything for selma handling
uh to work and then felix baylor
uh swiss student came in and took his
design and and really uh extended it and
kind of hardened it um did new things
with it and then felix
uh was interested in in seeing if he
could we knew there's a market for it
because every time i give a talk a lot
of
people would always come up and say oh
can i get one of these i really really
need something like this and
so um back i think in 2007 2008 felix
spun off this company's
and a few of my other people went with
them and
spun that off and that's uh i said
that's something
sell sales product and um
growing company and they sell they sell
micro manipulation systems
and uh tool grippers and force sensors
and
parts for that so so it's you know that
that's kind of sad it's satisfying to to
see your research get to a point where
somebody's willing to pay money for it
you know in the real world not just you
know
research so what about your other
collaborations with various
corporations i mean obviously you worked
at honey all well but um
other places where your work has been
used by
industry um well we've done we did a lot
of work with with seagate when we're in
minneapolis
um and then uh we we developed some
we developed some devices for the
telecommunications company which they
patented
uh and this is just before the telecom
crash in 2000 so then
plans change when when uh industries
crashed um
uh yeah i mean we work with we we've got
other companies
we're working with right now um
but but uh you know i think there's two
ways to make an impact
with your research one is to get
companies to use your your uh
technology and get it out there but the
other thing that you realize is probably
the more important one is to educate you
know bring in really good
students uh show them some interesting
area and then they they're the ones that
go out there and they start leading the
company
a guy like vikram at seagate
some of my folks got different companies
you know they
rise in the company i know and very
burk's abb was at abb
and led product development teams and
and now has moved into new areas
uh different areas and uh so you realize
it's the students the good ones you know
they're the ones that are really
carrying the torch when they get out
there in the industry and start
implementing these new technologies i
think so
and who are some of your other students
of any of them wound up in academia
as well oh yeah several so you you son
is it toronto
jake is it uh utah
university of utah i have a gyong
is it uh carnegie mellon um
arun a good nano fabrication guy
a arun who did some beautiful work uh
and carbon nanotube devices for me uh
he's just moved from sandia now to he's
moving to virginia
commonwealth university lee shendong i
should mention lee shin
lee shin joined my group i can't
remember 2003 or so i was looking for i
was actually
advertising for a somebody in the area
of biology
uh for a post doc and lician came to me
at a conference i knew lee shin from his
work in in fukuda's group
in japan in his phd thesis he'd done
beautiful nano manipulation
work and he said you know i'm um
i'd be interested if uh you know in
not maybe doing biology but working in
this other area and
i happened to arun who was a former
student of mine at minnesota
a master's student and also told me he'd
like to come back to switzerland as a
phd
and he was interested in similar topic
and then i also had a really good german
student dominic bell who's now ceo of
aeon and scientific and he joins all of
a sudden i had this nano group of really
first-rate people
lee shin and arun and dominic and then
some others joined and
um so that we that's where we
really how we did nano and the nano work
um got involved in there but oh alicia
is at michigan state that's how that
started so
alician is a professor there
um boy i should have a list i'm
forgetting people i'm sure but uh
they'll come back to me at some point
how many phds do you think you've been
like
i don't know this would be quite you
know i've never counted i don't even
know how many people work for me half
the time let's say uh
uh i don't know if i've had 20 25
um i guess i could count the number of
thesis i have on my bookshelf but
i know some of them don't give me the
final copies that's probably not right
so uh yeah but um
so um apart from students have there
have been some other really important
collaborators that you've worked with
over the years that have been
influential on your work development oh
gosh yeah let's see
i mean you know as a phd student i mean
you know i was two years
uh i think i'm actually older than nicos
pompani nicolopoulos but he was he was
ahead of me as a grad student and he was
sort of my
yeah big brother and he showed me uh
well he's greek
he didn't show me how to write good code
that's for sure
but he showed me uh uh you know uh how
to do math uh right and then
we did a lot of just you know lqr lqg
stuff um
that was good i mean of course you know
pretty but max don't have to you know
these people are good i mean and
and you know in illinois chicago i've
had you know
your professors that treat you well and
and mentor you and people like sobriety
going to minnesota uh who are i mean at
uh
university of illinois chicago and uh um
so so so that's been important and then
um
you know i mean people that are pretty
