so i was
born in switzerland towards the swiss
mountains
in 1959
i went also there to school it's rather
in the countryside
and had a very good time for playing
around and but also in school
did you have any interest early on
robotics or mechanics
i had a lot of interest in building
stuff i had also the chance in
in primary school to have a teacher
which was building crazy stuff
and he introduced us also to for example
build a bridge also
out of a couple of papers which can
withstand a lot of
load or building the highest tower out
of
100 matches and this actually made me
very
excited about designing building stuff
and i think there it was the moment
where i felt that i
could probably become an engineer is
that what you studied when you got to
school
when you got to university you went into
engineering straight away
so actually the decision to what to do
after
my high school was not so easy i wanted
to either
go for a medical doctorate doctor
relative surgery
or to engineering and at the end i ended
up in engineering but i still had the
because a medical doctor sergeant has
also
a lot to do with doing something with
your hands to build something or to
fix something and from my point of view
it has some
similarities and did you do electrical
or mechanical engineering i was
doing mechanical engineering because it
sounded to me a little bit more
really concrete and more hands-on
and i think it was a good choice and
where did you end up going to graduate
school so i ended up at eth
so this is the the best universe
technical university
in switzerland it was the most obvious
choice
and i think it was a good choice and i
did and also continued with a phd
where i started to move a little bit
away from pure mechanical engineering
i did a phd not in robotics directly but
in mechatronics
combining rotor dynamics with
magnetic bearings which are controlling
the levitation of a rotor without
contact
and this was also a moment where i first
got in
real contact with robotics so next door
in the same lab
we started i was a little bit involved
in building a robot which was
able to play ping-pong it was
more than 20 or 25 years ago this time
it was
still very difficult because we didn't
have to appropriate
hardware or computer power or vision
system
but we came up with a solution where
there was a robot playing
pong against a human and actually it was
we needed very good ping pong player
against the robot not because
the robot was so good but we had to be
very precisely
in moving the balls back but it was
amazing it was at this time i think the
fastest robots in the
robot in the world because ping pong
playing needs really very fast robotics
so robotics has also a lot to do with
dynamics modeling control and this was
very fascinating for me what year was
that
this was around 88
89. and did it ever go
against serious humans
there was at this time a competition
robot against robots
and of course it was somewhat funny
because
i think that the most exchanged it was
probably three times because
most robots were not ready our robot was
pretty good
but it was more or less a project we
where we can learn a lot
um on on modeling building robots and
also controlling robots
and who was the advisor on that project
this was
professor gerhart reitzer he was
actually the first
person which was getting involved in
robotics at eth
and which did really serious work in
this he was one of the
early pioneers in europe
doing robotics from ping ping-pong
playing robots for
force-controlled robotics it was mainly
manipulators
and then also for some first step steps
to its
service robotics so cleaning tables
with a robot for example
and was uh what was the next career that
you worked on after that
so i after my phd was which was not
mainly in robotic but on this
magnetic levitation was he also your
advisor on that
yes he was my advisor so we were a group
which mechatronics and robotics
were very close and so it was a lab
working on
modeling control and and
actuation on fast and dynamic systems
then i had a chance to go to stanford
for one year as a postdoc and
get involved got involved in some
visionary ideas about
very small robots micro nano robotics
with the idea to have systems which can
manipulate
very small parts and there was also a
bit
was involved there in in tactile
manipulation
and in the third point which then
made me come after coming back also to
start a new thing was that
i learned there that robotics is an
excellent tool for education
and i think i'm still extremely
convinced that for education it's
it's really perfect for getting young
people excited for different topics it's
very interdisciplinary
it's very tough very difficult you have
to to model you have to
learn about actuation control sensing
and so on
and when i came back from united states
i immediately started a new course which
was about building robots hands-on
education which was pretty successful
which allowed students really to apply
their knowledge to go beyond what they
did
in pure mechanical engineering for
example to learn
how to integrate sensors and and
actuators and control
what kinds of components or platforms
were they building at that time
so it was uh at the end a competition
this course and we had always about
probably five six
uh to ten teams and they were
tasked like playing football or
building fully autonomously
out of wooden blocks a tower and this
was probably the most impressive
uh what i had with the students they
built really with a
small robot a tower which was
nearly 1.5 meters high fully
autonomously
so it was also a lot about design so
there was the appropriate design and
then
all the sensing and the control
integration
and who did you work with while you were
at stanford so it was uh
mainly with larry leifer and mark
kukowski
so and some people which
other phd students which worked on this
nano robotics
and it was a very stimulating
environment so actually
i have the chance that larry life is now
starting a
one-year visiting professorship at eth
he was involved in robotics but also a
lot in design how can you design
how can you stimulate good design and
innovation and then we are continuing on
this
what year was it at 90
1989 to 90.
