YouSaid · the spoken record

Russ Tedrake

lines on the record: 172
first: 2020-08-09
most recent: 2020-08-09
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

“No, never that. I mean, I was It was working hard, but I was loving it, right? I mean, there's, I think, there's this magical thing where you. You know, I'm lucky to surround myself with people that basically. Almost every day I'll be told something or something that I realize wow, I don't understand that. And if I could just understand that, there's something else to learn that if I could just learn that thing, I would connect another piece of the puzzle and, you know, I think that is just such an important aspect. And being willing to understand what you can and can't do and loving the journey of going and learning those other things. I think that's the best part.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. But let me actually tell. What happened when I first got to MIT because that I think might be relevant here, but I had taken a computer engineering degree at Michigan. I enjoyed it immensely, learned a bunch of stuff. I liked computers. I liked programming. But when I did get to MIT and started working with Sebastian Sung, Theoretical Physicist, computational neuroscientist. Culture here was just different. It demanded more of me, certainly mathematically and in the critical thinking. And I remember the day that I Borrowed one of the books from my advisor's office and walked down to the Charles River and was like, I'm getting my butt kicked, you know? And I think that's going to happen to everybody who's doing this kind of stuff, right? I think.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't really start. I mean, I was always in the better math classes that I could take, but I wasn't pursuing super advanced mathematics or anything like that until I got to MIT. I think MIT lit me up and... Really started. The life that I'm living now. But yeah, I really want kids to. Dig deep, really understand things, building things too. I mean, pull things apart, put them back together like that's just such a good way to really understand things and expect it to be a long journey, right? Don't have to know everything. You're never going to know everything.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's an interesting time to be a kid these days. Everything points to this being sort of a winner-take-all economy and the like. I think the people that will really excel. In my opinion, are going to be the ones that can think deeply about problems? Um, You have to be able to ask questions agile and use the internet for everything that's good for and stuff like this. And I think a lot of people will develop those skills. I think The Leaders, you know, robotics leaders, whatever are going to be the ones that can do more and they can think very deeply and critically. And that's a harder thing to learn. I think one path to learning that is through mathematics, through engineering. Would encourage people to start math early. I mean,”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, do you find that? I know you segment your podcast. Do you think that? People with the attention span aspect of it, or is it the”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every lecture is a, I'm sorry, every seminar even, I think every talk I give is an opportunity to give that differently. I can deliver content directly into your browser. You have a WebGL engine right there. I can throw 3D content into your browser while you're listening to me, right? And I can assume that you have at least a powerful enough laptop or something to watch Zoom while I'm doing that, while I'm giving a lecture. That's a new communication tool that I didn't have last year. And I think robotics can potentially benefit a lot from teaching that way. See, it's going to be an experiment this fall. I'm thinking a lot about it”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's great I do think that something's changed right now, which is, you know, right now we're giving lectures over Zoom, I mean, giving seminars over Zoom and everything. I'm trying to figure out. I think that's a new medium.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about problems very differently because of the way I've been given the opportunity to teach them at MIT. We have questions asked, the fear of the lecture, the experience of the lecture and the questions I get and the interactions just forces me to be rock solid on these ideas in a way that I didn't have that I don't know I would be in a different intellectual space.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought a lot about teaching. And so Isaac Asimov, great science fiction writer, has also actually spent a lot of his career writing nonfiction, right? His memoir is fantastic. He was passionate about explaining things, right? He wrote all kinds of books on all kinds of topics in science. He was known as the great explainer. And I do really resonate with his style and just his way of talking about. By communicating and explaining to something is really the way that you learn something, I think.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think. When you really find something, which a book that resonates with you might not be the same book that resonates with me. But when you really find one that resonates with you, I think the dialogue that happens, and that's what I love that Adler was saying, you know, I think Socrates and Plato say the written word is never going to capture the beauty of dialogue. But Adler says, no, no, a really good book. is a dialogue between you and the author and it crosses time and space. And I don't know. I think it's a very romantic. There's a bunch of like specific advice which you can just gloss over, but the romantic view of how to read and really appreciate it is so good. And similarly, teaching.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marking it up and having the hard copy writing in the side notes, side margins. I think that was really, I read it at the right time where I was just feeling just overwhelmed with really low quality stuff, I guess. And similarly, I'm giving more than three now. I'm sorry if I've exceeded my.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some sense, it's so classical it might surprise you. But I actually Not too long. It was a while ago, but some people hate that book. I loved it. I think In this time right now where Boy, we're just inundated with research papers that you could read on archive with. Limited peer review and just this wealth of information I don't know. I think the. Passion of what you can get out of a book, a really good book, or a really good paper if you find it. The attitude, the realization that you're only going to find a few that really are worth all your time. But then once you find them, you should just dig in and understand it very deeply. And it's worth.