open with a lot of their their work and
and help us guide us into areas
the hopkins people have been good uh
russ russ taylor and john
greg hager mentioned them um
and then i mean the nano robotics
community and micro nano community i
think
you know we all sort of look at each
other and try to
take the next step and look at different
things so there's
you know in in in europe there's a lot
of good micro
uh robotics folks there's the group in
bezenson nicholas chair and
uh mika gautier some of those folks
there um
um up in germany there's uh sergey
fatikov and his micro
nano manipulation group up there um
you know oh and of course pablo dario at
pisa as uh
you know when i first got here he helped
me get into the eu uh
cycle and and become a part of the you
know the european union funding uh
uh cycle um
so i think um
i'm forgetting lots and lots of people
you know
you don't get there yeah but uh um
[Music]
you know and then uh we work with a lot
of folks into into different fields
uh um and
and and just uh uh being able to
interact a little you know with for
instance uh
biophysicists i mean a guy like howard
berg at harvard uh
who who did a lot of bacteria work i
spent a spent some time with him and
just
listening to you know a guy like that
who uh
was at the beginning of understanding
bacterial motors uh
you know 20-minute talk from him you
learn more in 20 minutes then you you
learn
a week at a workshop you know just
i think you know i mean you know
initially in robotics i mean i was
inspired by i mean you know to me you
know
people like i mean there's a
great paper uh erdmann there's a fine
motion planning paper
mike erdmann and uh you know i think
matt mason and russ taylor i think are
on that
uh you know these kinds of things these
kinds of people and seeing these these
work that just blows you away and you
know when you're you're just
just a mechanical engineer and you see
these different ways of approaching
problems is
you know when you're young is it's
really uh intimidating i remember when i
was at carnegie mellon
the first two phd thesis i saw
uh were ken goldberg's thesis and uh sri
nair
ken's at berkeley srinagar's at columbia
i remember my first semester going to
those and just thinking my god
this is what they expect me to do this
is this is unbelievable
you know to see the the quality work and
these guys are so well spoken and and uh
you know i you know that's why you go to
you know
you go to these places and it really
raises your your level right when you
see
people like that and it makes you want
to you know try to try to strive for
something like you know a guy like takeo
canada at
cmu uh running the vision autonomous
system center he was sort of he's my
grandfather my academic grandfather and
and seeing
the work ethic but the creativity uh
that
he has and um you know these these
these are the kinds of things that press
you so
so uh when you arrived at illinois and
uh
you could ask the same question about
minnesota so how were you received as a
robot assist with them
uh was it a mechanical engineering
department yeah were there other people
working in that area were you
were they trying to get into robotics
well so so you
so i arrived at illinois chicago in
95 assistant professor
in a lot of ways robotics was a bad word
back then um
and i think there were for good reason i
think first of all though the field had
over promised
in the 80s what it could deliver i also
think there were a lot of professors
there a lot of
researchers researchers academics who
didn't know what to do
they didn't have a good view of you know
what was where's controls going where
were some of the manufacturing
and so they said they were doing
robotics and they'd build little things
and there wasn't a lot of
there was just not a lot of depth into
thinking about what they were doing
and you know you look at the schlocky
little things and and if you're you know
a thermodynamicist working with you know
uh
you know statistical mechanical you know
doing some you know some pretty detailed
theory and you look at this stuff and
you know you kind of raise your eyebrows
like who are these jokers
and it can create you know bad
reputation for the field so you come in
there i remember
i remember during my interview at
illinois chicago i went into uh celtic
gucci was the department at the time and
so i went into his office to talk to him
and this is one of my first real
interviews as an academic and he
probably my only real interview at that
time actually you know he's looking at
my cv he says
phd in robotics so is this a real degree
i had just found out a heart attack i'm
like yeah it's a real degree
you know so um uh you know and i still
think
i still feel i still feel there are
people out there who still
see it that way i think in this in this
department here there's still people
that think you know
oh you guys are just building jump you
know there's nothing to it and you're
spilling stuff there's nothing uh
there's no depth to it and and the same
people haven't ever tried to build
something so they don't really
understand
the difficulties i think usually but um
yeah um but you know that's one of the
reasons you do it
is because it is it's so wide open i
think so
there's so much to do and um in terms of
funding over
over your career where where have you
saw funding and where have you received