and um did you encounter other of the
robotics groups that were working there
and manipulation yes of course one other
person i was a little bit in contact at
stanford was osama khatib which is
since then a very good friend of mine
which is a very visionary
in a different kind of modelling control
of manipulation
and now also a whole human robot
which i think was very important in this
field but there were other
people which i was not directly
interacting with like bernie roth which
was
one of the really pioneers in robotics
um that's jennifer and some people from
from the aero astro institute which did
a lot for
for space manipulation and so on so
outside of um schweitzer's group
was there a lot of other robotics going
on in switzerland at the end of the
1980s
so at the end of 1980s there was some
mobile robotics starting
in electrical engineering um
and then later on this was also
moving over more to mechanical
engineering aside
the mobile robotics also schweitzer did
a very interesting and very visually
designed of a robot and
implementation for developing post
parcels that do the different office
building this was at this time
i think a very very tough challenge and
learned a lot and it was a nice robot
which was
doing more or less the job at the end
and
it was also the same time we started to
also think about where should
robots be where it's probably the most
challenging in this the environment
where humans have not directly access
so in the early 1980s 1990
there was a an a
bigger project at eth so-called poly
project on
nano robotics with the vision to have
very small robots
which can handle objects in the size of
a couple
micro micrometers if there is a
nanometer position
which is was more or less also the time
where tunneling microscopy
started to become very popular and so it
fitted well together that in this
environment where you can actually see
single atoms you probably would like to
also
manipulate very small parts and he was
learning about it so schweitzer was
still the head of the robotics lab i was
from the robotic side the leader of this
nano robotics project
and then i have people from from
computer vision were involved and there
were people from
from mechanics were involved in this and
from computer vision side it was all of
olaf kubler
who was not really a properties but very
close
and using his knowledge invasion for
this and
he was later on then the president of
ath zurich
and so they brought you back as a
professor
so i was there for as a post over senior
scientist and then i had a chance in 96
to
be appointed as a professor in lausanne
at epfl
where they had since while department of
microengineering
which had a lot of robotics involved so
i had the chance there to
to interact and start to work with
daniel niku
with professor burkhardt which was one
of
another pioneer in switzerland in
robotics he did
a lot of early work in in surgical
robotics
and there was a lot of stimulating
elements which came in
from nico more the bio-inspired
and behavior-based robotics and they had
also very good team design
so there was clavel which
is the inventor of the parallel robots
the delta robot
which was a very fast manipulator which
today is now
built and sold by abb as an industrial
robot for specific applications
you have to move very fast
okay and how long have you found
i was there for 10 years so i had
then a call to move back to zurich in
2006
and during the period at epf fell
we had a couple of very very interesting
projects which
also moved out to interact with
neuroscientists with
people more from biology one
project we had there is a very small
robot
in the size of a sugar cube which
interacted with cockroaches
so the idea was to study
to stop now
[Music]
so you will cut you will cut this or is
it yeah
well you can close the window yeah
i don't think too many so others had
this fascinating project
about very small robots the size of a
sugar cube
which should then interact with
cockroaches and the idea was from the
biological side
to study if how the the
collective behavior can be influenced so
the robots were
imitating cockroaches and there were
some
indications even in a science paper
showing that
we could influence robots the behavior
of cockroaches
so that they for example select another
place to
stay because the robots smelled like a
cockroach and they were attracting the
other cockroaches
as somebody who's both at eth and epfl
do you have a sense of the different
sort of tradition of robotics that goes
on in each
or the spirit of research being
different
i think it's it's there is a difference
that
in lausanne there was one person really
was strongly
influencing and bringing new ideas in
was shondan and nico
and this may brought up this tradition
to have this
bio inspired robotics where
people also study more in detail what
nature is doing and trying to
imitate his own robots this is probably
a difference i think in the spirit and
how we we work is pretty similar and i
think both places are
great places for robotics but eth is
mainly more traditional engineering
yes edh is probably more traditional
engineering and i think we are probably
covering
a broader field we are covering from
from
mobile robotics micro robotics up to
rehabilitation robotics and
and walking machines and so on where
lauzon is has a strong focus on
on buying special robotics
behavior-based robotics and new ways how
to
to to generate intelligence
for robotics and so while you're at epfl
did you
still focus mainly on small scale and
micro robots or did you do some large
scale robots
i did once on one side some more
focus on the small scale i think at the
time at this time we had the smallest
and the most uh
performant very small robots they were
called alice robots where
typically they they won also their
competition in japan
in the the mice uh running through the
mice
fully autonomously but we did also quite
a lot
in the larger scale and in 2002
we had actually had a chance to organize
iros which is one of the biggest
conference in robotics
in lausanne and in the same year we had
an exhibition in switzerland which is
the expo 2002
which is a national exhibition and we
were invited to
to have a part on robotics
and for this we we built uh
tour guide robots which showed the
people around which explained what
robotics
does today and and the robot himself
which were two guides but
were also a part of the exhibition and i
think it was the biggest installation
probably
since every of of number and
time of robots so we had 11 robots
working 12 hours a day
for five months and interacting with
roughly about 700 000 people
and it was very interesting experience
for us also to learn how
people approach robots so we learned for
example that
if a robot can speak we had a very good
speech synthesis
in different languages uh the the people
which are interacting with robots they
assume
that the robot can also understand them
so people had tended to start to speak
to robots
and then they had to learn that the
