okay if you could just start by telling
us where you were born and where you
grew up
where were i born i was born in new york
city
1925 that makes me quite old
and grew up in uh
various boroughs of new york queens
mainly brooklyn a little bit
went to school and
city high school or public school
and then went into the navy where i
became an electronic technician
and studied radar and repairing radar
and so on
came back from the navy and went to nyu
engineering school
so i graduated from nyu engineering
school
and then joined the research division at
nyu
electrical engineering division worked
there for six years
and got my postgraduate education there
at nyu
so i'm an nyu graduate of everything
right
in new york then of course nyu closed
its engineering school
maybe they saw me as a result
they closed them now they closed in
1973.
so i did research there at nyu this is
up in the bronx they had a nice campus
of the bronx
which no longer exists
and then i decided i'd go out to
industry so i worked for burrows i
worked for rca
we did some electronic countermeasures
work
worked on the polaris communication
system
which is a you're familiar with polaris
the submarine
you're not the submarine a missile
submarine
and the problem with communicating with
submarines is that they're underwater
and electromagnetic communications does
not penetrate
sea water so there's all sorts of
schemes to
communicate with the submarine
that's a whole other discussion we get
out
there what did i do then yeah then i was
working for a company called trachor
and we did we did work on
direction finding electro electronic
direction finding
we did work on communication systems
hf communication systems
i became the vice president for
the systems and sciences division of
trade corps
i know you're familiar with tradecore
it's a texas company
my office was in washington but it was
texas it's a texas company
and there have many many uh divisions
then i i left them and went to nsf
and we were in washington at that time
with my office there was washington
so i went to nsf as what was called a
rotator
and it has this policy of bringing
people in
for two years and rotating them through
well i liked it so much and they liked
me i guess so i stayed on
as a permanent federal employee
and at nsf i was a program director for
the control and automation program
which was the program that was handling
control automatic control and so on
and these are really prior to the days
of
robotics
we also did uh bio uh engineering
and uh
i guess those were the two main topics
so you know nsf uh
is a proposal we accept proposals was
the
theme there and
so we get many and somebody had to
handle whatever came in something was
handled
so i handled whatever other subjects
were
assigned to my and from there i worked
up the section head
and then i was division director for
uh three stints there and then
i was division director of three years
or something and they brought somebody
else in
then when that person left i went back
to be division director
so and the division was electrical
engineering
and then we split off electrical
engineering it became
a biomedical engineering and
environmental systems
so then we did that what year did you
started
1973.
and how did you get into nsf
i'm sorry how did you get into nsf how
did i get into nsf
uh well you know nsf was a well-known
organization
and i knew it i had a friend of mine was
a section head there
a gentleman named mohammed gowsey who
went on to become the dean of
davis i guess he was a dean and
i had lunch with him one day and he said
come on up
and you know we're looking to enlarge
the section largely
i said well i'm not really interested
that was my mistake i said i'm not
interested but i'll go up with you
and then it looks so interesting and i
said well i'll try it for a couple years
just to broaden my horizon and that was
my
uh my uh way of getting intense i've
been staying in nsf
and that's i stayed there till uh i
retired
from nsf in 2000 i guess
but i wasn't finished yet i went to work
at johns hopkins university
johns hopkins university at that time
had an engineering research
center on robotics in
surgery surgical robotics
so i worked with them for two years
getting them started and so on
and then i was that was it enough is
enough right
i figured it's time for somebody else to
get in there
so that's my history and the robotics
plot really started
at nsf i didn't i didn't do much
robotics uh
anywhere else well i'm not a researcher
in robotics you understand i was a
uh what was called the funder you know
but i had to make
decisions and i was involved with
organizations leading and i did a lot of
international work
a lot of international robotics research
not again not not research i never did
any research in robotics
so um at nsf
in electrical engineering now you have
to understand nsf is divided up
into presently into electrical
mechanical civil not the name the names
are fancier than that
but the uh and then there's
environmental and bioengineering
then there's a section there on centers
and you know bigger programs and so on
so in our program our section we had
bioengineering and automation
and automation
led to the beginning of robotics so
and one of the the major uh contributors
at that time was a man named ks
foo and k.s foo
was a professor at purdue
and i went out there and visited purdue
and saw ks
he was very prominent guy and
uh along with him there were three other
