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

“Is crazy This whole field of motion planning, collision free motion planning. And we write very complex algorithms so that the robot can dance around and make sure it doesn't touch the world.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So that is one of the big challenges. And I think it's still true. Boston dynamics and Animal and there's this incredible work on legged robots happening around the world. Most of them still are very good at the case where you're making contact with the world at your feet. And they have typically point feet relatively, their balls on their feet, for instance. If those robots get in a situation where the elbow hits the wall or something like this, that's a pretty different situation. Now, they have layers of mechanisms that will make, I think, the more mature solutions have ways in which the controller won't do stupid things. But a human, for instance, is able to leverage incidental contact in order to accomplish a goal. In fact, I might, if you push me, I might actually put my hand out and make a new brand new contact. The feet of the robot are doing this on quadrupeds, but we mostly in robotics are afraid of contact on the rest of our body.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then Is once you get off the script, things can go very wrong because even our state estimation, our system that was trying to Collect all the data from the sensors and understand what's happening with the robot. It didn't know about this situation. So it was predicting things that were just wrong. And then we did a violent shake and fell off in our face first out of the robot.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little bit of push here. Actually, we have videos of us running into the robot with a 10 foot pole and it kind of will recover. But this is a case where there's no space to recover. So a lot of our secondary balancing mechanisms about like take a step to recover. They were all disabled because we were in the car and there's no place to step. So we were relying on our just lowest level reflexes. And even then, I think just hitting the foot on the seat on the floor, we probably could have recovered from it. But the thing that was bad that happened is when we did that and we jostled a little bit, the tailbone of our robot was only a little off the seat. It hit the seat. The other foot came off the ground just a little bit. And nothing in our plans had ever told us what to do if your butt's on the seat and your feet are in the air”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And basically when the robot was in one of its most precarious configurations trying to sneak its big leg out of the side. The other controller that thought it was still driving told its left foot to go like this. And that wasn't good. But it turned disastrous for us because what happened was...”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we had, you know, you think of NASA's operations and they have these checklists, you know, pre-launch checklists and the like, we weren't far off from that. We had this big checklist. And on the first day of the competition, we were running down our checklist. And one of the things we had to do, we had to turn off the controller, the piece of software that was running that would drive the left foot of the robot in order to accelerate on the gas. And then we turned on our balancing controller. And the nerves, jitters of the first day of the competition, someone forgot to check that box and turn that controller off. So we used a lot of motion planning to figure out a sort of configuration of the robot that we could get up and over. We relied heavily on our balancing controller.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We kind of joke, we call it the big robot little car problem because somehow the race organizers decided to give us a 400-pound humidoid. And then they also provided the vehicle, which was a little Polaris. The robot didn't really fit in the car, so you couldn't drive the car with your feet under the steering column. We actually had to straddle the main column of and have basically one foot in the passenger seat, one foot in the driver's seat, and then drive with our left hand. The hard part was we had to then park the car, get out of the car. It didn't have a door. That was okay. But it's just getting up from crouched, from sitting when you're in this very constrained environment.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I can tell you exactly what happened. I contributed one of those. Our team contributed one of those spectacular falls. Every one of those falls has a complicated story. I mean, one time the power effectively went out on the robot. Because it had been sitting at the door waiting for a green light to be able to proceed and its batteries and therefore it just fell backwards and smashed its head to its ground and it was hilarious. But it wasn't because of bad software, right? But for ours, so the hardest part of the challenge, the hardest task, in my view, was getting out of the Polaris. It was actually relatively easy to drive the Polaris.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, I think our philosophy is just. Basically, Monte Carlo estimation is just run as many experiments as we can, maybe try to set up the environment to make the things we are worried about. Happen as often as possible, but really we're relying on somewhat random search in order to test. That's all we'll ever be able to, but I think because there's an argument that Things that will get you are the things that are really”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think there's a whole philosophy to testing. There's the unit tests, and you can do that on a hardware, you can do that in a small piece of code. You write one function, you should write a test that checks that function's input and outputs. You should also write an integration test at the other extreme of running the whole system together that try to turn on all of the different functions that you've think are correct. It's much harder to write the specifications for a system level test, especially if that system is as complicated as a humanoid robot. But the philosophy is sort of the same. The real robot, it's no different, but on a real robot, it's impossible to run the same experiment twice. So if you see a failure, you hope you caught something in the logs that tell you what happened, but you'll probably never be able to run exactly that experiment again.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How could we have found that we only have one robot? It's running almost all the time. We just didn't have enough hours in the day to test that robot. Something has to change, right? And then I think that, I mean, I would say that the team that won Keist was the team that had two robots and was able to do not only incredible engineering, just absolutely top rate engineering, but also they were able to test at a rate and discipline that we didn't keep up with.