robot can speak but not understand
interesting um so what were some of the
big challenges
of building small profiles
i think what we also focused and i think
is very interesting to see that
there are some scalings law in mechanics
in computing
and sensing and we try to see how the
scaling
changes and of course also in nature you
see obvious changes
in the scaling law if you compare the
body shape of an elephant with an ant
you can see that that the structural
loading of through the mass is very
favorable with
changing when it gets more so small
robots you can throw out of the window
and
they will survive if you have a big
robot they will not survive that's the
same in nature
so you can do new things on the other
side we of course
which is probably also evident but
that if you guys get smaller even a
smaller
particle is all of a sudden becoming an
obstacle
and this was actually what motivated us
then to start
going into flying robot because he said
the smaller you get the more difficult
it's
it's is easy to go in rough terrain for
example or even
on flat ground with a little bit of of
all of for a small road but it's
immediately a hill
and so we started to to um combine these
small robots with flying robots and we
started to
to work on on quarter quadrature
helicopters um and i'm still convinced
in very tiny space where where the space
is very complex for example in
destroyed building probably the best way
to go through it is flying
even if it has all the challenges where
you need always power even if you
want to stand still in the air you
you have very limited calculation power
you cannot carry too much
sensors around but on the outside you
can you have much more mobility
and this is again in nature if you see
the smaller you get that animals get the
more
trouble there are flying so you have
flies but you never see elephants
fly you can also see in birth the
biggest birds that don't fly anymore
so it's really interesting to to realize
this
and we did and also some flying stuff
which i think is probably the first and
only up to now
with a rather small airplane with 2
meter wingspan we did
a continuous flight so if we flew 24
hours
and we had full charge battery so in a
sunny day you could continue for days
and also there with a lot of study how
does the the structural size influence
more or less the probability that you
can fly in continuous mode
and and so it's interesting also to see
that
flying is from a structural way
much easier with small units because the
structural loading is much less an issue
which is shown in the nature but on the
other side of course
the smaller you get the more problem do
you you have
with high dynamics you have to control
faster on the other side you have less
calculate calculation power available so
it's also a very challenging part
interesting so um so what was the first
flying
about the quadrotor it was a quadrotor
actually it was even
a first one which was not a really fully
autonomous flying was
uh the alice robot which was the sugar
coupe robert which was a quick this two
small propeller
and which allowed us to to make small
chumps so he for example fly from the
ground to a
on the table and then it will continue
this was more or less
touching a little bit it was nothing
very very serious but it was a starting
point
which was a lot of fun to uh apart from
the general lesson about
scaling and body types did you take a
lot of biological inspiration in the
specific design
choices of some of these neurons i think
we we're always trying to get inspired
by
by biology but in principle i think as
an engineer should get inspired
by whatever you you see and i think you
have to move around
and i think one important thing is bio
inspire
inspiration is very very good but all
the inspirations also speaking
with colleagues and i think this is
extremely important to speak and to
interact with other people because this
gives you inspiration
imitation is another issue and i'm
personally not so
in favor that i don't think that too
strong
imitation is good because biology is
another
basic ingredient for building something
so molecules
molecules and cells are extremely
different than
than computer chips and so you cannot
directly copy something
on a computer chip and this is i think
it's important to consider you can get
inspiration but then you have to
to bring it to this new way of of
material
you have to build it and so this makes a
big difference
and did you live to animal perception or
neural models at any point or control
system we had
a couple of european projects where we
had neuroscientists involved
from from mainly from all over europe
and we learned a lot from them i think
they're learning also from us
so what we did in one of the european
projects we showed that
the basin approach for for actually
learning and
and dealing with uncertain information
can also actually model more or less
the the brain the the structure and the
concept of the brain so
at the end there is one way that you
have neural networks
but on the other side also the brain is
done some
doing some sort of statistical um
calculation which
was very exciting but we learned also
that
the worlds are quite quite different so
neurosciences are
have other principle goals and and
other approach had to understand and to
do science
and uh how did they luring back to eth
so i had one
moment the chance to have because they
had they had a
person who passed away too early and
then they had an open lab and they asked
me to
move back to adh i think it was a chance
to
to restore their change i think it's
always good if after 10 years you you
start a new field or you start at a new
place and i think it was very
interesting
i was moving actually also with a lot of
my
my phd students so it was not a big loss
that i had to build up again
i could more or less directly continue
but i was
in lausanne in this micro engineering
department which is
many students which are in between
mechanical electrical and computer
science
here then i was in a mechanical
engineering department
which of course has the implication that
you have
people which were known less probably
about computer science but more about
mechanics and which motivated me then
also to start
much more now on walking robot walking
robot i think has a lot to do with
modeling dynamic modeling control
and it was very interesting and so we
are
now moving fast forward on walking robot
which
is a new field which i'm very excited
about
are you focusing on we are focusing at
the moment
on quarter pad we are focusing on
the the type of locomotion but then also
how
on the actuator so in order to do what
the
the final goal is that we can run with
electric
actuators and for doing so you you
cannot
you need elastic elements in the in the
actuator which can store the energy
during the step on the ground
and so we have now a concept which
i think is very permissible and
hopefully pretty soon we can really show
for the first time in the world