funding
for your work well in the states it was
uh i mean the national science
foundation was very good to me
um onr i got the young investigator
award i got some i was on a couple darpa
grants
um uh and i had industry money coming i
get
some indus uh good industry money um
i never you know i never had a problem
in the states with funds um
other than you know my first year like
everybody but uh
but then i left before uh you know i
came here before
uh a lot of the
well i came here in 2002 and let's see
when was
the president there was a new president
around that time i think and that things
kind of changed then i think priorities
of the country changed and so
um
now here you know we have a basic
funding so i have a group and i can keep
people around for years i can keep
memory in the system i keep
chemists in the group i keep in a guy
who's an electrical engineer who's been
here 30 years and he designs
electronic boards for me and it's a key
part of our success
is being able to exactly get the kind of
electronics we need without
having to you know fit a round peg in a
square hole
um you know then i
have my systems engineers i have my you
know fundamental robotics field but i'm
able to keep that here so i've got that
basic funding but then here
uh in europe and in switzerland i mean
there's also the swiss national science
foundation
i'm a research counselor for that so i
also help determine how that money gets
distributed a little
i have some say in it and a lot
european union funds things switzerland
has a program that helps
it's more near-term products so it's
it's kind of a it's a federally funded
government program that
you don't want to do basic research on
it but it helps kind of develop a
product and so
with some of the startups we're able to
leverage that
money how does that work with
switzerland not being part of the eu but
still being able to get eu yeah so it's
changed since i've been here i mean it
used to be
uh if you got funded on an eu proposal
then switzerland had an agreement that
they would just
put the money into the eu proposal and
it would come back to you
but since that time it's changed and now
switzerland actually makes a
contribution
to the eu and then just based on the
evaluation of the proposals
some of that money comes back
so it's not uh one-to-one like it was so
it's
and that's the way switzerland behaves
here they um are good at
uh uh
let's see they they participate in the
eu uh when it's
when it works out well for them i should
say but um
um but that's a good they become a part
of the community and i think that's the
real benefit i've seen
of being a part of the european union
funding uh
cycle isn't necessarily uh i mean you
know you
do these interesting projects but it's
really it gives me a great chance to
meet um
and work with uh people all over europe
i mean you know people like paulo
and palidario in italy are
sergey up in germany or the folks in
france antoine feliere ferriera
the folks in bezensong um
people all over bulgarians you know
finns uh
so i think that's the one thing that
this that this has done is it's really
helped
at least my perspective it seems to
bring the science in europe
closer together and uh uh so that's done
that we get
we get some industry funds here i'm not
as hungry for that here as i was in the
u.s in the u.s i would
basically help develop products and give
patents if i could just to get money but
here it's like yeah we can be pickier
and choosier here we're not as
as we can we can choose our problems a
little more
our interests and what we think is best
so it's it's a bit of a different system
here
i just wanted to ask about so what what
do you see as the kind of the future of
micro robot nano robotics what are the
big sort of outstanding problems and
research directions
uh well i think i think um
you know in the immediate term what i'm
looking at are
first of all applications where how are
we going to use these what can they
really do
um um
i think there's there's really
interesting evidence that that targeted
delivery in in various parts of the body
can have dramatic impacts on recovery of
uh from diseases we see that in the
brain and
we're seeing that in the eye now in the
retina and
i'm sure as we start to rethink the way
we might get drugs there i think that's
gonna be really interesting to
to figure out okay how do we get things
on these robots how do we get them there
okay we that's one of the things we're
working on how do you how do you make
these things move
one of the big open issues uh is is the
imaging problem how are you going to see
these things and find them in the body
can you instantiate behaviors on them in
some way
so they they can behave much like a a
bacteria does where they're basically
following some kind of a gradient some
chemical gradient or light gradient or
ph or something like that
you know i think i think
that's where i'm i'm i'm looking and you
know if i were
starting my career over again uh and
building a lab and
and thinking about interesting problems
i i would love to work on
figuring out all these little molecular
mechanisms that are
that are i mean they're like they're
little tiny machines uh they're little
you know o-rings that you know
uh uh two kinds of proteins that just
naturally form these beautiful o-rings
for instance on an e coli
