YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Playter

lines on the record: 161
first: 2023-04-28
most recent: 2023-04-28
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

“In the early days of developing Big Dog, the loose rock was the epitome of the hard walking surface because you step down and then the rock and you had these little point feet on the robot and the rock can roll and you have to deal with that last minute change in your foot placement.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We take them outside often, you know, rocks, hills, that sort of thing. You've been surround our lab in Waltham. We probably haven't been on the sand, but stop. I don't doubt that we could deal with it. We might have to spend a little bit of time to sort of make that work. But we did take Big Dog to Thailand years ago. And we did this great video of the robot walking in the sand, walking into the ocean up to, I don't know its belly or something like that, and then turning around and walking out, all playing some cool beach music. Great show. But then we didn't really clean the robot off, and the salt water was really hard on it. So we put it in a box, shipped it back by the time it came back. We had some problems with corrosion.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe Atlas could spill his beer because he's got nowhere to put it. God, Alice could walk on the sand. So can it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, have we really had him out on the beach?”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it will be even more complex with manipulation because there's a lot more going on. And you need to capture, I don't know, things slipping and moving in your hand. It's a level of complexity that I think goes above footground contact when you really start doing dextrous manipulation. So there's challenges ahead still”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Events well in a way that captured the important parts of the interaction was a really important element to get right and to also do in a way that was computationally feasible and could run fast. Because if your simulation runs too slow, then your developers are sitting around waiting for stuff to run and compile. So it's always about efficient fast operation as well. So that's been a big part of it. You know, I think developing those tools in parallel to the development of the platform and trying to scale them has really been essential, I'd say, to us being able to assemble a team of people that could do this.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The root of some of our physics based simulation tools really started at MIT. And we built some good physics-based modeling tools there. The early days of the company, we were trying to develop those tools as a commercial product. So we continued to develop them. It wasn't a particularly successful commercial product, but we ended up with some nice physics-based simulation tools so that when we started doing legged robotics again, we had a really nice tool to work with. And the things we paid attention to were things that weren't necessarily handled very well in the commercial tools you could buy off the shelf, like interaction with the world, like foot ground contact. So trying to model those contacts.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Atlas robots at the company. And, you know, we probably have 40 developers there all trying to gain access to it. And so you need to share resources and use some of this software pipeline.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an important part of building a team around it, which means you need to also have software tool, simulation tools. So we have always made strong use of physics-based simulation tools to do some of this calculation, basically test it in simulation before you put it on the robot, but you also want the same code that you're running in simulation to be the same code you're running on the hardware. And so even getting to the point where it was the same code going from one to the other, we probably didn't really get that working until a few years, several years ago. But that was a bit of a milestone. And so you want to work, certainly work these pipelines so that you can make it as easy as possible and have a bunch of people working in parallel, especially when we only have, you know, four of the Atlas robots, the model.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Computers weren't as capable about calculating forward with a sophisticated model. But as computation gets better, we can do more of that.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there's yet another loop that's probably happening a little bit slower, which is where you start to bring, you know, your perception in, your vision, and things like that. And so you need to run all of these loops sort of simultaneously. You do have to manage your computer time so that you can squeeze in all the calculations you need in real time in a very consistent way. And the amount of calculation we can do is increasing as computers get better, which means we can start to do more sophisticated calculations. I can have a more complex model doing my forward prediction. And that might allow me to do even better predictions as I get better and better. And it used to be, again, 10 years ago, we had to have pretty simple models that we were running at those fast rates because the”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, there's a few different layers of that. You want at the lowest level, you like to run things typically at around a thousand hertz, which means that, you know, at each joint of the robot, you're measuring position or force and then trying to control your actuator, whether it's a hydraulic or electric motor, trying to control the force coming out of that actuator. And you want to do that really fast, something like 1,000 hertz. And that means you can't have too much calculation going on at that joint. But that's pretty manageable these days and is fairly common. And then there's another layer that you're probably calculating, you know, maybe at 100 hertz, maybe 10 times slower, which is now starting to look at the overall body motion and thinking about the larger physics of the robot.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why you need to be able to predict forward just a little bit. And so that's where this model predictive control stuff comes in. Predict forward what you think is going to happen. And then if that does happen, you're in good shape. If something else happens, you better start predicting again”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we'll push you over if you're not ready for it. And the robot reached to grab the door handle. I think it missed the grasp of the door handle, was expecting that its hand was on the door handle. And so when it tried to turn the knob, Just threw itself over. It didn't realize, oh, I had missed the door handle. I didn't have, I didn't, I was expecting a force back from the door. It wasn't there. And then I lost my balance. So these little simple things that you and I would take totally for granted and deal with the robots don't know how to deal with yet. And so you have to start to deal with all of those circumstances.