that you can really run with a robot and
with electrical act wages
and which is something pretty close to
what nature does
also muscles have elastic elements in
and there for example we are getting a
lot of inspiration from from nation
nature but of course we are doing it
quite differently so we are not trying
to imitate muscles
we we are convinced that today
electrical motors are extremely
efficient and the best you can get from
technology
and we found ways how to imitate what
nature does
or uh um but in a quite different way
still having elastic elements and having
um
an actuator but quite different
so if you don't have elastic element you
have an impact with the ground when
once the foot and this is a lot of
energy
which can be will be lost so in
principle if you have no elastic element
you
you lose at each contact with the ground
all the energy
um you need an elastic element of course
you could probably also
recover part of this in the in the motor
but the motor is not fast and dynamic
enough
um so it's better to store this energy
during the step
in the in the in the
in the spring and get it directly back
because otherwise you will end up with a
there's a motor which is probably about
10 times bigger because you're really
losing all the energy and with
a perfect system which has elastic
elements in series you you can gain
probably 90 percent of the energy which
is otherwise lost
and if you have the big actuators at one
point you're getting too heavy and you
will never run
so i think the only way to even think
about running this
with motors and within the artificial
system
is that you have to have this this
elastic elements in it
and did you um develop a lot of your
ideas in relation to the work of mark
of course this is uh one of the the main
source of inspiration
i think it's still a death strand in the
in this field and there's a lot of
inspiration coming from there
and of course also a lot of modeling is
not
absolutely new but it's it's a lot about
the design how can
i think we came up with very innovative
designs which allowed to
to have an optimal way to control um
walking
so that you mainly during the stance
phase you
are trying to get best out of recovering
the energy and getting off again
and during the flight phase you have to
have the best situation to
move the legs where you need to move it
so that it has the best contact the next
point
what kind of strategies and techniques
did you use to achieve that
so it's it's more or less similar
elements which
mark raver started off and
now we are of course then optimizing the
control
so you have to switch actually control
it during
the flight phase you control more as the
movement and your stance phase you have
to
to try to optimally get the best uh
kickoff
after this in movement and then there is
always the question
what type of of gaze is best and we did
quite some investigation actually on
on what is the best gate for which speed
on on model uh on simulation
and you can also see nature so depend on
speed a horse is either
walking trotting or galloping and you
can exactly see the same in
with models that depend on speed there
is different
gates which are most optimal and this is
actually also what we
try to now bring on on the real real
system
um so
tell me about isis that's the
intelligent systems
is that part of you yours yes
so we have uh actually at eth
structure we have departments and then
the next lower level is typically an
institute
and so we have an institute of robotics
and intelligent systems
where we have currently uh five
professors involved
brett nelson with micro nano robotics
and robot reader with
his rehabilitation robotics roger gaster
in search of robotics and similar stuff
and fumaida
also on walking and especially new
design on locomotion
and i think we have a really strong team
we have also some other people from
computer vision which
contribute in this field and since two
years we have now or a little bit more
than two years a
specialized master program in robotics
system control
which attracts a lot of students and
which
further boosts this this field
so iris was actually there was gerhard
schweitzer
which was really the main party in
robotics at eth but also
in europe he was among the very first
working on this
and then when he was retired brett
nelson came in and then
i restarted with one professor and since
then
there have been a lot of people coming
in so i was then coming in
in 2006 shortly after robert arena and
then
our two young colleagues colleagues a
couple years ago
and we had also a chance to have people
from computer science which are
more and more getting involved in
robotics being a
now at eth like mark polo phase look
vanguard
and then we recently had also raf de
andrea
who is a controls person who's but he
was doing a lot of robotics with flying
robots also
so we have really a strong team uh
meanwhile and it's
extremely exciting to be here yeah
that's a
walk down the hall i believe we need
lineup stations there are
not like students
so in terms of uh the master's in
robotics are you aware of any other
master's programs and robotics in europe
seems like they're pretty uncommon to
actually have a degree in robotics
yeah there are a couple other places in
europe which have master programs there
also some common master program
interestingly we had
some very interesting discussion at the
beginning we have seen that we have
have these people from perception
computer vision we have people on people
on control and people in robotics
which we share a lot of of ideas and we
interact a lot
and we said we should do something
together because we have also more or
less
the same type of students which are
interested in our work
and so we we came up we should have a
special professional master for this
and interestingly the number of robotics
people
were very in favor to have robotics as
first
robotics and then system and control
which covers more less field because
robotics is somewhat in an attractive
field and it turned out very well so it
attracts people it's actually not too
much
disciplinary so we can attract people
from computer science even from
physics and math and from electrical
engineering and mechanical engineering
which is i think very nice and
the robotics is is exciting but we are
not only doing robotics so there are
some people in our master program which
are more much more
on pure control even some working on
actuator or motor control or pure
computer vision
but most of them are interested at this
interdisciplinary element that you have
a system which uses sensors
activators and then in some sort of an
intelligence in between to
to control systems in real world
settings
so um so brad nelson does
no we don't do much of max robotics
anymore so um
we we're never actually in this very
small
scale as he does it so he's really a
pioneer in his field we have very small
devices
it also changes the whole concept so he
has small
robots which then of course now have not