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sapiens is the first one Homoce is the second. We mentioned the Black Swan by Caleb. I think that's a good sort of mind opener. I actually. So there's maybe a more controversial recommendation I could give. Well,”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I actually didn't read that much as a kid, but I read fairly voraciously now. There are some recent books that, if you're interested in this kind of topic, like AI superpowers by Kaifu Li is just a fantastic read. You must read that. Yuval Harari is just, I think that can open your mind.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you miss him? I mean, Yes, I don't know if I'd more so than if I had a different science project that I'd worked on super hard, right? Yeah, I mean, the robot, we basically had to do heart surgery on the robot in the final competition because we melted the core Yeah, there was something about watching that robot hanging there. We know we had to compete with it in an hour, and it was getting its cuts ripped out.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What really noticed felt more impressive, more dominant was the way that they would touch everything and lick everything and pick things up and stick it on their tongue and whatever. And he said, watching his daughter convinced him that actually he needed to study tactile sensing more. So there's something very important. I think it's a little bit also of the passive versus active part of the world, right? You can passively perceive the world. But it's fundamentally different if you can do an experiment, right? And if you can change the world and you can learn a lot more than a passive observer You can, in dialogue, that was your initial example, you could have an active experiment exchange. But I think if you're just a camera watching YouTube, I think that's a very different problem than if you're a robot that can apply force and touch.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think when you're in on the details, then we, of course, anthropomorphized our work with Atlas. But in verbal communication and the like, I think we were pretty aware of it as a machine that needed to be respected. I actually worry more about the smaller robots that could still move quickly if programmed wrong. And we have to be careful actually about safety and the like right now. If we build our robots correctly, I think then a lot of those concerns could go away. And we're seeing that trend. We're seeing the lower cost, lighter weight arms now that could be fundamentally safe. I mean, I do think touch is so fundamental. Ted Edelson is great. He's a perceptual scientist at MIT. And he studied vision most of his life. And he said when I had kids, I expected to be fascinated by their perceptual development.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if I, if the robot that was walking around my home looked more like a teddy bear and a little less like the Terminator, that could change completely the way people perceive it and interact with it. And maybe they'll even want to teach it, like you said. You could not quite gamify it, but somehow instead of people judging it and looking at it as if it's not doing as well as a human, they're going to try to help out the cute teddy bear, right? Who knows? But I think we're building robots wrong and being more soft and more contact is important, right?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's super important. Even just in a practical sense, if we forget about the emotional part of it, but for robots to interact safely while they're doing meaningful mechanical work in the close contact with or vicinity of people that need help, I think we have to have them, we have to build them differently. They have to be afraid, not afraid of touching the world. I think Baymax is just awesome. That's just like the movie of Fig Hero 6 and the concept of Baymax, that's just awesome. I think we should, and we have some folks at Toyota that are trying to Toyota research that are trying to build Baymax roughly. And I think it's just a fantastically good project. I think it will change the way people physically interact. The same way, I mean, you gave a couple examples earlier.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you program a robot to tie shoelaces and not just one shoe but every shoe right? That's a really good problem. It's tempting to write down like the infinite dimensional state of the laces. Probably not needed to write a good controller. I know we could hand design a controller that would do it, but I don't want that. I want to understand the principles that would allow me to solve another problem that's kind of like that. But I think if we can stay pure in our approach, then the challenge of tying anybody's shoes is a great challenge.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enveloping grasps and the like. But I think the really good problems in manipulation. So manipulation, by the way, is more than just pick and place. That's like a lot of people think of that, just grasping. I don't mean that. I mean buttoning my shirt. I mean tying shoelaces”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perception problems and the state representation questions, and then how do you do control? Thing that's a little bit sad is that for me at least is there's a lot of manipulation tasks that people want to do and should want to do they could start a company with it and be very successful that don't actually require you to think that much about underaction or dynamics at all even but certainly underactuated dynamics once I have if I if I reach out and grab something if it if I can sort of assume it's rigidly attached to my hand then I can do a lot of interesting meaningful things with it without really ever thinking about the dynamics of that object So we've built systems that kind of Reduce the need for that.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think it's everywhere. I think in some places, Already have natural tools to deal with it. It rears its head. I mean, in linear systems, it's not a problem. We just like an underactuated linear system is really not sufficiently distinct from a fully actuated linear system. It's a subtle point about when that becomes a bottleneck in what we know how to do with control. It happens to be a bottleneck, although we've gotten incredibly good solutions now, but for a long time that I felt that that was the key bottleneck in Legged Robots. And roughly now the underactuated course is me trying to tell people everything I can about how to make Atlas do a backflip, right? I have a second course now that I teach in the other semesters, which is on manipulation. And that's where we get into now more of the, that's a newer class. I'm hoping to put it online this fall completely. And that's going to have much more aspects about the”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for instance, if the contact mechanics of all of those onion pieces and all the permutations of possible touches between those onion pieces, you can give me a high-dimensional state representation. I'm okay if it's linear. But if I have to think about all the possible shattering combinatorics of that, then my robot's going to sit there thinking and the soup's going to get cold or something.