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the curse of a general purpose robot that they're not perfect at any one thing, but they might be able to do a wide variety of things. And that is That is the goal at the end of the day. I think we all want to build general purpose robots that can be used for lots of different activities, but it's hard. And the wisdom in building successful robots up until this point have been go build a robot for a specific task and it'll do it very well. And as long as you control that environment, it'll operate perfectly. But robots need to be able to deal with uncertainty. If they're going to be useful to us in the future, they need to be able to deal with unexpected situations. And that's sort of the goal of a general purpose or multi-purpose robot. And that's just darn hard. And so some of the, you know, there's these curious little failures. Like I remember one of a robot, you know, the first time you start to try to push on the world with a robot, you forget that the world pushes back.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we were trying to drive the robot through this maze, we were just trying to support the other teams. It was humbling because it was really a hard task. And honestly, the robots, the tiers were because mostly the robots didn't do it. You know, they fell down. repeatedly it was hard to get through this contest. Some did and they were rewarded and won, but it was humbling because of just how hard these tests weren't all that hard. A person could have done it very easily. But it was really hard to get the robots to do it.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were asked, our role in this was to build a humanoid at the time. It was our sort of first generation Atlas robot. And we built maybe 10 of them. I don't remember the exact number. And DARPA distributed those to various teams that sort of won a contest showed that they could program these robots and then use them to compete against each other. And then other robots were introduced as well. Some teams built their own robots. Carnegie Mellon, for example, built their own robot. And all these robots competed to see who could sort of get through this maze of the FASS. And again, I think the purpose was to kind of push the whole industry forward. We provided the robot and some baseline software, but we didn't actually compete as a participant.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so there was a contest where a bunch of different robots were asked to do a series of tasks, some of those that you mentioned, drive a vehicle, get out, open a door, go identify a valve, shut a valve, use a tool to maybe cut a hole in a surface and then crawl over some stairs and maybe some rough terrain. So it was The idea was have a general purpose robot that could do lots of different things. had to be mobility and manipulation on board perception. And there was a contest which DARPA likes at the time was running sort of follow on to the grand challenge, which was let's try to push vehicle autonomy along, right? They encourage people to build autonomous cars. So they're trying to basically push an industry forward”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could have periods where the communication was entirely interrupted and the robot had to be able to proceed But you could provide some high level guidance to the robot. Basically, low bandwidth communications to steer”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the courage to do a backflip in the first place and to not worry too much about the ridicule of somebody saying, why the heck are you doing backflips with robots? Because a lot of people have asked that. Why are you doing this?”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“you We definitely broke a few robots trying, but that's where the build it break it fix it strategy comes in. You got to be willing to break. And what ends up happening is you end up by breaking the robot repeatedly. You find the weak points. And then you end up redesigning it. So it doesn't break so easily next time, you know?”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's sort of you talked about under actuated, right? So when you're in the air. There's some things you can't change, right? You can't change the momentum while it's in the air because you can't apply an external force, a torque. And so the momentum isn't going to change. So how do you work within the constraint of that fixed momentum to still get from A to B where you want to be?”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just on the fly. So the model predictive control lets you adjust on the fly. And of course, I think this is what people adapt as well. When we do it even a gymnastics trick, we try to set it up so it's as close to the same every time. But we figured out how to do some adjustment on the fly. And now we're starting to figure out that the robots can do this adjustment on the fly as well using these techniques.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The physics we can calculate physics pretty well using Newton's laws about how it's going to evolve over time. The sick trick, which was a front somersault with a You saw the robot on various versions of that trick I've seen it land in different configurations and it still manages to stabilize itself. And so what this model predictive control means is, again, in real time, the robot is projecting ahead a second into the future and sort of exploring options. And if I move my arm a little bit more this way, how is that going to affect the outcome? And so it can do these calculations, many of them, and basically solve where given where I am now, maybe I took off a little bit screwy from how I had planned, I can adjust.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the next second or two about how its motion is going to transpire. And you can solve for optimal trajectories to get from A to B. So, this is happening in a much more natural way. And we're really seeing an acceleration happen in the development of these behaviors, again, partly due to these optimization techniques, sometimes learning techniques. So it's hard in that there's a lot of mathematics behind it, but we're figuring that out.