integrated actuators which are activated
from outside
and there is a very high potential for
medical robotics and in
other fields in this we are still trying
to push the limits we had
recently a project which was recently
finished on
on very small helicopters or
with fully integrated control and
navigation tools
so again to to seal a bit limits but
this is still in the
size of of centimeters and not
not micro and millimeters and so now
you're
uh also finding yourself in
administration
how did that happen yeah so sometimes
it happens by by accident i think
um it's also very challenging and a very
interesting job and
i i think that robotics helps quite a
lot
uh because robotics is very
interdisciplinary i had to do
view my research with neuroscientists
with biologists with
chemists and then and so you can
probably easier understand a little bit
different disciplines
and i'm actually surprised myself to see
that a lot of
robotics people are ending up in in
somewhat also
a similar job so in australia now
um hugh darren white is also now had
a head of the one of the biggest
research institution in
in australia which is then not on
robotics but on a lot of different
fields
[Music]
so i i typically claim that we are
really
one of the top addresses in the world in
robotics i think we have really a large
spectrum
of very good people and in this field
and we what we need for robotics
and robotics is on one side
on research a lot of different topics
where you can
follow on sometimes it's even moving a
little bit away from robotics but
i think the most interesting part in
robotics is probably even more the
education part
i think robotics is a perfect
environment and field for educating
brilliant young
engineers because it touches on so many
elements it deals with
with a very tough mathematical problem
theoretical problem but also
with real-world situations you have to
deal with with sensor which are not
perfect you have to deal with models
which
in reality the real system will not
follow the model anymore
and even if robotics industry is not
huge today but if you see where our
people end up they end up in a lot of
fields where this system thinking and
this integration of all these elements
is of importance i
see a lot of my former students ending
up in car industry because cars are
getting more close to robotics
devices with automatic parking with a
lot of
senses activators involved google is
is hiring a lot of people from robotics
on one side they have
also some project in robotics but they
also i think they can
benefit from people which know how to to
navigation systems should be done in the
future how you can probably
more faster build maps and so on and so
robotic i think it's is
it's perfect for motivating and and
developing young people and uh
so it's it's a very strong added value
for university to have a
strong program in robotics um who are
some of your
students
so it's it's actually funny this is i
realized i had once a visiting student
for the united states and he went
through the this was still at epfl
he went through the list of alumni and
he said
did you realize that most of your alumni
are
ending up in spin-off companies and
that's what's the point i've realized of
course there are some still in academia
but the clearly i would guess more than
50
are in spin-off companies a big part in
our own spin-off company been so many
others
and of course this reflects a little bit
the robotics is still a bit far ahead
from
real product but they are so excited
about the system so they're starting
their
spin-off companies so we have a company
in lausanne which is
is doing service and robotics mobile
robotics
and there are some people that did
something which is not directly robotics
related robotics we have a spin-off
company which is doing inspection
robotics
together with alstom inspecting big
machinery
what are the what is the names of the
spinoff companies one is bluebotics in
lausanne one is
in in syracuse alstom
inspection robotics which is a main
focus on
inspecting big power plants for example
where there are very interesting
applications because
if you imagine if you have to service a
power plant
which is producing typically energy um
and if it's down for one day you are
losing an
income for up to a couple millions per
day
so if you have robots which allow you to
be faster in inspection for example you
don't have to open the whole machine you
can
bring robots in you can gain a lot of
money i think this is the
the fields where it's probably the most
promising to anti-visual robotics
technology because it's
worse wow if you think about this
dream of having personal robots at your
home this is
on one side extremely complex on the
other side there is a lot of pressure on
the price
so people will not be able to afford a
100
000 robots in their home so there is
still a long way to go
but there is fields i call this
typically the
industrial service robotics where
probiotics can really do all it today
good job
what were some of the other spin-offs so
there is one
is called shock fish
uh which is not directly robotics but
this they have uh developed
and some devices which allow you
to get along and get better in contact
with other people at conferences and and
other events so it's it's
some sort of a conference navigator
system which is not too far from
robotics
it's exactly this type of technology
where roboticists are very good in
in working on
um who are some of the other people
you've collaborated with over the years
so we have quite a large number of
collaborators in
in europe um especially because european
europe has since
a long time now this bigger project
where you
collaborate with other universities so i
think with all the people which are
known in europe like rudiger dilmond
rasha
tiller paolo dario
or bruno ccr all these people we had a
lot of exchange
then more currently we have with paul
newman and
wall from burgers these are all people
which i think they are
very influential in robotics and it's
it's it's really great to have these
tools also in europe to
to work together with them to submit
projects and to get
funding for for a strong collaboration
international collaboration it's it's uh
for from funding side a little bit more
difficult but we have a lot of exchange
with
with cmu we had especially laws on every
year more or less one or two students
exchange we had
with mit we are collaborating a lot with
with stanford of course which is always
a very inspiring place
and this australia also because the this
the center in sydney the
field and service robotics center there
is one of the
the very advanced environment for
for mobile robotics and we had a lot of
students there and they had some people
in our lab and so on
um so
where where is uh most of the funding
coming from for robotics right now
in in switzerland we have
interestingly very or nicely a very
strong programming
cognitive systems and robotics which was
starting now with this framework seven a
couple years ago
