YouSaid · the spoken record

Vijay Kumar

lines on the record: 68
first: 2019-09-08
most recent: 2019-09-08
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

“Think the ones that receive a lot of notoriety are obviously the military vehicles. Military vehicles are controlled by a base station but have a lot of human supervision, but I have limited autonomy, which is the ability to go from point A to point B and even the more sophisticated vehicles can do autonomous takeoff and landing.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's true, although if you look at the price-to-performance ratio of robotic components, it's coming down dramatically. It continues to come down. So I think we're asymptotically approaching the point.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct, correct. So, in some sense, nature is very, very sophisticated, but the tasks that nature solves or needs to solve are very different from the kind of engineered tasks, artificial tasks that we are forced to address. And again, Nothing preventing us from solving these other problems, but ultimately it's about impact, you want these swarms to do something useful. And so you're kind of driven into this. Very unnatural, if you will, unnatural meaning, not like how nature does.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it involves mobility. Most often it's described in some kind of a global coordinate system. As a human, as an operator, as a commander, or as a collaborator, I have my coordinate system and I want the robots to be consistent with that. So, I might think of it slightly differently. I might want the robots to recognize that coordinate system, which means not only do they have to think locally in terms of who their immediate neighbors are, but they have to be cognizant of what the global environment looks like. So if I say surround this building and protect this from intruders, well, they're immediately in a building-centered coordinate system. And I have to tell them where the building is.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, there are a couple of different ways of looking at this. If you are a purist, you think of it as a way of recreating what nature does. So nature forms groups for several reasons, but mostly it's because of this instinct. Organisms have of preserving their colonies, their population. Which means what? You need shelter, you need food, you need to procreate, and that's basically it. So the kinds of interactions you see are all organic. They're all local. And the only information that they share, and mostly it's indirectly, is to, again, preserve the herd or the flock or the swarm and either by looking for new sources of food or looking for new shelters, right? As engineers, when we build swarms, we have a mission. And when you think of a mission,”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, I think as engineers, we do this. I mean, think about we build planes, we build iPhones, and we know that by taking individual components, well engineered components with well-specified interfaces that behave in a predictable way, you can build complex systems. So that's ingrained, I would claim in most engineers' thinking. And it's true for computer scientists as well. I think what's different here is that you want the individuals to be robust in some sense as we do in these other settings, but you also want some degree of resiliency for the population. And so you really want them to be able to reestablish Communication with their neighbors. You want them to rethink their strategy for group behavior. You want them to reorganize. And that's where I think a lot of the challenges lie.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you start obsessing about the individual building blocks and what they do, you inevitably will find it hard to scale up. Just mathematically, you just think about individual things you want to model. And if you want to have 10 of those, then you essentially are taking Cartesian products of 10 things. That makes it really complicated than to do any kind of synthesis or design in that high-dimensional space is really hard. So the right way to do this is to think about the individuals in a clever way so that at the higher level, when you look at lots and lots of them, abstractly, you can think of them in some low-dimensional space.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's very interesting. So, again, philosophically, as engineers, what we want to do is to go beyond the individual components, the individual units, and think about it as a unit, as a cohesive unit without worrying about the individual components”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot is made about that word emergent. And it means lots of things to different people, but you're absolutely right. I think as an engineer, you think about what Elemental behaviors were primitives you could synthesize so that the whole looks incredibly powerful, incredibly synergistic, the whole definitely being greater than the sum of the parts. And ANSA living proof of that.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then going out in different directions, looking for food, and then being able to demonstrate consensus, even though they don't communicate directly with each other the way we communicate with each other, in some sense they also know how to do democracy, probably better than what we do.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, so ants are really quite incredible creatures, right? The individuals arguably are very simple in how they're built, and yet they're incredibly resilient as a population. And as individuals, they're incredibly robust. So, you know, if you take an ant, it's six legs, you remove one leg. It still works just fine. And it moves along, and I don't know that even realizes it's lost a leg. So that's the robustness of the individual ant level. But then you look about this instinct for self-preservation of the colonies and they adapt in so many amazing ways. Transcending gaps by just chaining themselves together when you have a flood, being able to recruit other teammates to carry big morsels of food”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if that is. Everybody wants to use the word drones. And I've often said this drones to me is a pejorative word. It signifies something that's dumb. Pre programmed that does one little thing and robots are anything but drones. So I actually don't like that word, but that's what everybody uses. You could call it unpiloted. But even unpiloted, it could be radio controlled, could be remotely controlled in many different ways. And I think the right word is thinking about it as an aerial robot.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is true, too. So then, how quickly can you actually manipulate these three dimensional shapes and the individual components? Yes, you're right.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think beauty to an engineer is very different from beauty to someone who's looking at robots from the outside, if you will. What I meant there, so before we said that grand Associated with size. And another way of thinking about this is just the physical shape and the idea that you can create physical shapes in midair and have them deform. That's beautiful.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the thing that I'm most proud of that my students have done is really think about small UAVs that can maneuver and constrain spaces, in particular their ability to coordinate with each other and form three-dimensional patterns. So once you can do that. You can essentially create 3D objects in the sky and you can deform these objects on the fly. So in some sense, your toolbox of what you can create is suddenly got enhanced. And before that, we did the two dimensional version of this, so we had ground robots forming patterns and so on. So that was not as impressive. That was not as beautiful. But we do it in 3D suspended in mid-air, and you've got to go back to 2011 when we did this. Now it's actually pretty standard to do these things eight years later. But back then, it was a big accomplishment.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was amazing in hindsight, it looks like, well, we built this thing, which really should have been much smaller. And of course, today's robots are much smaller. Know Boston Dynamics or Ghost Robotics is a spinoff from Pen. But back then, you were stuck with the substrate you had, the compute you had, so things were unnecessarily big. But at the same time, and this is just human psychology, somehow bigger means grander. People never have the same appreciation for nanotechnology or nano devices as they do for the space shuttle or the Boeing 747.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this was not my work, but the folks who worked on this wrote what I believe to be the first multiprocessor operating system. This was in the 80s. And you have to make sure that obviously messages got across from one joint to another. You have to remember the clock speeds on those computers were about half a megahertz.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way back when I was in graduate school, I was part of a fairly big project that involved building a very large hexapod. Close to 7,000 pounds, and it was Powered by hydraulic actuation. Was actuated by hydraulics. With 18 motors, hydraulic motors. Controlled by an Intel 8085 processor and an 8086 coprocessor. To imagine this huge monster that had 18 joints each controlled by an independent computer, and there was a 19th computer that actually did the coordination between these 18 joints. So as part of this project, My thesis work was how do you coordinate the 18 legs? In particular, the pressures and the hydraulic cylinders to get efficient locomotion.”
2019-09-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Vijay Kumar: Flying Robots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source