YouSaid · the spoken record

Marc Raibert

lines on the record
131
first
2024-02-16
most recent
2024-02-16
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “One of the robots that we built wasn't actually a robot. It was a surgical simulator, but it had forced feedback. So it had all the techniques of robotics. And you look down into this mirror it actually was. And it looked like you were looking down onto the body you were working on. Your hands were underneath the mirror. Where you were looking, and you had tools in your hands that were connected up to these force feedback devices made by another MIT spinout sensible technologies. So they made the force feedback device we attached the tools and we wrote all the software and did all the graphics. So we had 3D computer graphics. It was in the old days when, this was in the late 90s, when you had the silicon graphics computer that was about this big. You know, it was the heater in the office, basically.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “What the connection was that at that point, Boston Dynamics was mostly a physics based simulation company. So when I left MIT to start Boston Dynamics, there was a few years of overlap. But the concept wasn't to start a robot company. The concept was to use this dynamic simulation tool that we developed to do robotics for other things. But working with Sony, we got back into robotics by doing the IBO runner, by we programmed, we made some tools for programming curio, which was a small humanoid this big that could do some dancing and other kinds of fun stuff. And I don't think it ever reached the market, even though they did show it. When I look back, I say that we got us back where we belonged”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I'll tell you, you know, I go around giving talks and take spot to a lot of them. And it's amazing. The media likes to say that they're terrifying and that people are afraid. And YouTube commenters like to say that it's frightening. But when you take a spot out there, now maybe it's self-selecting, but you get a crowd of people who want to take pictures, want to pose for selfies, want to operate the robot, want to pet it, want to put clothes on it. It's amazing.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I mean, at first, I wasn't an enthusiast for the humanoids. Because, again, it goes back to saying, what's the functionality? And the form wasn't as important as the functionality. And also, there's an aspect to humanoid robots that's about all about the cosmetics where there isn't really other functionality. And that kind of is off-putting for me as a roboticist. I think the functionality really matters. So probably that's why I avoided humanoid robots to start with. But I'll tell you, now after we started working on them, you could see that the connection and the impact with other people, whether they're lay people or even other technical people, there's a special thing that goes on. Even though most of the humanoid robots aren't that much like a person.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Think for a lot of people, you know, people who were, I think it's been both, though. Some people, I think I felt like they were saying, oh, why are you wasting your time on this stupid problem? But then I've been at many things where people have told me it's been an inspiration to go out and, you know, attack these harder things. And I think it has turned out, I think legged locomotion has turned out to be a useful thing.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Probably the smartest thing I ever did is to find the other people I mean, when I look at it now, you know, I look at Boston Dynamics and all the really excellent engineering there, people who really make stuff work. I'm only the dreamer.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, you're asking interesting question because In those days, we didn't actually optimize things, and they probably could have gone much further than we did and then had higher performance. And we just kind of got a sketch of a solution and worked on that. And then in years since, some people working for us, some people working for others, people came up with all kinds of equations or algorithms for how to do a better job, be able to go faster. One of my students worked on getting things to go faster. Another one worked on climbing over obstacles because when you're running, it's one on the open ground. It's one thing. If you're running like up a stair, you have to adjust where you are, otherwise things don't work out right. You land your foot on the edge of the step. So there's other degrees of freedom to control if you're getting to more realistic, practical situations.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “If they're too far forward, they kind of get thrown backwards. If they're too far back, they go over. And what they need to do is get it so that they go mostly up to get over the thing. And, you know, high jumpers is the same kind of thing. So there's a calculation about where to put the foot. And we did something, you know, relatively simple. And then there's a third part to keep the body at an attitude that's upright. Because if it gets too far, you know, you could happen just keep rotating around. But if it gets too far, then you run out of motion of the joints at the hips. So you have to do that. And we did that by applying a torque between the legs and the body every time the foot's on the ground. You only can do it while the foot's on the ground in the air, you know, the physics don't work out.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “You know, the simple story is that there's three things going on. There's something making it bounce. And we had a system that was estimating how high the robot was off the ground and using that, you know, there's energy that can be in three places in a Poga stick. One is in the spring, one is in the altitude, and the other is in the velocity. And so when at the top of the hop, it's all in the height. And so you could just measure how high you're going and thereby have an idea of a lot about the cycle. And you could decide whether to put more energy in or less. So that's one element. Then there's a part that you decide where to put the foot. And if you think when you're landing on the ground with respect to the center of mass, so if you think of a pole vaulter, the key thing the pole vaulter has to do is get its body to the right place when the pole gets stuck.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And then the next big step was to make it work in 3D, which that was really the scary part. Would these simple things, you know, people had inverted pendulums at the time for years and they could control them by driving a cart back and forth. But could you make it work in three dimensions while it's bouncing and all that? But it turned out not to be that hard to do, at least at the level of performance we achieved at the time.