and this allowed really to have a lot of
interesting projects and
a lot of interesting collaboration this
is uh in my lab for example the biggest
funding source for for doing robotics we
are typically involved in about
four to five or six of these europe
projects in parallel and
on flying robots on search and rescuing
robotics for example at the moment
then since last fall
we have a so-called national center of
competence in robotics
in switzerland which brings mainly
epfl and dh3x together which it does not
cover all aspects of robotics but we
have some
important aspects on locomotion and
we have some important aspects on
navigate
rehabilitation robotics or medical
robotics and
also manipulation so this is a way
to boost in the next hopefully up to 10
12 years
robotics and collaboration in
switzerland and we had a very good start
and
it brings these communities in
switzerland even closer together
and gets also some some industry
involved so even though switzerland
isn't part of the european union they're
still very much involved in
eu research yes from a from a research
point of view we are fully apart so we
can uh
lead european projects we are all very
successful in
in european funding and of course
switzerland has contracts that we
we pay our our part of the funding to
brussels and then we can also benefit
uh exactly the same as the other
european
uh countries so what do you see is the
big
technical problems and applications
facing robotics robotics
of course i think the biggest challenge
is still intelligence
i think we are still extremely far from
from having robots which can understand
the world
i will say that you can today do a lot
with computer vision you can
train robots so they can recognize faces
again
they can you can train robots to
recognize people but
if the situation is drastically
different but
where humans would still be possibly
able to for example a person a
wheelchair if
you didn't train your system this system
will not realize that this is still a
person
a human has no doubt you can always
recognize
it's also as simple as a chair if you
train a system and you can train it with
100 chairs if you have then a specially
designed chair
the system will not work anymore so
there is a lot of issues which
i think we we are not so clear how we
can solve this
it's also that today we can navigate
with robots
very reliably with lasers because you
have distance information
but we are still very poor in in pure
visual navigation and this is actually a
topic we are strongly pursuing for the
future also
for example car navigation vehicle
navigation
only revision only because humans can do
it
so obviously there must be solutions but
today
an artificial system have a lot of
problems you don't have to
adapt information and actually what we
do is actually we understand depth
because we understand the world so you
have a feeling what the door
size is and automatically if you see a
door you can
estimate the depth because you know a
typical size of a door
and this i think we are so far from
knowing how to to handle this especially
also with
limited calculation power which is given
typically without the numbers robots
because you have to move the the
computer with the robot so you cannot
have
infinite calculation power so do you
think things like active vision are
going to be helpful in
of course this is these type the type of
approaches which hopefully help
but i think it's it's much more i
typically say say that
it's it's about understanding understand
an
object is an object not because it has a
certain appearance
which is today what computer vision is
doing but because it has a certain
function
a chair is not a chair because it looks
like like a certain appearance because
chess can be extremely different
but the chair is trapped because you can
sit on it a mark is a mark because you
can drink something out of it
and i think we we have to describe or
the robot has to learn how to describe
the environment based on
functionalities and then because then
you
start to understand because they want to
once you want to interact with the
environment
you have to also understand what can you
do can you move something around
can this be used for some something and
this is actually if you
think back on how the intelligence of
humans
evolved i think typically you say
animals or
humans you start to be becoming
intelligent if you come
up with new ideas how to use something
for a certain function
once you start to use tools this shows
that
there is intelligence evolving and you
can only
use tools if you have an idea of about
the function
and about the the interaction of
elements and
and so on and there i think we were
still
in in the very early
stage on in the research and apart from
this
described as an industrial service robot
so what do you think the
i typically claim that robotics has a
lot of
outreach in in other fields which
at one point probably will not be
considered as robotics anymore but
parking aids for cars safety system in
cars this is very much inspired by
robotics
there's a lot of other fields even even
handheld devices or
devices at home machines or appliances
they get more and more elements which i
think
a lot of them are also coming out of
from robotics because it's
systems engineering it's it's perception
action
intelligence which um and so this brings
us back to this
point of education people educating
robotics
are typically very good in in coming up
with
innovative solutions of other systems
which
have some sort of an intelligence which
have some sort of of
simple decisions to make and i think we
should
probably not too much concentrate and
say we want to have tomorrow a service
robot which can do everything at home
but prior to see how can we now use this
knowledge to do
a better machine which is probably at
the end only a toaster but he does
probably
something better than than the the
current toaster
and and there i think there's plenty of
of potential to do
something in this direction and in terms
of education for young people who are
interested in
pursuing a career in robotics what would
you advise them to do
i think it's i would advise them to do
really to try to to work on on these
real systems and to try to really get
grip also on the not their core field
but the
related field so i think also in
industry
people which probably started in
mechanical engineering or electrical
engineering
and they start to evolve then during a
mass program doing psja
in another field so they are very
understanding
the whole systems and they are extremely
valuable
for for designing new system to come up
with new ideas
and robotics is probably one of the top
fields offering this
that you can learn um in in all the
different fields and you can evolve from
mechanical engineering to a
systems engineer which really can also
know about knows about
what is a sensor how can you filter your
sensor how can you
something about artificial intelligence
and and i think this is uh
is very important for for industry also