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what I worry about saying compressed because I don't mind that it's low dimensional or not. It has to be something that's easier to think about.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the state that is given to us by Lagrangian mechanics. There is a proper Lagrangian state of the system, but the relevant state for this is some latent state is what we call it in machine learning. But there's some different state representatives.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Details matter, you know, so If I'm moving around a particular object, right, then I think about, oh, it's got a position and orientation in space, that's the description I want. Now, when I'm chopping an onion, okay, the first chop comes down. I have now a hundred pieces of onion. Does my control system really need to understand the position and orientation and even the shape of the hundred pieces of onion in order to make a decision? Probably not, you know, and if I keep going, I'm just getting more and more, is my state space getting bigger as I cut. It's not right. I think there's a richer idea of state.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's just not the right Specification. There are aspects of the state that are very important to the task. There are many that are unobservable and not important to the task. So you really need it begs new questions about state representation. Another example that we've been playing with in Just the idea of chopping onions. Okay, or carrots turns out to be better. So onions stink up the lab, and they're hard to see in a camera.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the first step of me trying to button my shirt is estimate the full state of my shirt Including what's happening in the back here, or whatever, whatever.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was using cameras. That was at the time we felt like LIDAR was too heavy and too powerful. Heavy to be carried on a light UAV, and we were using cameras, and that was a big part of it was just how do you do even stereo matching at a fast enough rate with a small camera, a small onboard compute. Since then, we have now, so the deep learning revolution unquestionably changed what we can do with perception for robotics and control. So in manipulation, we can address, we can use perception, I think, a much deeper way. And we get into not only, I think the first use of it naturally would be to ask your deep learning system to look at the cameras and produce the state, which is like the pose of my thing, for instance. But I think we've quickly found out that that's not always the right thing to do.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Right around the time of the DARPA challenge, we had a complicated perception system in the DARPA challenge. We also started to embrace perception for our flying vehicles at the time. We had a really good project on trying to make airplanes fly at high speeds through forests. Sirtash Karaman was on that project and it was a really fun team to work on. much farther forward since then.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the philosophy there is let physics do more of the work. The technical approach has been optimization. So you typically formulate your decision making for control as an optimization problem and you use the language of optimal control. And sometimes numerical optimal control in order to make those decisions and balance these complicated equations in order to control. You don't have to use optimal control to do under actuated systems, but that has been the technical approach that has borne the most fruit in our, at least in our line of work.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But actually, those are the problems that make me so excited about manipulation right now is that it breaks some of the foundational control stuff that I've been thinking about.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as soon as I take a step, I get into more nuanced territory and to get to really dynamic robots or airplanes or other things, I think you have to embrace the underactuated dynamics. Manipulation, people think, is manipulation underactuated. Even if my arm is fully actuated, I have a motor. If my goal is to control the position and orientation of this cup, then I don't have an actuator for that directly. So I have to use my actuators over here to control this thing. It gets even worse. Like, what if I have to button my shirt? Are the degrees of freedom of my shirt, right? I suddenly. That's a hard question to think about. It kind of makes me queasy thinking about my state space control ideas.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a subtle point. When you're in contact and you have your feet on the ground, there are still limits to what you can do. Unless I have suction cups on my feet, I cannot accelerate my center of mass towards the ground. Faster than gravity because I can't get a force pushing me down. But I can still do most of the things that I want to. So you can get away with basically thinking of the system as fully actuated unless you suddenly needed to accelerate down super fast”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Passive dynamic walkers are the extreme view of that. Are you taking away all the motors and you have to let physics do the work? But it shows up in all of the walking robots where you have to use some of actuators to push and pull even the degrees of freedom that you don't have an actuator on.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the answer is no. The world gives us under actuated robots, whether we like it or not. I'm a human. I'm an underactuated robot, even though I have more muscles than my big degrees of freedom because I have in some places multiple muscles attached to the same joint. But still, there's a really important degree of freedom that I have, which is the location of my center of mass in space, for instance. I can jump into the air, and there's no motor that connects my center of mass to the ground in that case. So I have to think about these implications of not having control over everything.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a strange name, but I thought it captured the essence of what control was good at doing and what control was bad at doing. So what do I mean by underactuated? So a mechanical system. Has many degrees of freedom, for instance? I think of a joint as a degree of freedom. And it has some number of actuators, motors. So if you have a robot that's bolted to the table, that has five degrees of freedom and five motors, then you have a fully actuated robot. If you take away one of those motors, then you have an under actuated robot. Now why on earth? I have a good friend who likes to tease me. He said, Russ, if you had more research funding, would you work on fully actuated robots?