professors there george soridis
who was a founding professor of this
organization
a man named kaship and john lew
there were four men all in this area
robotics
and they were essentially each
submitting proposals and doing
a little bit different kind of work one
was doing pattern recognition and some
others were doing control
theory and so on and i talked to them
and
we set up what i call the advanced
automation laboratory
and the advanced automation laboratory
at purdue
brought the four of them together and
i supplied i didn't supply us by the
money that's all i supply
for equipment so we equipped it properly
because
it's an equipment intensive uh activity
robotics
if you want to do it right and we set up
what i thought was a very successful
you know partnership amongst these guys
these professors
and that worked for many years and then
that was really my be
the beginning of my interest in it then
we spread out and
many proposals came in as the field
[Music]
naturally grew and of course it grew
from
the basic industrial interest in
assembly so the first the first robots
if you want to call them robots or these
things you see on assembly lines
and they're picking and placing and
they're
painting and so on basically
it's an arm it's called a manipulator an
electron
a robotic manipulator
and it's programmed so in that sense
it doesn't have any intelligence it does
what it's told
and as the cars come down the line it
paints or whatever it does bolts in
so that was the beginning and then the
next thought
was to
untether it make it mobile
so then we went into the subject of
mobility
now as soon as you put a robot or a
machine
in an imprecise environment
it becomes more difficult to program
because now you depend upon sensory
inputs
sensory inputs like humans you know you
have eyes ears
your smell and so on so primarily
vision systems came along so robot had
some idea of its environment
and other senses were developed
so the whole area of robotics that had
to be developed was sensory
research so that the robot had some
concept and then as all kinds once you
untether
a robot once you untether a machine
it becomes a much more difficult problem
you see out of the problem of
navigation where humans
grow up from childhood and become
acquainted with their environment a
robot has to learn its environment
like to make the analogy that if you
take a human
like me drop me into the middle of
africa
in a jungle somewhere i'm lost i don't
know one tree from another
i wouldn't know where to eat i wouldn't
know where to get food i wouldn't know
how to do anything
a robot's the same thing you you
energize a machine has no
concept of its environment and how to
live in that environment how to work in
an environment
so that was a major area of research in
the early days
how to learn the environment learn to
navigate
learn perception and then of course the
robot has to do some work
it's not a toy so it has to
have a purpose and a purpose is
generally
something that requires hands
another big area of research in the
robotics field
is grippers started out with grippers
just two fingers
opening and closing but then as we got
more sophisticated
one of the major breakthroughs was a
five-fingered
manipulator and control of five fingers
is a very difficult i mean but
controlling them in a coordinated
fashion
is a very difficult problem so that was
worked on
so various people at this point in the
80s i would say
were working on manipulators were
working on the kinematics of the arms
working on stability
two-legged robots are based about
two-legged humans
are basically unstable you
really need three legs so in order to
make a robot
look like a human what's called humanoid
robots
and humanoid robots really a small piece
of the robot
problem the robot research area
but they're very uh it's a sexy
type of thing because everybody likes to
look at oh robots you know they're going
to do this
but you know when you think about a
robot is purpose
either has to work which is a basic
manipulator it has to move
one place to the other and so that's
more important than it looking
but researchers today you know will make
nice looking robots females male
so it's all cosmetic you know it's not a
purpose of any sort uh
and then we'll get back to organizations
all right
so that was really and the line
continues today they're still
researching in all these areas to make
robots more
efficient and more one of the big
problems is speed
agility accuracy and so on
if it's a machine and a machine
still follows newton's laws so you've
got a heavy machine
in motion it's hard to stop it it's hard
to move it
so humans are very very good at these
kinds of things i can move my hand and
stop it
you know athletes are very good toward
nation
robots are not so good you know they
they still have
a lot of limitations basically because
the laws of physics are against them
you know to move fast is not easy
unless it's very small and light once it
gets heavier
then it's another problem so anyway
you remember i mentioned the four people
george cerritis
came to work at nsf so
i was in this office and george was in
that office and we used to have coffee
and we used to talk
and we then he was a bachelor
and he had a pad on duplicates another
room
i'm talking like a young kid a pet on
dupont circle right
and he'd come in monday morning and he
wants somebody to talk to
so we have these long talks and you've
been thinking about this