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “In the very early days, I needed some better engineering than I could do myself. And I hired Ben Brown. We each had our way of contributing to the design, and we came up with a thing that could start to work. I had some stupid ideas about how the actuation system should work. And we sorted that out. It wasn't that hard to make it balanced once you get the physical machine to be working well enough and have enough control over the degrees of freedom. And then we very quickly, you know, we started out by having it floating on an inclined airtable. And then that only gave us like six foot of travel. So once it started working, we switched to a thing that could run around the room on another device. It's hard to explain these without you seeing them, but you probably know what I'm talking about, a planarizer.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I mean, I think that was the motivation to try and get more of the fundamentals of how animals work. But the idea that it would result in, you know, machines that were anything like practical, like we're making now, that wasn't anywhere in my head. You know, as an academic, I was mostly just trying to do the next thing, you know, make some progress, impress my colleagues if I could.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And so we walked around and we looked in offices. Chris, I didn't know anything. You know, I was basically a kid, but Ivan knew his way around. And we found Craig Fields in his office. Craig later became the director of DARPA. But in those days, he was a program manager. And so we went in. I had a little Samsonite suitcase. We opened and it had just the skeleton of this one-legged hopping robot. And we showed it to him. And you could almost see the drill going down his chin. Of excitement. And he sent me $250,000. He said, okay, I want to fund this. And I was between institutions. I was just about to leave JPL and I hadn't decided yet where I was going next. And then when I landed at CMU, he sent $250,000, which in 1980 was a lot of research money.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So I thought about it. And I made up a list of three possible projects. And I purposely made the top one and the bottom one really boring sounding. And in the middle, I put Pogo Stick Robot. And when he looked at it, Ivan is a brilliant guy, brilliant engineer, and real cultivator of people. He looked at it and knew right away what the thing that was worth doing. And so he had an endowed share. So he had about $3,000 that he gave me to build a first model, which I went, you know, I went to the shop and with my own hands kind of made a first model, which didn't work and was just a beginning shot at it. And Ivan and I took that to Washington. And in those days, you could just walk into DARPA and walk down the hallway and see who's there. Ivan, who had... Been there in his previous life”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I'm going to start on the not the technical side, but the, I guess we could call it the motivational side or the funding side. So before Carnegie Mellon, I was actually at JPL at the Jeff Propulsion Lab for three years. And while I was there, I connected up with Ivan Sutherland, who is sometimes regarded as the father of computer graphics because of work he did both at MIT and then University of Utah and Evans and Sutherland. Anyway, I got to know him. And at one point, he said he encouraged me to do some kind of project at Caltech, even though I was at JPL. You know, those are kind of related institutions.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “First of all, the leg lab actually started at Carnegie Mount So I was a professor there starting in 1980 about 1986. And so that's where the first topping machines were built. Starting, I guess we got the first one working in about 1982, something like that. That was a simplified one. Then we got a three-dimensional one in 1983. The quadruped that we built at the LEG Lab, the first version was built in about 1984 five and really only got going about 86 or so. It took years of development to get it to.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I don't know if you know my friend Matt Mason, who was the director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. And we go back to graduate school together. But he analyzed a movie of Julia Childs doing a cooking thing. And she did, I think he said something like there were 40 different ways that she handled a thing, and none of them was grasping. She would nudge, roll, flatten with her, you know, knife, things like that. And none of them was grasping.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You move it. Well, that's not anything like how people and animals work, you know. We juggle in our hands. We hug multiple objects and can sort them. So now to be fair, Being more aggressive is going to mean things aren't going to work very well for a while. So it's a longer term approach to the problem. And that's just theory now. Maybe that won't pay off, but that's sort of how I'm trying to think about it, trying to encourage our group to go at it.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “All just about the energy of bouncing, and I was going to have a springy thing in the leg, and some actuator so that you could get an energy regime going of bouncing. And the idea that balance was an important part of it didn't come until a little later. And then it might made the one like the pogo stick robots. Now I think that we need to do that in manipulation. If you look at robot manipulation, we've been working, we, a community has been working on it for 50 years We're nowhere near human levels of manipulation. I mean, we can, you know, it's come along, but I think it's all too safe. And I think trying to break out of that safety thing of static grasping, you know, if you look at the a lot of work that goes on, it's about the geometry of the part, and then you figure out how to move your hand so that you can position it with respect to that. And then you grasp it carefully.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Walked very slowly. It always had at least three feet on the ground, so it worked like a table or a chair with tripod stability. And it moved really slowly. And I just looked at that and said, wow, that's wrong. That's not anything like how people of animals work because we bounce and fly. We have to predict what's going to happen in order to keep our balance when we're taking a running step or something like that. We use the springiness in our in our legs, you know, our muscles in our tendons and things like that as part of the story, you know, the energy circulates. We don't just throw it away every time. So I'm not sure I understood all that when I first thought, but I definitely got inspired to say, you know, let's try the opposite. And I didn't have a clue as to how to make a hopping robot work, you know, not balanced in 3D. In fact, when I started, it was.