and um as a as a teacher and advisor
what was gerhard schweitzer like
to
i had a very great great pleasure to
work with him i think he really was my
mentor which
helped me to to end up where i'm
today he was very open-minded he was
very
good in really feeling where the new new
elements come out he was actually
um coming from from really mechanical
engineering he was doing a lot of
dynamics and rhododemx when he was a
student himself and a phd but then he
realized that at one point
this mechanical mechanics is not
an entire a closed system anymore
we have now all of sudden sensors
activated and control
and you can do much more than only
having a a
mechanical system or a rotor you can
actually actually control the rotor
you can if you control it you can
probably reach higher speeds
and then of course robotics versus the
next step so uh
you can have a simple machine but you
can have also a machine which
uses sensor to do much more than than
only moving around
but then also really to adapt to the
environment
and so he really was
i think very instrumental in the whole
europe on this mechatronics that here
which came
first the first step and then it evolved
first to
to have even a stronger focus on
was there robotics else that influenced
you as a mentor
so he is the primary mentor but of
course later on i had
the chance to be in contact with a lot
of people so as i mentioned
i was when i started in lausanne there
was this new aspect on
on on different type of approach for
control which came in
also a stronger element of raymond
clavel who is the inventor of delta
robot which
brought mode is a very mechanical part
in he was a ex
and still is an excellent designer of of
mechanical systems
which is also important so i think to
have a very good system you you have to
to understand and to take the best of
all of them and bring them in the best
way together
and then i had the chance to to meet in
a lot of meetings with all these people
from
all over the world and and i think this
is i can probably
not i could an endless list of people
which inspired me
in different ways so more probably for
to its market side some more on
on specific aspects on on mathematics on
neuroscience and so on
okay so that pretty much does it for my
questions if
there's anything you'd like to add or
any stories we missed
of course probably the in general and
it's probably
a little bit back to education of course
the the nicest thing about university
job i think as a province is that you
always in contact with young people
and i have also the feeling that
robotics attracts even especially
gifted but also very very fun and
inspiring people and if you asked before
about
who was a mentor and inspired me i think
probably in the last 15 years the main
inspiration were my students
it makes such a lot of fun with working
together with them
and and see how they develop you you
give them some guidance but
very fast in in a lot of fields they
they are better than you they
they come up with new ideas and and i
think this is
is extremely nice and this makes me
happy every day to do the job um
working with young people and and see
how they they i i
have the feeling that today they are
more intelligent than we were in
this time because they are learning
probably earlier they
are much more multi-disciplinary also
that mechanical engineers students
they are not only good in mechanics but
they can also
even do a web interface and they they do
control and
and it's amazing how they develop
are there any particular students that
stand out or projects that they've done
i had a lot of students and it's
probably very difficult to really
if i start to name somebody i would name
for uh put names forever
but uh it's interesting that it's not
only phd students it's also
the master's student even bachelor
students which are sometimes
bringing a lot of elements back so we
have this
so-called focus project in the third
year with our students this is
last year of the bachelor program where
they can select
some focus and most students select can
select probably in
energy in mechanical engineering or
biomedical but one
selection is also that they have less
courses and more project work so they
work for one year
on a project and we had outstanding
results in this they had
there are typically teams of six to
eight students and they are so dedicated
they
at one point you have nearly to to just
speed them down a little bit because
they're working in
24 hours a day and about their project
and they
really even as a undergrad student
they can do wonderful thing and and go
far beyond what you
would expect from this be still students
and young students
anything else you'd like to add
difficult to say there might be hundreds
of
elements to to add
um what would you say was the first
robotics conference
so i was actually not
so early getting involved so as i
mentioned i was mainly mechatronics
i was probably in 92 or 91 that was the
first real robotics conference i
attended
and but then i was moving very fast
especially when i started in lausanne
because in the phase between
90 to 96 i was also 50 half of my job
was with a spin-off company
which i was involved and this was also
very interesting because then you get a
little of feeling what what
it means then to go from an invention to
an innovation
and i think i'm still profiting from
them to understand also that it's not so
easy
if you have a new idea it's still still
a long way to
to go um for for going forward
but then of course it's uh
there is a lot of robotics conferences
there is on one side the very big
conferences like icro
and iras where i think the nice thing
about
there is that you can really meet the
whole community as well as the meeting
if you want to meet again with your
colleagues you you meet there
i feel like that i have two two families
one is the
local family with my family but my
parents and
brothers and sisters and my but there is
also this robotics family
and and it's amazing how
how nicely this works so you meet two or
three times a year but you were
immediately catching up what you did
discussed before we had a lot of
of very informal and good uh
interactions
on the other side apart this big
conference we have the smaller
topical conference and i think this is
also extremely interesting because then
you're
you're probably less than 100 people um
it's
everybody is focused on the same topic
you have everybody there
for really discussing and so next week
there will be the dynamic walking
workshop which is a very
small workshop but all the people which
have to say something on this
they will be there and there's a lot of
strong interaction and
and this i think drives research forward
what was the spin-off company
this was a company working on on
electric magnetic bearings
this was the topic i did in my phd
and which then continued this is for
example used in
tropomolecular pumps so to have high
speed rotation
without contact so your your the the
whole rotor is in