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it really did teach me something fundamental about what it's going to take to get robustness out of a system of this complexity. I would say the DARPA challenge really was foundational in my thinking. I think the autonomous driving community thinks about this. I think lots of people thinking about safety-critical systems that might have machine learning in the loop are thinking about these questions. For me, the DARPA challenge was the moment where I realized. You know, we've spent every waking minute running this robot. And again, for the physical competition, days before the competition, we saw the robot fall down in a way it had never fallen down before, I thought.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you got it right. I mean, I think the causality is not that we work hard, and I think other disciplines work very hard too, but I don't think that we work hard and therefore we are happy. I think we found something that we're truly passionate about. Makes us very happy. And then we get a little involved with it and spend a lot of time on it. What a luxury to have something that you want to spend all your time on, right?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we always knew that if we fell back to, if we got to the point where if for some reason things slowed down and we fell back to the original solver, the robot would actually literally fall down. So it was a harrowing sort of edge we were sort of on. But actually, the 400 pound humanoid could come crashing to the ground if your solver's not fast enough. We had lots of good experiences.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had course had told our commercial solver to use warm starting, but even the interface to that commercial solver was causing us these delays. So what we did was we basically wrote, we called it fast QP at the time. We wrote a very lightweight, very fast layer, which would basically check if nearby solutions to the quadratic program, which were very easily checked could stabilize the robot. And if they couldn't, we would fall back to the solver.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, your observation is almost spot on. What we did was what everybody, I mean, people know how to do this, but we had not yet done this idea of warm starting. So we are solving a big optimization problem at every time step. But if you're running fast enough, the optimization problem you're solving on the last time step is pretty similar to the optimization you're going to solve on the next.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Few days ahead. I went over, there was, it happened that Frank Permentor, who's a very, very sharp, he was a student at the time working on optimization. He was still in lab. Frank, we need to make the quadratic programming solver faster, not like a little faster. It's actually, you know. And we wrote a new solver for that QP together that night.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get an email saying, Good news, we made the robot, does the simulator faster? It's now 1. I was just like, oh man, what are we going to do here? That came in late at night for me.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very hard to simulate these complex scenes at real time rate. So right up to days before the competition, the simulator wasn't quite at real time rate. And that was great for me because my controller was solving a pretty big optimization problem. And it wasn't quite at real-time rate. So I was fine. I was keeping up with the simulator. We were both running at about 0.7. And I remember getting this email. And by the way, the perception folks on our team hated that they knew that if my controller was too slow, the robot was going to fall down. And no matter how good their perception system was, if I can't make my controller fast enough. Anyways, we get this email like three days before the virtual competition. It's for all the marbles. We're going to either get our humanoid robot.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And your controller will run on this controller, this computer, and the physics will run on the other, and you have to connect. Now, the physics, they wanted it to run at real-time rates because there was an element of human interaction and humans could, if you do want to teleop, it works way better if it's at frame rate.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, even the virtual robotics challenge was super nerve-wracking and dramatic. I remember using gazebo as a simulator on the cloud. There was all these interesting challenges. I think the investment that OSR FC, whatever they were called at that time, Brian Gurki's team at Open Source Robotics, they were pushing on the capabilities of Gazebo in order to scale it to the complexity of these challenges. So up to the virtual competition. So the virtual competition was you will sign on at a certain time and we'll have a network connection to another machine on the cloud that is running the simulator of your robot.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I mean, there were some, of course, high highs and low lows throughout that. Anytime you're not sleeping and devoting your life to a 400-pound humanoid. I remember actually one funny moment where we're all super tired. So Atlas had to walk across cinder blocks. That was one of the obstacles. And I remember Atlas was powered down hanging limp, you know, on its harness. And the humans were there, picking up and laying the brick down so that the robot could walk over it. And I thought, what is wrong with this? We've got a robot just watching us do all the manual labor so that it can take its little scroll across the terrain.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, y It was a good time for me. We had a bunch of algorithms that we were very happy with. We wanted to see how far we could push them. And this was a chance to really test our metal to do more proper software engineering. The team, we all just worked our butts off. We're in that lab almost all the time.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was a defining experience for me. It came at the right time for me in my career. I had gotten tenure before. I would do a sabbatical and most people do something relaxing and restorative for a sabbatical.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, and then the question was, and the gamesmanship of the organizers was to figure out what we're capable of, push us as far as we could, so that it would differentiate the teams that put more autonomy on the robot and had a few clicks and just said, go there, do this, go there, do this versus someone who's picking every footstep or something like that.