and he came up with the idea you know we
we need
we were part of the control society at
that time the ieee control society
and we decided we'd have to split off
we'd have to split off and form our own
society because robotics is really much
more than just control
you know
so let's see now by this time george was
back at purdue and
uh he did all the work
i was part of the council that worked
with him but
george did all the leg work or forms
that'll be filled up with the ieee
and we got uh a council together
i remember ks who was on it i was on it
george
uh
i'm trying to remember who the other
guys were
but i can't oh loophole
lou paul was on it he's not going to be
here he i saw he didn't answer
and there were several other people on
it
and uh cerritis did the work
i mean he he got the uh you don't become
a society right away you become
something else a council or something
so we ran some meetings and brought
people in
and they signed up and we got i guess
enough people i'm not really sure what
the process is
but i guess you got enough people you
become a society yeah
and i guess we ran the first conference
in saint louis i'm not mistaken
and i think ks foo was the uh general
chair
what year was that have you remembered
probably 83. one of those 83
405 one of them said there was a meeting
i remember in atlanta
uh the professor book i remember him
because the name was so peculiar
and uh i think that was you know you're
stretching my memory now
as to what came first but that was the
early days
and uh and we we just continue doing it
you know year after year building the
organization
and the robotic society is automation
and robotics really
everybody talks about robotics but
there's a big automation component to it
which is a completely different thing
so at the council we we had you know
long discussions on what directions we
would go in
and there was a considerable discussion
of the uh
the social impact or the labor the labor
with how we would we get a lot of
feedback
a lot of arguments from labor leaders
who would not like this idea of robots
replacing people and we you know we
discussed this
academically it was none of us really
were in a position to do anything we
were mostly academics
uh and we saw was a fruitful discussion
less discussion because uh
we had no impact on anything labor
management and so on would go ahead
general motors wasn't interested in our
opinion or whether they should use
manipulators or not layoff people so
we dropped that end of the discussion
and stuck with the
with the technical aspects of it
and from there the organization just
grew you know it became
technical societies within within our
society there are
technical i guess they call them
technical
committees technical committees yeah
something they're subsets and one of the
subsets was conferences
so the publication and conferences there
was technical considerations
and uh now there's industry
so there's a vice president on society
as a vice president for technical
affairs for
industry affairs with conference affairs
and so on and
the years went by i got interested in
the conferences i was the first
vice president well i was president in
91
and then when the conferences became
more
interesting i i ran the first
one of the conferences in minneapolis as
a matter of fact in 96
and then i ran the uh ran it again in
2006 in orlando
so i was general chair twice
now you asked about ierp i could talk
an hour on ierp that's a very
interesting subject mr international
so in uh the early 80s
you know the same subject about robots
and the uh
the effect of robots on labor and so on
and there was a a meeting of the
the g7 it was g7 in those days
in france and
g7 under uh midigan i guess
probably pronouncing that wrong but the
president of france
and they came up with this idea of
forming a robotics task force
and all seven countries in the uh
in the g7 agreed to serve on it you know
there's no power there in the g7 they
just
have to coordinate but france and japan
and japan was the leader
at that time in robotics there was no
question about it they were way ahead of
us
and so they decided to form
a task force and report
to the next meeting on what we could do
that task force was assigned by the
president of the united states to his
science
director his science director assigned
it to the director of
uh nsf director of nsf assigned it to
the head of engineering the whole
directorate and he assigned it to me so
next time i'll never be it was a friday
night
and i was ready to go home and he said
no we have to go over to the executive
office building
so i went over to the executive office
building met with the science
and he gave me all kinds of advice
because there was a meeting in japan an
organizational meeting in japan
and his main concern as
as always is that we don't
do anything that would jeopardize u.s
industry's competitive position
and i said don't don't worry i don't
know anything
that will upset the u.s industry
take a drink of water
so i went to japan that was september
of 83 i believe
and we had uh an organizational meeting
there
and there was japan was represented of
course it was in tokyo
and france was representatives they were
the so-called lead countries
and the u.s great britain italy
germany
i'm missing somebody aren't i who am i
missing
it'll come to me there were seven
countries no great britain
see us japan france
great britain germany italy
who else is there um
that's all right it'll come to me