membrane uh there are
sensors there are communication pathways
that are very
chemical but mechanical in a sense i
think understanding
uh understanding these i think robotics
has a lot to bring because there's a lot
of modeling
there's a lot of kinematics involved
there's a lot of different forces and
many many degrees of freedom so i think
the motion planning community i mean
these people are working in these areas
i think it's
i think there's really exciting areas
out there to to go at these scales
simultaneously why we do that while
we're doing i mean i'm an engineer i
want to build something
useful i don't want to i mean i'm happy
to explore things and you know
that's exciting that's what gets me up
in the morning but i also want to make
sure what i'm doing has an impact and so
i think
on the other side we need to think and
understand uh
you know work closer with the doctors
the the biomedical people who
who understand that who understand the
issues the problems and then think
what are the tools that we can bring to
bear on these problems and
so finding the applications and then
functionalizing i think are
interesting and vision and like i said
imaging is is a key
problem that i have not had the guts to
jump into
uh enough yet as much as i need to
that's one of the reasons we work on the
eye
so we can just look through a microscope
and see instead of worrying about that
so
a lot of the biorobotics work that's
been done is sort of interfacing neurons
with with bio or with robotic systems
electronic systems but
there hasn't been as much of this sort
of mechanical interaction between
the biological side and the robotic side
what would you say yeah well it's you
know it's
i mean we've worked with biologists
we've studied like drosophila how fruit
flies fly
and uh when you do that you know we
basically
we build the tools for the
neurobiologists to uh
to to make measurements you know what's
the lift force of a fruit fly uh
you know uh what's its
you know resonant frequently you know
what's it you know what's its bandwidth
or
something like that um
but but as you work with them and you
work with things like cl again so you
work with zebrafish or
or e coli uh you can't help but get
ideas
on how to build
new kinds of micro-robotic mechanisms or
use some of these physical principles
that you know
why does e coli have a rotary motor
and why does it have this this uh
corkscrew flagella
uh on it well it turns out from a fluid
dynamics perspective it's a beautiful
design i never would have dreamed of it
uh you know
but when you look at i mean but then it
turns out jeffrey taylor and then uh
did back in 1952. i wouldn't have
thought of it though but
um and then there's there's a yeah
anyway i'm
rambling about about previous work in
this area but i think that um
there's interesting work in germany in
the 30s out of this thing but why why
are these organisms
how did they evolve to use these
in this way in this little niche these
little physical niche
these these mechanisms that i you know
as a mechanical engineering designer i
wouldn't sit down and
come up with on my own so you look at
those but i think as we go smaller
and we start to look at these molecular
mechanisms all of a sudden you realize
um we have to look at nature you're not
gonna i just
really think that the problem is too
hard you know there is a computational
issue there's a search issue that we're
never going to overcome where we're
going to be able to design
uh mechanisms that are are
half as as capable as as these you know
proteins that come together to form
these structures um
i mean there's the dna origami people
people that are looking using dna out of
the
the semen work that started 20 years ago
and there's an interesting community
there but
but that's just the tip of the iceberg
of what's going on at these scales and
there's all these things if we just look
at nature
and look at if we get good cryo
transmission electron microscope images
and better ones and
and we can start to really visualize
these mechanisms and things i think
boy that's that's fascinating to me and
i think that would be
a great area to head in so how far off
do you think it is before we can
assemble biological systems of our own
design
yeah well i mean we can
if you talk to geneticists i mean there
are things they can do
now i mean i don't know when i talk to
them they're as mentioned in this o-ring
you take fly-in and fly m and there are
a couple of
proteins uh um and and they just come
together
and and fit in a certain way and they
form a ring okay
as an engineer i'm curious what are the
process parameters you know how robust
is that
what when will that not happen what
concentrations do i need what
temperatures will that happen
um you know i'm just curious what you
know
is that is that a tool i can build
something else off of
but i could build that i think now i
know um
kelly used it at utah he you know tells
me he can build flagella uh you know you
can just build a flagella
get a whole bunch of them um you know
then you look i mean you look at the
synthetic biology people i mean that's
they think they can
do all these things i you know i think
it's a great field i
like everything that's new i think
everybody underestimates the complexity
of it just like we did robotics in the
in the 80s uh probably we're still
underestimating it's complexity but