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look on YouTube for the 2020 versions until March, and then you have to go back to 2019 thanks to COVID. No, I've poured my heart into that class. And lecture one is basically explaining what the word underactuated means. So people are very kind to show up and then maybe have to learn what the title of the course means over the course of the first lecture.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a team at TRI that's working on soft hands. And you get so much more information if you can put a camera behind the skin roughly and get fantastic tactile information, which is super important. Like in manipulation, one of the things that really is frustrating is if you work super hard on your head mounted, on your perception system for your head-mounted cameras. And then you've identified an object, you reach down to touch it. And the last thing that happens right the most important time, you stick your hand and you're occluding your head-mounted sensors, right? So in all the part that really matters, all of your offboard sensors are occluded. And really, if you don't have tactile information, then you're blind in an important way. So it happens that soft robotics and tactile sensing tend to go hand in hand.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes Makes things smoother, right? So the The result of small actions is less. Discontinuous, but it also means potentially less instantaneously bad, for instance. I won't necessarily contact something and send it flying off. The other aspect of it that just happens to dovetail really well is that if soft robotics tends to be a place where we can embed a lot of sensors too. So if you change your hardware and make it more soft, then you can potentially have a tactile sensor, which is measuring the deformation.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite the opposite. It changes the computational problem. I think because of the, I think our world and our mathematics has biased us towards rigid. But it really should make things better in some ways. It's a I think the future is unwritten there. The other thing is”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that makes it hard actually. In fact, hitting the table with your rigid arm or nearly rigid arm has some of the problems that we talked about in terms of simulation. I think it fundamentally changes the mechanics of contact when you're soft, right? You turn point contacts into patch contacts, which can have torsional friction. You can have distributed load. If I want to pick up an egg, right? If I pick it up with two points, then in order to put enough force to sustain the weight of the egg, I might have to put a lot of force to break the egg. If I envelop it with contact all around, then I can distribute my force across the shell of the egg and have a better chance of not breaking it. So, soft robotics is for me a lot about changing the mechanics of contact.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so what's soft robotics? I told you that I really dislike the fact that robots are afraid of touching the world all over their body. So there's a couple reasons for that. If you look carefully at all the places that robots actually do touch the world, they're almost always soft. They have some sort of pad on their fingers or a rubber sole on their foot. But if you look up and down the arm, it's just pure aluminum or something.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a really important space. I do feel like a few years ago, drones were successful enough in academia. They kind of broke out and started an industry and autonomous cars have been happening. It does feel like manipulation in logistics, of course, first, but in the home shortly after seems like one of the next big things that's going to really pop.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we already have Roomba's cruising around. We have Alexa's or Google Homes on our kitchen counter. Only a matter of time till they spring arms and start doing something useful like that. So I do think it's coming. I think lots of people have lots of motivations for doing it. It's been super interesting actually learning about Toyota's vision for it, which is about helping people age in place. I think that's not necessarily the first entry, the most lucrative entry point, but it's the problem maybe that Really need to solve, no matter what. I think there's a real opportunity. It's a delicate problem. How do you work with people, help people, keep them active, engaged, but improve the quality of life and help them age in place, for instance?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, there's a big group working on small. Portfolio Also, a couple other projects and advanced materials discovery using AI and machine learning to discover new materials for car batteries and the like, for instance. Yeah. And that's been actually incredibly successful team. There's new projects starting up too.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's going to be important for robots too. I mean, that's another massive theme at Toyota research for robotics is this fleet learning concept. The idea that as a humanoid don't have enough time to visit all of my states, right? There's just a, it's very hard for one robot to experience all the things. That's not actually the problem we have to solve, right? We're going to have fleets of robots that can have very similar appendages. And at some point, maybe collectively they have enough data that their computational processes should be set up differently than ours, right?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Write good algorithms that try to spend most of their time in the corner cases. So you basically imagine you're building an autonomous car and you want to put it in, I don't know, downtown New Delhi all the time accelerated testing. You can write sampling strategies which figure out where your controller is performing badly in simulation and start generating lots of examples around that. Space of possible places where that can be where things can go wrong is very big. So it's hard to write those algorithms.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I mean, I think we have to get better at that. I mean, control theory has for decades talked about active experiment design. So, people call it curiosity these days. It's roughly this idea of trying to exploration or exploitation, but in the active experiment design is more specific. You could try to understand the uncertainty in your system, design the experiment that will provide the maximum information to reduce that uncertainty. There's a parameter you want to learn about, what is the optimal trajectory I could execute to learn about that parameter, for instance. Scaling that up to something that has a deep network in the loop and a planning in the loop is tough. We've done some work on Matt O'Kelly and Amancina. We've worked on some falsification algorithms that are trying to do rare event simulation that try to just hammer on your simulator. And if your simulator is good enough, you can spend a lot of time.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source