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decree of autonomy was always a central part of the discussion. So what wasn't clear was how far we'd be able to get with it. So the idea was always that you want semi-autonomy, that you want the robot to have enough compute, that you can have a degraded network link to a human. And so the same way we had degraded networks at a many natural disasters, you'd send your robot in. You'd be able to get a few bits back and forth, but you don't get to have enough potentially to fully operate the robot every joint of the robot.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't really know for sure what we were signing up for in the sense that you could have had something that as it was described in the call for participation that could have put a huge emphasis on the dynamics of walking and not falling down and walking over rough terrain or the same description, because the robot had to go into this disaster area and turn valves and pick up a drill, cut the hole through a wall. It had to do some interesting things. Challenge could have really highlighted perception and autonomous planning, or it ended up that locomoting over complex terrain played a pretty big role in the competition.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were two tracks. You could enter as a hardware team where you brought your own robot, or you could enter through the virtual robotics challenge as a software team that would try to win the right to use one of the Boston Dynamics robots.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boston Dynamics was to make humanoid robots. People like me and the amazing team at MIT were competing first in a simulation challenge to try to be one of the ones that wins the right to work on one of the Boston Dynamics humanoids in order to compete in the final challenge, which was a physical challenge.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure So the DARPA robotics challenge, it came on the tales of the DARPA Grand Challenge and DARPA Urban Challenge, which were the challenges that brought us, put a spotlight on self-driving cars. Gil Pratt was at DARPA and pitched a new challenge that involved disaster response. It didn't explicitly require humanoids, although humanoids came into the picture This happened shortly after the Fukushima disaster. And our challenge was motivated roughly by that because that was a case where if we had had robots that were ready to be sent in, there's a chance that we could have averted disaster. And certainly after in the disaster response, there were times where we would have loved to have sent robots in. So, in practice, what we ended up with was Grand challenge, a DARPA robotics challenge where”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complexity. But for me, I think a lot about contact, the mechanics of contact. If a robot hand is picking up an object or something. And when I write down the equations of motion for that, they look incredibly complex, not because Actually, not so much because of the dynamics of the hand when it's moving, but it's just the interactions in when they turn on and off. So having a high-dimensional but simple description of what's happening out here is fine. But if when I actually start touching, if Write down a different dynamical system for every polygon on my robot hand and every polygon on the object, whether it's in contact or not, with all the combinatorics that explodes there, then that's too complex. So I need to somehow summarize that with more intuitive physics.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, I actually think learning is probably a route to achieving this. But the representation matters, right? And I think having a function that takes my inputs to outputs that is arbitrarily complex may not be the end goal. I think there's still the most simple or parsimonious explanation for the data. Simple doesn't mean low-dimensional. That's one thing I think that we've a lesson that we've learned. So a standard way to do model reduction or system identification and controls is the typical formulation is that you try to find the minimal state dimension, realization of a system that hits some error bounds or something like that. And that's maybe not, I think we're learning that that was the state dimension is not the right metric.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's your weights of your neural network. We've solved the problem. Where would we be today? I don't think we'd be as far as we are. There's something to be said about having the simplest explanation for a phenomenon. So I don't doubt that we can train neural networks to predict even physical f equals MA type equations. But I maybe. I want another Newton to come along because I think there's more to do in terms of coming up with a simple models for more complicated tasks.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. I think maybe even that's a key to intelligence or something. But I mean, okay, what if Newton and Galileo had deep learning? And they had done a bunch of experiments and they told the world”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think taking a class on analysis is all I'm sort of arguing is to take a chance to stop and Force yourself to think rigorously about even the rational numbers or something. It doesn't have to be the end-all problem, but that exercise of clear thinking, I think, goes a long way. And I just want to make sure we keep preaching on.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean There are times where Problems that can be solved with well known mature methods could also be solved with a deep learning approach. There's an argument that. You must use learning even for the parts we already think we know because if the human has touched it, then you've biased the system and you've suddenly put a bottleneck in there that is your own mental model, but something like inverting a matrix. I think we know how to do that pretty well, even if it's a pretty big matrix. And we understand that pretty well. And you could train a deep network to do it, but you shouldn't, probably.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not immediately rewarded for going through some of the more rigorous approaches. And then I wonder where that takes us. Well, I'm actually optimistic about it. I just want to. My part to try to steer. Rigorous thinking.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just because human, but I think The learning mantra is the basically the statistics of the data will tell me things I need to know, right? And for the example you gave of all the nuances Eye contact or hand gestures or whatever that are happening for these subtle interactions between pedestrians and traffic. Maybe the data will tell that story. I may be even one level more meta than what you're saying. For a particular problem, I think it might be the case that data should tell us the story. But I think there's a rigorous thinking that is just an essential skill for a mathematician or an engineer that I just don't want to lose it. There are certainly super rigorous control, sorry, machine learning people. I just think deep learning makes it so easy. Do some things that our next generation are.