Episode #412 from 6:47
Legged robots
One of the things that underlies a lot of your work is that the robots you create, the systems you have created for over 40 years now have a kind of, they're not cautious. So a lot of robots that people know about move about this world very cautiously, carefully, very afraid of the world. A lot of the robots you built, especially in the early days, were very aggressive under actuated. They're hopping, they're wild, moving quickly. So is there a philosophy under underlying that? Well, let me tell you about how I got started on legs at all. When I was still a graduate student, I went to a conference. It was a biological legged locomotion conference, I think it was in Philadelphia. So it was all biomechanics people, researchers who would look at muscle and maybe neurons and things like that. They weren't so much computational people, but they were more biomechanics and maybe there were a thousand people there.
Why this moment matters
One of the things that underlies a lot of your work is that the robots you create, the systems you have created for over 40 years now have a kind of, they're not cautious. So a lot of robots that people know about move about this world very cautiously, carefully, very afraid of the world. A lot of the robots you built, especially in the early days, were very aggressive under actuated. They're hopping, they're wild, moving quickly. So is there a philosophy under underlying that? Well, let me tell you about how I got started on legs at all. When I was still a graduate student, I went to a conference. It was a biological legged locomotion conference, I think it was in Philadelphia. So it was all biomechanics people, researchers who would look at muscle and maybe neurons and things like that. They weren't so much computational people, but they were more biomechanics and maybe there were a thousand people there.