there's another country floating around
somewhere there's no robotics
anyway we had this meeting and it was a
very difficult meeting to organize
because each country has a national
national program
a national program in the sense that
france was directing a lot of their
energy into undersea robots
italy was into energy they still they're
still into energy
programs uh
oh canada canada was the other country
yeah we forgot pool canada
because canada doesn't have much i
better not say this on camera
they don't have much of a robotics uh
they admitted
they're not much into the robotics field
they built the space shuttle arms
the space shuttle arm which of course is
funded by nasa yeah
but that was matter of fact when we had
a meeting in canada
uh we had two meetings so far in canada
unless we rotate every year
and from those humble beginnings we're
now 16 countries
so many many countries came to join us
a lot of people try to join but you can
join it's a
it's a national thing it has to be a
government
so 16 countries and now and our next
meeting
will be in poland in
september so
poland joined china of course we're very
happy to see china
yes they're very active now in robotics
russia
joined early in the game and uh
let's see the netherlands was there for
a while
norway came in so we had a very good
representation
hungary is now in there so we've got a
lot of little little countries that are
highly specialized
in robotics and uh
one of the primary activities that we
engage in
there's some business activities but the
primary technical activity
is that we spend two days on what we
call country reports
so every representative has to give a
verbal report
and also a written report
the host country gives a one-hour report
on their robotics activities
so this is essentially a coordinating
group
and you know we all know each other we
can call each other we send a part of
the
the ierp is to send study missions
so for example china when they first
came in
send a mission to the u.s and i happen
to be
you know working at intercept then so we
arranged a tour for the
various labs germany did a tour of japan
there are various uh activities each
country
funds their own activities one of the
first things i learned is you can't
interfere with the national programs
and you can't change the color of money
they will not pay anybody else to do
anything they keep their home money
for their own purposes excuse me
and over those years have you seen uh
trends in the way that the different
countries
invest in robotics or the kinds of yeah
well one of one of the things
that we promoted over the years as you
see different elements appear
on the horizon and seem to where the
research seems to be going
we stayed away from industrial
activities industrial activities
are well-funded in each country and it's
highly proprietary
general motors won't tell anybody else
so on what they're doing
so we made an agreement in the early
days
and we had it took two meetings one day
meeting in tokyo and one two day meeting
in france
and i like an interesting side story
in france i was with the the japanese
delegate who was a very high level guy
he spoke french fluently spoke english
fluently and so on
and we were in the same hotel one
evening
and we were taking a walk and i said to
him
forget his name mr so-and-so
for answers uh japan is way ahead
in this robotics field why are you so
cooperative with the rest of us
he says well japan's way ahead but the
u.s
has the researchers so
they obviously knew they had to reach
out
for more innovative stuff in other
countries
and i always thought that was a very uh
interesting remark that he made because
japan was way ahead in those days
people were all playing catch-up
and we saw we focused on well i'll go
into the details here
since each country was different we
created a matrix
and the matrix was countries here one
axis
and subjects on the other axis so it was
bio bio robotics
environment and a whole list of robotic
subjects
and each country could decide what they
want to be involved in
and that's stopped the arguments is what
the whole organization should do
because it allowed people to focus on
what their interests are
so as i said france was under seas and
italy
had someone to see stuff mainly energy
so
we we picked them out and over the years
subjects emerged because they were there
was more background research going on
so for example the medical application
of
robotics that started really to
percolate
as companies got more interested and
you know there was more impetus to
develop that field
so we ran several workshops and meetings
and brought researchers together in that
in that field
i should have added that generally when
we have these meetings
once a year the host country will also
do a workshop
host the workshop and
some countries will in our in our
business meeting
they will offer a workshop and if many
people agree
then they'll host the workshop on some
other subject that they want to pursue
so we've had workshops you know in every
country
and several as a modified to some
country france is very very interested
in
in various aspects there uh
mainly in toulouse there's a lot of
industrial work going on
in toulouse and the people who go to
these workshops and these
meetings are are they all governmental
no no
no no no the government is the organize
organizing committees
the meetings that we hold
which we call a forum
and that word only came up against the