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, this stuff has really evolved rapidly in the last few years. You know, the first time we did a somersault, you know, there was a lot of kind of manual iteration. What is the trajectory? You know, how hard do you throw? In fact, in these early days, I actually would when I'd see early experiments that the team was doing, I might make suggestions about how to change the technique. Again, kind of borrowing from my own intuition about how backflips work. But frankly, they don't need that anymore. So in the early days, you had to iterate kind of in almost a manual way, trying to change these trajectories of the arms or the legs to try to get a successful backflip to happen. But more recently, we're running these model predictive control techniques where we're able to, the robot essentially can think in advance.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. And there's lots of videos of it trying and failing. And that's, you know, that's all, you know, we don't always release those videos, but they're a lot of fun to look at.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're now thinking about the next generation of Atlas. And we're probably going to be in the realm of a person can't do it with the next generation. The robots, the actuators are going to get stronger where it really is the case that at least some of these joints, some of these motions will be stronger.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Atlas, I don't know the exact height. It was probably a meter high or something like that. It was a pretty tall jump that Atlas was able to manage when we last tried to do this. And I have video of my chief technical officer doing the same jump. And he really struggled, you know, to get the heat.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It probably can't curl as much as we can yet. But a metric that I think is interesting. Another way of looking at that strength is the box jump. So how high of a box can you jump onto?”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we haven't done that yet, Carrie Spott. I guess we did a little bit of a little skit around Christmas where we had two spots holding up another spot that was trying to put a bow on a tree. So I guess we're doing that in a small way.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That tool bag, you know, had loose stuff in it. So it managed that. There are harder things that we haven't done yet. We could have had a big jointed thing or, I don't know, a bunch of loose wire or rope”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to some degree, you don't want to have to pay too much attention to each specific thing, right? There's sort of a generalization here. Obviously, when you grab a thing, you have to conform your hand, your end effector, to the surface of that shape. But once it's in your hands, it's probably just the mass and inertia that matter. And the shape may not be as important. And so in some ways, you want to pay attention to that detailed shape. In others, you want to generalize it and say, well, all I really care about is the center of mass of this thing, especially if I'm going to throw it up on that scaffolding”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a big change for us. And I think the tools we've built are really allowing that to happen quickly now. Some of those motions that you saw in that most recent video, we were able to create in a matter of days. It used to be that it took six months to do anything new on the robot. And now we're starting to develop the tools that let us do that in a matter of days. We think that's really exciting. That means that the ability to create new behaviors for the robot is going to be a quicker process.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we also think this differentiates us from the other humanoid robot activities that you're seeing out there. Mostly they're not picking stuff up yet and not heavy stuff anyway. But just like you or me, you need to anticipate that moment. You're reaching out to pick something up and as soon as you pick it up, your center of mass is going to shift. And if you're going to turn in a circle, you have to take that inertia into account. And if you're going to throw a thing, you know, you've got all of that has to be sort of included in the model of what you're trying to do. So the robot needs to have some idea or expectation of what that weight is and sort of predict, you know, think a couple of seconds ahead. How do I manage now my body plus this big heavy thing together to get and still maintain balance, right? And so.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we were definitely trying to show that the robot and the techniques were applying to the Atlas let us deal with heavy things in the world. Because if the robot's going to be useful, it's actually got to move stuff around. And that needs to be significant stuff. That's an appreciable portion of the body weight of the robot.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is. The humanoid form is attractive in many ways, but it's also a challenge in many ways. Have this big upper body that has a lot of mass and inertia. And throwing that inertia around increases the complexity of maintaining balance. And as soon as you pick up something heavy in your arms, you've made that problem even harder. And so in the early work, in the leg lab and in the early days at the company, we were pursuing these quadruped robots, which had a kind of built-in simplification. You had this big rigid body and then really light legs. So when you swing the legs, the leg motion didn't impact the body motion very much. All the mass and inertia was in the body. But when you have the humanoid, that doesn't work. You have big, heavy legs. You swing the legs. It affects everything else. And so dealing with all of that interaction does make the humanoid a much more complicated platform.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not necessarily required for natural movement. It's just required. We don't have a gravity force that you can hook yourself onto to apply an external force in the direction you want at all times, right? The only external forces are being mediated through your feet and how they get mediated depend on how you place your feet. And you can't just, you know, God's hand can't reach down and push in any direction you want.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interactuated is the right word, right? You can't push the robot in any direction you want to, right? And so that is one of the hard problems of legged locomotion.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In those earlier days, again, we were working with these really simplified models. So we're trying to boil all the physics of the complex human body into a simpler subsystem that we can more easily describe in mathematics. And sometimes those simpler subsystems don't have all of that complexity of the straight leg built into them. And so what's happened more recently is we're able to apply techniques that let us take the full physics of the robot into account and deal with some of those strange situations like the straight leg.