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the contrast of that is. I don't know. It really gets me. I think. People underestimate Maybe the power of clear thinking. And so, for instance, deep learning is amazing. I use it heavily in our work. I think it's changed the world unquestionable. Makes it easy to get things to work without thinking as critically about it. So I think one of the challenges as an educator is to think about how do we make sure people get a taste of the More rigorous thinking that I think goes along with some different approaches.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I've been lucky to experience something that not so many roboticists have experienced, which is to Hang out with some really amazing control theorists and The clarity of thought that some of the more mathematical control theory can bring to even very complex messy looking problems. Really, it really had a big impact on me. I had a day even just a couple weeks ago where I had spent the day on a Zoom robotics conference having great conversations with lots of people felt really good about the ideas that were flowing and the like and then I had a late afternoon meeting with one of my favorite control theorists and And we went from these abstract discussions about maybes and what ifs and what a great idea to the super precise Statements About systems that aren't that much. More simple or abstract than the ones I care about deeply.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leave no pain, right? You should end feeling better than you started. But it's mostly, I think, and COVID has tested this because I've lost my commute. I think I'm perfectly happy walking around town with my wife and kids if they could get them to co. And it's more about just getting outside and getting away from the keyboard for some time just to let things compress.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To win I'm not going to take a dinghy across the Atlantic or something if that's what you want, but if someone does and wants to write a book, I would totally read it because I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. I do have some fun things that I will try. I like to when I travel, I almost always bike to the Logan Airport and fold up a little folding bike and then take it with me and bike to wherever I'm going. And it's taken me, or I'll take a stand-up paddleboard these days on the airplane, and then I'll try to paddle around where I'm going or whatever. And I've done some crazy things.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say, I'm not a fast runner particularly. Probably my fastest splits ever was when I had to get to daycare on time because they were going to charge me some dollar per minute that I was late. I've run some fast splits to daycare. That those times are past now I think work, you can find a work-life balance in that way. I think you just have to. I think I am better at work because I take time to think on the way in. So I plan my day around it. And I rarely feel that those are really at odds.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It became kind of a game of how can I get to work. I've rollerbladed, I've done all kinds of weird stuff. But my favorite one these days is I've been taking the Charles River to work. So I can put in a little robot not so far from my house, but the Charles River takes a long way to get the MIT. So I can spend a long time getting there. And it's not about, I don't know, it's just about... I've had people ask me how can you justify taking that time? But for me, it's just a magical time to think, to compress, decompress, especially, I'll wake up, do a lot of work in the morning, and then I kind of have to just let that settle before I'm ready for all my meetings. And then on the way home, it's a great time to sort of let that settle.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I live about 12 miles from MIT, but you can find lots of different ways to get there. So, I mean, I run there for many years. I've biked there. Yeah, but normally I would try to run in and then bike home, bike in, run home”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a good book actually. There's probably more good books since I read them. But Ken Bob, barefoot Ken Bob Saxton. He's an interesting guy. But I think his book captured the right way to describe running barefoot running to somebody better than any other I've seen.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think people who are afraid of barefoot running or worry about getting cuts or getting stepping on rocks. First of all, even if that was a concern, I think those are all very short term. If I get a scratch or something, it'll heal in a week. If I blow out my knees, I'm done running forever. So I will trade the short term for the long term anytime. But even then, and this, again, to my wife's chagrin, your feet get tough, right?”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we do amazing things with our hands. And we stick our foot in a big solid shoe, right? So there's, I think, when you're barefoot, you're just giving yourself more appropriate reception. And that's why you're more aware of some of the gait flaws and stuff like this. Now, you have less protection too.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slowly. That's the biggest thing people do are excellent runners and they're used to running long distances or running fast and they take their shoes off and they hurt themselves instantly trying to do something that they were used to doing. I think I lucked out in the sense that I couldn't run very far when I first started trying. And I run with minimal shoes too. I mean, I will bring along a pair of, actually like aqua socks or something like this. I can just slip on or a running sandals. I've tried all of them.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you take your shoes off, then if you hit hard with your foot at all, then it hurts. You don't like run 10 miles and then realize you've done some damage. You have immediate feedback telling you that you've done something that's maybe suboptimal and you change your gate. I mean, it's even subconscious. If I, right now, having run many miles barefoot, if I put a shoe on, my gate changes in a way that I think is not as good. So it makes me land softer. And I think my goals for running are to do it for as long as I can into old age, not to win any races. And so for me, this is a way to protect myself.”
2020-08-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source