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

“I think it might even change the way we have to think about the way we write systems. What happens if you have the robot running lots of tests and it screws up, it breaks a dish, right? How do you capture that? I said you can't run the same simulation or the same experiment twice on a real robot. Do we have to be able to bring that one-off failure back into simulation in order to change our controller, study it, make sure it won't happen again? Is it enough to just try to add that to our distribution and understand that on average we're going to cover that situation again? There's really subtle questions at the corner cases that I think we don't yet have satisfying answers for.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Robot that could perform that for any dish in anybody's kitchen with enough confidence that it could be a commercial product. And it has deep learning perception in the loop. It has complex dynamics in the loop. It has controller. It has a planner. And how do you take all of that complexity and put it through this engineering discipline and verification and validation process to actually get enough confidence to deploy? I mean, the DARPA challenge made me realize that that's not something you throw over the fence and hope that somebody will harden it for you, that there are really fundamental challenges in closing that last gap.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So TRI has given me the TRI robotics effort, has made this investment in simulation, in Drake, and Michael Sherman leads a team there of just absolutely top-notch dynamics experts that are trying to write those simulators that can pick up the dishes. And there's also a team working on manipulation there that is taking problems like loading the dishwasher. And we're using that to study these really hard corner cases kind of problems in manipulation. So for me, this simulating the dishes, we could actually write a controller if we just cared about picking up dishes in the sink once. We could write a controller without any simulation whatsoever. And we could call it done. But we want to understand what is the path you take to actually get to”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was really interesting that what happened was that we started getting more professional about our software development during the DARPA robotics challenge. I learned the value of software engineering and how to bridle complexity. I guess that's what I want to somehow. Fight against and bring some of the clear thinking of controls into these complex systems we're building for robots. Shortly after the DARPA robotics challenge, Toyota opened a research institute TRI, Toy Toyota Research Institute. They put one of their, there's three locations. One of them is just down the street from MIT, and I helped ramp that up as a part of the end of my sabbatical, I guess.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then one of those systems, the last thing I said the first two things that Drake is, but the last thing is that there is a set of multi-body equations, rigid body equations, that is trying to provide a system that simulates physics. And we also have renderers and other things. But I think the physics component of Drake is special in the sense that we have done excessive amount of engineering to make sure that we've written the equations correctly. Every possible tumbling satellite or spinning top or anything that we could possibly write as a test is tested. We are making some, you know, I think fundamental improvements on the way you simulate contact.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some rewards for spending a little bit more up front cost in describing each system. I was inspired to do that because I think the complexity of Atlas, for instance, is just so great. And I think although, I mean, Ross has been incredible, absolute huge fan of what it's done for the robotics community. The ability to rapidly put different pieces together and have a functioning thing is very good. But I do think that it's hard to think clearly about a bag of disparate parts. Mr. Potatahead kind of software stack. If you can ask a little bit more out of each of those parts, then you can understand the way they work better. You can try to verify them and the like. You can do learning against them.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second thing is a system modeling language, a bit like LabView or Simulink, where you can make block diagrams out of complex systems. Or it's like Ross in that sense, where you might have lots of ROS nodes that are each doing some part of your system. But to contrast it with Ross, we try to write, if you write a Drake system, then you have to, it asks you to describe a little bit more about the system. If you have any state, for instance, in the system, any variables that are going to persist, you have to declare them. Parameters can be declared and the like. But the advantage of doing that is that you can, if you like, run things all on one process, but you can also do control design against it. You can do, I mean, simple things like rewinding and playing back your simulations. For instance, these things, you”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, Drake is three things roughly. It's an optimization library, which provides a layer of abstraction in C++ and Python for commercial solvers. You can write. Linear programs, quadratic programs, semi definite programs, sums of squares programs, the ones we've used, mixed integer programs, and it will do the work to curate those and send them to whatever the right solver is, for instance. And it provides a level of abstraction”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Drake is the simulator that I've been working on. There are other good simulators out there. I don't like to think of Drake as just a simulator because we write our controllers in Drake, we write our perception systems a little bit in Drake, but we write all of our low-level control and even planning and... Optimization in”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think simulating contact is one aspect. And people often say that one of the reasons that we have a limit in robotics is because we do not simulate contact accurately in our simulators. And I think that is... The extent to which that's true is partly because our simulators, we haven't got mature enough simulators. There are some things that are still hard, difficult that we should change. But we know what the governing equations are. They have some foibles, like this indeterminacy, but we should be able to simulate them accurately. We have incredible open source community in robotics, but it actually just takes a professional engineering team a lot of work to write a very good simulator like that.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I have to enumerate every possible order that my hand came into contact with the bottle, then I'm dead in the water. Any approach that we were able to get away with that in walking? Because we mostly touch the ground within a small number of points, for instance, and we haven't been able to get dexterous hands that way.