japanese came up with that word at the
beginning so we still call them forums
once a year but the meetings are held
and academics are invited industries
invited
whoever for example now belgium
is very interested in
demining but here's a word for it uh
the mining for civilian purposes not not
military to mining
there's a as a word i can't think of it
right off hand
so they've run a number of workshops and
a number of as a whole there's a whole
study group we we have study groups it's
it's uh you know i could talk for
several hours on the subject
they created study groups and they're
pursuing with their leadership they're
pursuing
this human human
demanding or something i forget what
it's called
but they've had meetings in many places
i looked into that when i was at nsf and
uh
it turns out that that that kind of work
is done
by the military even for civilian
purposes done by the military
and once you get into that field it's
all
classified or something politics
so we never got too involved in that
demanding
activity but they're very active they've
had
experiments in afghanistan they've had
experiments in
other countries that have you know
mining problems
not mining problems but we got
interested in mining too that was
another subject that
canada was particularly interested in
mining water made in mining
so we've had several workshops on that
too
as to how to do uh underground mining
safely and do now that there's a good
subject for
us minors of course are endangered it's
terrible job
on the other hand they're working so
they said oh we're going to save you
you know you got a dirty job and they
say leave us alone
you're going to save us to put us out of
work somewhere so that's a very
complicated
situation yeah and was the aim of these
meetings mainly
to exchange information or was there
also
some form of um fostering collaborations
among the countries
yeah there were there have been
these situations really uh
i mean things like collaboration so
grew not so much from us as leaders of
the organization
but from the members we'd have a meeting
say on mining and
not d mining mining and canada would be
interested
and then some other country would say oh
we're very interested in the subject too
and there will be a little collaboration
going on
which is really not under our auspices
but they would figure out how what they
wanted to do
joined experiments and so on
and france and japan
did some joint joint activities
and there was a u.s france
program that went on
i remember lou paul as a matter of fact
he used to be a president was one of the
ex-presidents
he collaborated with a fellow named
george geralt
in france and they did a collaborative
project
let's see i'm running out of speed
running out of time
um so just to go back i can tell you my
other one another activity nato
we'll get there but while you're still
talking about the labor issues so
you said that you when you you sort of
left that behind in the 70s but then it
sort of came up again with the liners in
canada were there any sort of more
formal no no
what i said was when we had the
organizing
council to form uh
this society that was one of the
subjects we
we decided we would not handle that was
the only time
otherwise a very important subject yeah
it just wasn't something the ieee
which is a technical organization would
would have any influence on it all
but uh under any of the organizations
you're with were there ever moments
where
organized labor approached you or the
organization no we never had organized
labor
no we've had workshops on this uh some
of the other countries
were quite interested in in that subject
that we've had a couple of workshops on
that subject
but uh the subject of human interactions
with uh as soon as humanoid robots
started coming in
then you started to think of the
interaction of humanoid
of robots on humans and there's still
there may be
sessions here that are on that subject
there's a workshop or maybe a workshop
or something
so there were some countries were
interested in that and they had some
joint activity going on
we're talking now this is uh 30th year
of irp
i think i can proudly say we're one of
the most one of the
few international organizations that
last
30 years as they come and they go
but we've managed to hang in there why
do you think it was so successful
well i think two reasons you want to
know the practical reason
we don't ask no money from anybody
because as soon as you get
i don't want to go into the us budget
and how that works i've been involved in
that for many years
but when you get a line item in a budget
i shouldn't say this on the camera
somebody looks oh look at that money
there
if they've been doing this for 30 years
they don't have to do it anymore
i won't mention any names but
congressional people will come
over so we keep a low profile
we spend very little funding the money
is
is very little but each country pays for
their own
and we're accomplishing what we think is
important work
so it just keeps lasting and more
countries keep joining
portugal is trying to join us but
they can't get a government letter
because their
their financial situation is bad
so they can't uh but they've attended we
had what we call observers at meetings
so a country
taiwan for example wanted to join
uh so we
we get an observer status and the eu is
part of this organization too so there
are observer status
but taiwan is not an observer anymore
and i don't want to go into that