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, let me tell you about how I got started on legs at all. When I was still a graduate student, I went to a conference. It was a biological legged locomotion conference, and I think it was in Philadelphia. So it was all biomechanics people, you know, researchers who would look at muscle and maybe neurons and things like that. They weren't so much computational people, but they were more biomechanics. And maybe there were 1,000 people there. And I went to a talk, one of the talks, all the talks were about The body of either animals or people and respiration, things like that. But one talk was by a robotics guy, and he showed a six-legged robot that”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Of the structure itself. But then, you know, it turns out that the aesthetics of the thing itself add and combine with the lifelike things that the robots can do. But the heart of it is making them do things that are interesting. One of the things that underlies a lot of your work is that the robots you create, the systems you have created for over 40 years now have a kind of, they're not cautious. So a lot of robots”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “But yeah, I guess that is a question how much was it about function versus just creating something cool? I think it's still a balance between those two. There was a time, though, when I was, I guess I was probably already a professor or maybe late in graduate school, when I thought that function was everything and that mobility, dexterity, perception and intelligence, those are sort of the key functionalities for robotics. what mattered and nothing else mattered. And I even had kind of this platonic ideal that a robot, if you just looked at a robot and it wasn't doing anything, it would look like a pile of junk, which a lot of my robots looked like in those days. But then when it started moving, you'd get the idea that it had some kind of life or some kind of interest in its movement. And I think we purposely even designed machines, not worrying about the aesthetic.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Aluminum cylinder. I can't even remember what it's called now, that you needed a starter, I think it was. And we would take those apart, fill them with match heads, put a tail on it, and make it into little rockets. So it wasn't always about function. Well, Rocket was pretty much fun. I guess that is pretty functional.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “David Maher had models of the brain that were appealing both to biologists but also to computer people. So he was a visitor in the AI lab at the time. And I guess he became full-time there. So that was the first time a bridge was made between those two groups. Then the bridge kind of went away and then there was another time in the 80s and then recently, you know, the last five or so years there's been a stronger connection. You said you were always kind of a builder. What stands out to you in memory of a thing you've built? Maybe a trivial thing that just kind of like inspired you in the possibilities that this direction of work might hold. I mean, we were just doing gadgets when we were kids. You know, I have a friend. We were taking, you know, the, I don't know if everybody remembers, but fluorescent lights had this little...”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And the neurophysiology wasn't really working for me. It wasn't conceptual enough. I couldn't see really how by looking at single neurons you were going to get to a place where you could understand, you know, control systems or thought or anything like that. And, you know, the AI lab was always an appealing. This was before CSAL, right? This was in the 70s. So the AI Lab was always an appealing idea. And so when I went back to the AI lab, you know, following him, and I saw the arm, I just thought, you know, this is it. It's so interesting. The tension between the BCS brain and cognitive science approach to understanding intelligence and the robotics approach to understanding intelligence. Well, BCS is now morphed a bit, right? They have the Center for Brain's Minds and Machines, which is trying to bridge that gap. And even when I was there, David Maher was in the AI.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah. And you saw the pieces and you saw in your vision the arm when it's put back together and the possibilities that holds. Somehow it spurred my imagination. I was in the brain incognitive sciences department as a graduate student doing neurophysiology. I'd been an electrical engineer as an undergraduate at Northeastern.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So he became an accountant. But the result of that was our basement was always full of tools and equipment and electronics. And from a young age, I would watch him assembling a kit, an ICO kit or something like that. I still have a couple of his old ICO kits. But it was really during graduate school when... Followed a professor back from class. It was Bertold Horn at MIT, and I was taking a. An interim class. It's IAP, independent activities period. And I followed him back to his lab. And on the table was a Vike Arm robot arm taken apart in probably a thousand pieces. And when I saw that, you know, from that day on, I was a roboticist. Do you remember the year 1974? 1974. So there's just this arm in pieces.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Flavor, it used to be Gentoo, and the reason I say that is because it rhymes with go to. So you should go to Express VPN. com slash legspod for an extra three months free. This is Alex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mark Ribert. When did you first fall in love with robotics? Well, I was always a builder from a young age. I was lucky. My father was a frustrated engineer. And by that I mean he wanted to be an aerospace engineer, but his mom from the old country thought that that would be like a grease monkey. And so she said no.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Faster than light travel is not possible. You click a button. If you click it fast enough, right there, you're a different location, a different country. It opens up all kinds of possibilities. Just press the button, close your eyes, and imagine you're in London among all those people with a fancy accents that make you sound really smart. And that allows you to watch different content that's geographically restricted, for example. But again, I think the privacy thing is really the important thing. Everybody should be using a VPN, ExpressVPN is my favorite one. It's fast. It works on any device. Any operating system, Linux, the best, the sexiest, most powerful operating system, but not many people use it, maybe because they're not cool. If you want to be one of the cool kids, you should be using Linux. To this day, Ubuntu is my go-to.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Download NetSuites popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite dot com lex. That's netsuite dot com slash lex for your own KPI checklist. This episode is brought to you by Express VPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the Internet. I've used them for many years. You know, it's the privacy thing, for sure. It's also the happiness thing. I press the button, turns on, I pick a location. Instantaneously, space time travel solved. I don't understand what all the hoopla is about like uh”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source