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simplest example maybe would be imagine a robot with a flat foot and we think about the phases of gait where the heel strikes and then the front toe strikes and then you can heel up Are each different contact configurations. I only had two different contacts, but I ended up with four different contact configurations. Now, of course, my robot might actually have bumps on it or other things, so it could be much more subtle than that, right? But it's just even with one sort of box interacting with the ground already in the plane has that many, right? And if I was just even a 3D foot, then probably my left toe might touch just before my right toe and things. If I'm a dexterous hand and I go to talk about just grabbing a water bottle,”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every different control configuration, including sticking or sliding or parts of my body they're in contact or not, looks like a different system. And I think of them, I reason about them separately or differently. And the combinatorics of that blow up, right? So I just don't have enough time to compute all the possible contact configurations of my humanoid. Interestingly I mean, I'm a humanoid. I have lots of degrees of freedom, lots of joints. I only been around for a handful of years. It's getting up there. But I haven't had time in my life to visit all of the states in my system. Certainly all the contact configurations. So if step one is to Consider every possible contact configuration that I've ever been in, that's probably not a problem I need to solve, right?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, control has an answer for this. Robust control is one approach, but roughly you can write controllers which try to still perform the right task despite all the things that could possibly happen. The world might want the table to go this way and this way, but if I write a controller that pushes a little bit more and pushes a little bit, I can certainly make the table go in the direction I want. It just puts a little bit more of a burden on the control system, right? And this discontinuity do change the control system because the way we write it down right now”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The non smooth comes in when I make or break a new contact first or when I transition from stick to slip. So you typically have static friction and then you'll start sliding and that'll be a discontinuous change in velocity, for instance, especially if you come to rest and the...”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are situations absolutely where our laws don't tell us. So the standard approach that's okay. I mean, instead of having a differential equation, you end up with a differential inclusion, it's called. It's a set-valued equation. It says that I'm in this configuration. I have these forces applied on me. And there's a set of things that could happen, right?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the rigid body assumption of contact leaves us with some paradoxes, which are annoying for writing simulators and for writing controllers. Still, do that sometimes because soft contact is potentially harder numerically or whatever, and the best simulators do both or do some combination of the two. But anyways, because of these kind of paradoxes, there's all kinds of paradoxes in contact, mostly due to these rigid body assumptions. It becomes very hard to write the same kind of control laws that we've been able to be successful with for fighter jets. We haven't been as successful writing those controllers for manipulation.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we think about with friction is our standard model says the amount of force that the table will push back if I were to now try to push my table sideways. I guess I have a table here is proportional to the normal force. So if I'm barely touching and I push, I'll slide. But if I'm pushing more and I push, I will slide less. It's called Coulomb friction is our standard model. Now, if you don't know what the normal force is on the four legs and you push the table, then you don't know what the friction forces are going to be. And so you can't actually tell the laws just don't aren't explicit yet about which way the table's gonna go. It could veer off to the left, it could veer off to the right, it could go straight.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also know since it's not rotating that the moments have to balance and since it's a three-dimensional table it could fall in any direction it actually tells me uniquely what those three normal forces have to be If I have four legs at my table, four-legged table, and they were perfectly machined to be exactly the right, same height, and they're set down and the table's not moving. The basic conservation laws don't tell me there are many solutions for the forces that the ground could be putting on my legs that would still result in the table not moving. Now, the reason that seems fine, I could just pick one, but it gets funny now because if you think about friction,”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when it comes down that their mass moves in a constant position relative to each other itself. And that leads to some paradoxes when you go to try to talk about rigid body mechanics and contact. And so for instance, if I have a three-legged stool with just a, imagine it comes to a point at the leg. So it's only touching the world at a point. If I draw my physics, my high school physics diagram of this system, then there's a couple of things that I'm given by elementary physics. I know if the table is at rest, if it's not moving, zero velocities. Means that the normal force, all the forces are in balance. So, the force of gravity is being countered by the forces that the ground is pushing on my table legs.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a feedback mechanism. And thinking about this as locally, like a linear system, for instance, I can use more linear algebra tools to study systems like that, generalizations of linear algebra to these smooth systems. Is contact a robot. Has something very discontinuous that happens when it makes her And even the way it touches or the order of contacts can change the outcome in potentially unpredictable ways, not unpredictable, but complex ways. I do think there's a little bit of A lot of people will say that contact is hard in robotics, even to simulate. And I think there's a little bit of a, there's truth to that, but maybe a misunderstanding around that. What is limiting is that when we think about our robots and we write our simulators, we often make an assumption that objects are rigid.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, an airplane is of extremely complex system, or a spacecraft landing or whatever, but at least it has the luxury of things change relatively continuously. That's an oversimplification. But if I make a small change in the command I send to my actuator, then the path that the robot will take tends to change only by a small amount.