but you know i think we're you know
complexity
the complexity of these problems is
really difficult to get handle on when
you start
we've learned that along for you know
decades many many times in many fields
what's your advice for young people who
would be interested in pursuing a career
in
robotics or micro robotics what should
they do
well i think um
you know if you want to work in in in
if you want to work in robotics i mean
the first thing is
you got to have a passion you got to be
willing to come in to work at five in
the evening and go home and eight in the
morning if that's what it takes
you've got to
but but you also have to make sure
you're working
with the best people you can work with
because you you never you know
you my experience is you
uh you know everybody else is smarter
than you are and
uh you better you better go out and and
you know grab their knowledge
and and and you know try to learn the
lessons uh
from them right and um what is it you
know
uh yeah anyway you just need to um
work with the best people and then you
know then you build these networks and
then you you
i mean it's really a it's a fun
community to be a part of because
especially if you've been in it as long
as i have now over in 26 years or so
you see the field you see areas grow and
wane and then you see things come back
um
you you know the groups that you can
trust and you think their work is if
if they can't solve it you know you're
not going to be able to or or you know
if they think it's interesting there
might be something really there
um but i think you know working with um
you know uh just that interaction with
with the top people in the field and
brings you up i think um
the other thing is um you know i mean
there's advice if you want to really
make an impact in the field go to the
the scales go to the one end either the
very very far enter
you know we went to a very small end but
you can't go much smaller than we're
going now uh you know we could talk
quantum robotics but you know i know tj
tarn talks that but i still
i have an idea of what it might be but i
i'm not willing to say it
uh uh but it has nothing to do with
small it has something to do with the
philosophy of the field but i think
i don't know if there's you know
extremes in the field to go in right now
but i think there's
you know i mean medical robotics is
exciting i mean i saw when i first saw
russ taylor give the talk in 1990 i
think it was or 91.
i could tell it was gonna be exciting
and i think it's more exciting than ever
um
um i think there's still a there's a ton
to do at uh molecular levels
we're just starting to scratch the
surface and i think we'll do interesting
things but then
you know you see military applications
and you see that you know that's going
to push that is pushing the technology
in
incredible ways uh people talk about
service robotics
and i still think that's a completely
open issue i i don't understand
you know i'm not sure how these things
are going to be accepted everybody's got
their own view i mean the japanese have
their view of it
americans are going to have their view
and the europeans are
working in these areas too and
but i think i think there's a lot of
interesting areas but as long as you go
into one that
and you work with the best people and
and you're passionate about what you do
when
good things happen eventually you know
so
great uh is there anything else you'd
like to add all those things we missed
oh gosh i don't know um
no i i you know i just look back i guess
now you're talking about this it's
interesting i mean
in in 84 falling into robotics
accidentally
and uh you know i uh uh
you know it becomes a passion you know
it's amazing how it's a passion i mean i
can't
anything that has anything to do with
robotics i still read even though i work
in micro nano i'm
you know it's it's a you know it's
it's it's a fascinating field and i you
know i still
be interesting to see where it's going
to go because i'm not willing to make a
prediction but uh
um but it's clearly uh it's clearly here
for a long time forever as far as i can
see as long as we're here somebody's
going to try to make
trying to make smarter and smarter
machines things that are more
intelligent and so
uh i was lucky to you know sort of
accidentally fall into it and uh
happy i'm you know happy to be a part of
it for for such a long time so
were you uh influenced by any
sort of literature or movies as a kid
my mom has a picture of me in third
grade for halloween i was a robot
now i think you know as a kid i was
influenced by the apollo missions i was
seven years old when they landed on the
moon
and i didn't want to be an astronaut but
i i wanted to know how the how to build
a rocket i wanted to know how to build
the eagle you know and the
the modules and and the lunar modules
and what those were uh
and i think more than you know anything
that got me excited about engineering
was was the space
program in the uh in the 70s 60s and 70s
and
landing on the moon in
july was it july 20th
1969 i guess right was it
sunday july yeah i think it's july 20
1969 yeah and and you know um
seven years old that's a good thing for
seven years you know that was back
before all these toys and everything you
had to really
want to follow these things if you're
interested in it so
okay great okay
good thank you