in the air hold by active magnet so it's
it's also
not too far from robotics in a sense
that you have a sensor you have a some
sort of a control and intelligence
in between you have to know a model of
the whole system and you have actuators
which are
some coils to to have the whole thing
in place what are the challenges of
taking technology from the lab to
the product i think you have to be
dedicated and you have to be willing to
go a long way
i always claim there are a couple of
exceptions but i claim that it takes
from the moment
where you have a very new thing and
where you think this has a potential
to that you really have success some
success on the market
10 years some very often even more
and you have to be willing to go this
way because it's
you're suffering sometimes it's a lot of
fun but sometimes it's also very hard
if the sellers are not so high you're
getting always running for money
and this is a difficult but a very
rewarding
way but if you want products on the
market you have to do this and this is
also
the motivation where i was supporting
for having spin-off
because robotics is still a very young
field in a way
you very often research is done you show
once that
it might work you have a nice video that
shows it works
very often it's you probably had to do
five videos update worked
as that you can show what it does to go
from this to
something reliable on the market where
you can get hand over this
assistant to a client it's a long way
and i think you young people
are probably willing to do this and
probably the most adapted because they
are
at the state of the art and i can bring
this over and uh
it's the way i think where how robotics
can
can really become a real much more
apparent in green products and in terms
of
intellectual property and patenting um
how does the university encourage
professors to
take their research into startups so in
a way we have a concept we are a
governmental university
and am i responsible also for the
technology transfer
i will say that our goal is not to make
money out of
patents our goal is to bring it as fast
as possible to
youth and the best for our society which
means that we still have to do patents
because then this allows the companies
to to follow on
but we are very open so if you have
spin-off companies we try
to support them best so that they they
get this pardon for
reasonable price so very often we have
also deals that in the first couple
years they don't have
to pay any royalties because they have
not enough money
so that really they can go forward
and i think this is important on the
other side it's also
my conviction that you you should
typically you have not to convince the
professor themselves you have to
convince the young people to go for it
because professors will
at least in europe typically not all of
a sudden change to go to
to a startup it's more often united
states when
professor of eth typically they stay as
professor we did but their
students they are keen to do something
and professors can
support them on their way forward it
starts by supporting having them in
in at the university so we are
supporting allowing our
startup companies to stay in the lab for
the first two years
and then we have also the oldest places
where we can
support them there's a lot of other ways
to support them
so it's it's very important i think for
in the beginning that you
have a strong connection still with the
research people
with you have access to other young
people so to bring the whole thing
forward
and what are some of the successful
startups that have come out of uth
recent years especially
yeah in robotics of course there is
probably nothing you can say it's a huge
success until now but but it's also not
a field like like
facebook and google this is uh can
evolve much faster robotics
will take much longer and but we have
for example also inspection robotics was
founded in 2006
they have an hour already a good start
they are having their first applications
of robots in
in inspection yes so this uh
inspects robotics com companies this is
actually a special concept also of a
company
it's called alstom inspection robotics
alstom is
one of the biggest companies in power
production and and also trade and so on
as a french company
is a big part in switzerland also and
this is a
new concept we are trying to promote
even more in the future that
we have from the beginning a strong
contact with the potential
uses of technology alstom is not
building there
is there is not their main interest to
build inspection robotics
but they have to inspect their
machineries and
because we have a strong link with them
they are involved in the company or
also financially it allows us to be much
faster because they bring the market
knowledge in
and they have also good connection to
the market and so i think this is is
important that you have to write
partnership with this
probably bigger companies which are not
exactly in the same field
which we but it can largely profit from
your field
and on the other side you can profit
from them to bring them
the market knowledge and to bring them
properly to the contact customers
and and also financially can support you
if you need to expand
and do they have like in the states they
have these research parks
around universities is there a similar
concept yes we have a so-called techno
park
and actually even different places one
is in
downtown zurich unfortunately not on on
campus
which would be even nicer but zurich we
have a university which is
downtown and downtown you cannot expand
so easily so this is about
two kilometers away from the main campus
here in zurich but it's
still good in close enough where you
you have this start of companies
and is there also collaboration with the
university observer
yes of course there is uh ralph pifer
which is at the university of zurich and
he's a very inspiring person
taking a lot of inspiration also from
biology and
and doing a lot of crazy stuff which i
think is really inspiring
and to learn from and in this context we
have collaboration we have
probably more strong collaboration in
the field of medical robotics
because eth has no medical school but we
have the
the chance to have the university
hospital next door
so it's 50 meters away and
this allows us this together with the
university of zurich which has the
medical school
to be really extremely close to real
environments for for rehabilitation
robotics for example
surgical robotics and this
is also a field which we will strengthen
in the future
we will have a new department starting
next year which is
health science and technology and
interestingly there is
two professors of robotics in there and
there will probably even be more
all the healthier adidas and then they
will more or less be
in between engineering departments and
this new department of health science
and technology which is a
perfect environment for for um boosting
this field
because you are challenged and by the
real uses
and the real environment
okay thanks