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Control problems there are beautiful, I think. Contact is one thing that differentiates them from many of the control problems we've solved classically. Modern control grew up stabilizing fighter jets that were passively unstable. And there's amazing success stories from control all over the place. Power grid, I mean, there's all kinds of it's everywhere that we don't even realize, just like AI is now.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there are many different types of robots. The control that you need for a Jibo robot, you know, some robot that's sitting on your countertop and interacting with you, not touching you, for instance, is very different than what you need for an autonomous car or an autonomous drone. It's very different than what you need for a robot that's going to walk or pick things up with its hands, right? Passion has always been for the places where you're interacting or you're doing more dynamic interactions with the world. So walking now manipulation.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beautiful mechanisms. There's actually a pretty good computer, probably a couple chips in there doing amazing things. We don't think of that as a robot anymore, which isn't fair because then roughly it means that robotics always has to solve the next problem and doesn't get to celebrate its past successes. I mean, even factory room floor robots are super successful. They're amazing. But that's not the ones. I mean, people think of them as robots, but they don't, if you ask what are the successes of robotics, somehow it doesn't come to your mind immediately.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, it's good. I mean, there's standard definitions of combining computation with some ability to do mechanical work. I think that gets us pretty close. But I think robotics has this problem that once things really work, we don't call them robots anymore. Like my dishwasher at home is pretty sophisticated.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like this. Yeah, I think that's right. I think. There's something that humans seem to do, or maybe am I dangerous introspection. I think we are able to make very simple models that assume a lot about the world very quickly. And then it takes us a lot more time, like you're wrestling. You probably thought you knew what you were doing with wrestling and you were fairly functional as a complete wrestler. And then you slowly got more expertise. So maybe it's natural that our first... First level of defense against seeing a new robot is to think of it in our existing models of how humans and animals behave. And as you spend more time with it, then you'll develop more sophisticated models that will appreciate the differences.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually, Zach from Boston Dynamics let my kid drive in one of their demos one time. And that was just so good. So good.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way of those things. I don't know that. Is robotics really that much worse? I feel the pain that you feel too every time I read one of these. Sometimes it's friends and I definitely wish it went better or went differently. But I think it's healthy and good to have bursts of ideas, bursts of activities. Ideas, if they are really aggressive, they should fail sometimes. Certainly, that's the research mantra, right? If you're succeeding at every problem you attempt, then you're not choosing aggressively enough.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think. You can't just look at the failures. I mean, Boston Dynamics is a success. There's lots of companies that are still doing amazingly good work in robotics. I mean, this is the capitalist ecology or something, right? I think you have many companies, you have many startups, and they. Push each other forward, and many of them fail, and some of them get through, and that's sort of the natural.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I completely agree. I think Boston Dynamics is absolutely awesome. I think I show my kids those videos. And the best thing that happens is sometimes they've already seen them. I think I just think it's a pinnacle of success in robotics that is just one of the best things that's happened. Absolutely completely agree.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think the way we interact with each other online is changing the value we put on personal interaction. And that's a crazy big change that's going to happen and rip through our society has already been ripping through our society, right? And that has implications that are. I don't know if they should be scared of it or go with the flow, but I don't see some battle lines between humans and robots being. First thing to worry about.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An important question Actually, I think I like Rod Brooks' answer maybe the best on this. I think, and it's not the only answer he's given over the years, but maybe one of my favorites is. Says it's not going to be, he's got a book, Flesh and Machines, I believe. Not going to be the robots versus the people. We're all going to be robot people. Because we already have smartphones. Some of us have serious technology implanted in our bodies already, whether we have a hearing aid or a pacemaker or anything like this. People with amputations might have prosthetics That's a trend, I think, that. Likely to continue? I mean, this is now wild speculation. But, I mean, when do we get to cognitive implants and the like?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think robots are, I think people attribute a robot that looks like an animal as maybe having a level of self-awareness or consciousness or something that they don't have yet. So it's not, I think our ability to anthropomorphize those robots is probably, we're assuming that they have a level of intelligence, that they don't yet have. And that might be part of the fear. So in that sense, it's too hard. You know, there are many scary things in the world, right? So I think Right to ask those questions, we're right to think about the implications of our work.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think technology is complicated. It can be used in many ways. I think there are purely software. Tax that somebody could use to do great damage. Maybe they have already. I think. Wheeled robots could be used in bad ways too. Drones, right I don't think that I don't want to be building technology just because I'm compelled to build technology and I don't think about it. But I would consider myself a technological optimist, I guess, in the sense that Think we should continue to. Create and evolve and our world will change. And if we will introduce new challenges, we'll screw something up maybe. But I think also we'll invent ourselves out of those challenges and life will go on.