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one of the things that makes this straight leg a challenge is you're sort of up against a singularity, a mathematical singularity where, you know, when your leg is fully extended, it can't go further the other direction, right? There's only you can only move in one direction. And that makes all of the calculations around how to produce torques at that joint or positions makes it more complicated. And so having all the mathematics so it can deal with these singular configurations is one of many challenges that we face. And I'd say in the”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that probably took 15 years, 10 to 15 years to sort of get that from the Pet Man prototype was probably in 2008 and what was it, 2022, last year that I think I saw good walking on Atlas.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But even then, it was hard to get the robot to walk when you were walking that it fully extended its leg and essentially landed on an extended leg. And if you watch closely how you walk, you probably land on an extended leg, but then you immediately flex your knee as you start to make that contact. Getting that all to work well took such a long time. In fact, Probably didn't really see the nice natural walking that I expected out of our humanoids until maybe last year. And the team was developing on our newer generation of Atlas some new techniques for developing a walking control algorithm. And they got that natural looking motion as sort of a byproduct of just a different process they were applying to developing the control.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our first humanoid, we needed to deliver natural looking walking. We took a contract from the Army. They wanted a robot that could walk naturally. They wanted to put a suit on the robot and be able to test it in a gas environment. And so they wanted the motion to be natural. And so our goal was a natural looking gate. It was surprisingly hard to get that to work. And we did build an early machine. We called it Petman prototype. It was the prototype before the Petman robot. And it had a really nice looking gait where it would stick the leg out, it would do heel strike first before it rolled onto the toe so you didn't land with a flat foot. You extended your leg a little bit.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lifelike or elegant or just natural looking. And so I think if you get the physics right, It also ends up being more efficient, likely. There's a benefit that it probably ends up being. More stable in the long run, you know, it could walk stably over a wider range of conditions. And it's more beautiful and attractive at the same time.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think, and part of the reason why people are attracted to the machines we build is because the inherent dynamics of movement are closer to right because we try to use walking gates or we build a machine around this gate where you're trying to work with the dynamics of the machine instead of to stop them. Some of the early walking machines, you're essentially you're really trying hard to not let them fall over. And so you're always stopping the tipping motion, you know? And sort of the insight of dynamics stability in a leged machine is to go with it, you know, let the tipping happen, you know, let yourself fall, but then catch yourself with that next foot. And there's something about getting those physics to be expressed in the machine that people interpret as”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it might, yeah, it might be hard to actually articulate exactly. There's something about, and being a competitive athlete, there's something about seeing movement. You know, a coach, one of the greatest strengths a coach has is being able to see, you know, some little change in what the athlete is doing and then being able to articulate that to the athlete. And then maybe even trying to say, and you should try to feel this. So there's something just in seeing. And again, sometimes it's hard to articulate what it is you're seeing. But there's a, just perceiving the motion at a rate that is, again, sometimes hard to put into words.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a little bit more on the art side. Maybe it predates your knowledge. Before you have the knowledge of how to control it, you try to work through the art channel. And humanoids sort of make that available to you. If it had been a different shape, Maybe we wouldn't have had the same intuition about it.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of science around it. And trying to develop scientific principles that let you extrapolate from like one-legged machine to another, develop a core set of principles like a spring mass bouncing system, and then figure out how to apply that from a one-legged machine to a two or a four-legged machine. Those principles are really important, and we're definitely a core part of our work. There's also When we started to pursue humanoid robots, There was so much complexity in that machine that, you know, one of the benefits of the humanoid form is you have some intuition about how it should look while it's moving. And that's a little bit of an art, I think. Now it's, or maybe it's just tapping into a knowledge that you have deep in your body and then trying to express that in the machine. But that's an intuition.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends if you could have built that car or just gotten another one, right? That would have been the approach. I remember. When I got to grad school, you know, I got some training about operating a lathe and a mill up in the machine shop, and I could start to make my own parts. And I remember breaking some piece of equipment in the lab and then realizing, because maybe this was a unique part and I couldn't go buy it. And I realized, oh, I can just go make it. was an enabling feeling. Then you're not afraid. It might take time. It might take more work than you thought it was going to be required to get this thing done. But you can just go make it. And that's freeing in a way that nothing else is.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it lets you be fearless in your work. Too often if you are working with a very expensive robot, maybe one that you bought from somebody else or that you don't know how to fix, then you treat it with kit gloves and you can't actually make progress. You have to be able to break something. And so I think that's been a principle as well.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source