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the fear is a bit cultural, though, because I mean, you notice that in my age in the US, we grew up watching Terminator, right? If I had grown up at the same time in Japan, I probably would have been watching Astro Boy. And there's a very different reaction to robots in different countries, right? So I don't know if it's a human innate fear of metal marvels or if it's something that we've done to ourselves with our sci-fi.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm not a psychologist. I think I don't know exactly why People react the way they do. Think we have to be careful about the way robots influence our society and the like. I think that's something that's a responsibility that roboticists need to embrace. I don't think robots are going to come after me with a kitchen knife or a pellet gun right away. And I mean, if they were programmed in such a way, but I used to joke with Atlas that. All I had to do was run for five minutes and its battery would run out. But actually, they've got a very big battery in there by the end. So it was over an hour.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny, I never watched the episode. I know when it happened though, because I gave a talk to some MIT faculty one day on assuming Monday or whatever I was telling them about the state of robotics. And I showed some video from Boston Dynamics of the quadruped spot at the time. It was the early version of Spot. And there was a look of horror that went across the room. And I said, I've shown videos like this a lot of times. What happened? And it turns out that this video had gone, yeah, this black mirror episode had changed the way people watched. The videos I was putting out.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever. And there are some things that the robot will do better. I think. You really set yourself up to try to see could robots win the game of soccer as the rules were written. Right thing for the robot to do is to play very differently than a human would play. You're not going to get the perfect soccer player robot. You're going to get something that exploits the rules, exploits its super actuators, its super low bandwidth feedback loops or whatever, and it's going to play the game differently than you want it to play. And I bet there's ways we saw that in the DARPA challenge that it's very hard to write a set of rules that someone can't find a way to exploit.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to make the rules very carefully, right? I mean, if Atlas kicked me in the shins, I'm down. And game over. So it's very subtle on.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I guess there is Robo Sumo wrestling. There's like the Robo One competitions where they do have these robots that go on the table and basically fight. So maybe I'm wrong.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start your organization now, right? I think almost independent of which problem is technically harder because they're both hard and they're both different.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's very hard to say one thing is harder when some problems harder than the other. What probably matters is. Who started the organization that, I mean, I think Robocup has a pretty serious following, and there is a history now of people playing that game, learning about that game, building robots to play that game, building increasingly more human robots. It's got momentum. So if you want to have mixed martial arts compete, you better start your”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the amazing thing is this ability to be flexible with our models, plan when we need to, use our well-oiled controllers when we don't, when we're in familiar territory. Having models, I think the other thing you just said was something about, I think your awareness of what's happening is even changing as you get as you improve your expertise, right? So maybe you have a very approximate model of the mechanics to begin with and as you gain expertise, you get a more refined version of that model. You're aware of Muscles or balance components that you just weren't even aware of before. So, how do you scaffold that?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of physics and mechanics and contact mechanics that I think we do learn or we do have policies for. We do control for almost feedback. But somehow we're able to still, I mean, I've never picked up a telephone with a shoe and a water bottle before. And somehow, and it takes me a little longer to do that the first time. But most of the time we can sort of figure that out.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My guess is I think there's evidence that you can plan at some of these levels, right? He's got a game he likes to talk about. I think he calls it the pick three game or something where he puts a bunch of clutter down in front of a person. And he says, okay, pick three objects and it might be a telephone or a shoe or a Kleenex box or whatever. And apparently you pick three items and then you pick, he says, okay, pick the first one up with your right hand, the second one up with your left hand. Now using those objects, now as tools, pick up the third object. So that's down at the level of.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's hierarchy and composition. Probably in the systems that we don't capture very well yet. You have layers of control systems. You have reflexes at the bottom layer and you have a A system that's capable of planning a vacation to Some distant country, which is probably don't have a controller, a policy for every possible destination you'll ever pick, right? But there's something magical in the in-between. And how do you go from these low-level feedback loops to something that feels like a pretty complex set of outcomes?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A slow motion version of where you learn the basic skills and you've probably gotten better at it and there's much more subtlety, but it might still be hard to actually really on the fly. Take a model of your humanoid and figure out how to plan the optimal sequence that might be a problem we never solve.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's reasons to be optimistic, but I think our best understanding of those problems are still pretty hard. I have been Increasingly focused on manipulation, partly where that's a case where the contact has to be much more rich. There are some really impressive examples of deep learning policies, controllers Can appear to do good things through contact. We've even got new examples of deep learning models of predicting what's going to happen to objects as they go through contact. But I think the challenge you just offered there still eludes us, right? The ability to make a decision based on those models quickly. I have to think, though, it's hard for humans when you get that complicated. I think probably.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome. That's a nice description of it. So there's also an opponent in there, right? So if Right, if you are wrestling a human and are in a game-theoretic situation with the human, that's still hard. But just to speak to the quickly reasoning about contact part of it, for instance.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source