the reason for that is a little
difficulty between china and mainland
mainland china and taiwan are we
it's a subject i'd rather not be on
camera with
um but then nato nato has
you know nato is a big military
organization but nato also has a science
site
i don't know if you're aware of that
there's a whole science side to nato
and in the mid 80s they decided to hold
a
uh what they call a council or something
on uh robotics so i was involved with
that for a number of years we did a lot
of workshops
we did a lot of meetings in brussels and
other places
visited plants and so on there's a
german automation plants
so that was another another uh aspect
but the field
you know grew grew fantastically fast
you know compared to now in in
some of the prime things i think you see
here in surgical
activities and the center that i worked
with at hopkins
actually was hopkins mit and carnegie
mellon
composed this engineering research
center
and they were primarily interested in
still off
in in surgical robotics
so they created the uh the steady hand
for operating purposes as a they created
a machine
that can do uh extremely precision
type of surgery where humans might have
a tremor
the machine doesn't tremor yeah
all right i'm running out of steam uh
what was some of the research that nato
was pursuing
nato yeah well nato's that was a very
broad ban
a lot of i try to remember it
primarily the focus was on vision
vision systems although we had a couple
of meetings i remember in toulon we had
a meeting
on undeceased robotics
and
yeah in
my my head is really going the northern
part of italy on the
on the coast there what's the city
geneva right we had a meeting in geneva
on that subject and uh
you know a lot of a lot of broad-based
meetings we also had
in the iarp reviews
robotics reviews so every like five
years or so
we would have a meeting and bring in you
know whoever
we felt were the top experts who would
come in and give a presentation
and they would sort of lay out where
they think the field is going
and we write a report and disseminate
the main thing is disseminating these
reports
there was no nothing classified we never
dealt with anything that was classified
so everything the iarp does is in the
public domain
and what do you think are some of the
results of um for example the work of
the irp and having these reports and
this dialogue among the countries
well it's hard to quantify results like
that yes
not necessarily quantitatively but just
even in terms of
uh maybe how the field developed or you
know did it affect for example how
different countries chose to spend
funding um yeah that
that is true the last meeting we had or
not the last was the previous the the
the interest seemed to be in education
there was a lot of things
automating education and robotics and
education
use of computers and so on and several
countries have gone into that since
see each of the delegates at the at the
rarp meeting is a government
representative
representative and he reports to
you know some government entity and
tries to influence what that
it always gets back to money tries to
influence where
their funding will go sometimes i guess
they're successful sometimes they're not
you know it's all according to the
country and what their interests are
again each country the problem we always
ran into is each country has a national
program sometimes it's called the
national program
sometimes it's just you know you can see
from what they're doing that it's a
program
and they probably have a five-year
funding
program and you can't you can't
interrupt that and say oh you ought to
do something
that we came up with it's too hard too
much inertia in the system
to try and do something like that
so what i would always re the analog i
would say is
there's national trains going in each
direction
and most of them if they're parallel
they're never going to meet you know
so you you can't throw them off the
track because there are
there's too much bureaucracy involved in
your
years at nsf did you see the way in
which
the interests of the u.s research
evolved over those years
and well the nsf that's an interesting
question the nsf
we started this in the electrical
division and the mechanical division
also had
robotics work and kinematics and so on
however after i don't remember the dates
but nsf then started a computer science
activity and robotics slowly moved into
computer science so the only place i
think you'll see a robot
title or robotics in in a
write-up of any sort would be in the
computer science area
so it developed see nsf
being a research organization never
really funded
the entire subject of robotics
it would fund you know kinematics it
would fund vision do it fun
manipulators computer science and so on
and these were small individual projects
but came together
under other auspices for example
another example comes to mind
in ohio state
we created i funded it as a matter of
fact
a uh hexapod vehicle six-legged vehicle
which they entitled the the the students
called the bionic bug
but it was not a bionic bug it was a
machine hopper
nasa i'm not even sure anymore picked up
that design
and enlarged it and it was they used it
for moon moon
exploration or something so a lot of the
work we
we put the feed money in we don't have
intercept doesn't have big money for
those things so
somebody else eventually picks it up
it's a basic research
i'm sorry more basic research though
yeah well nsf is a basic research
organization
sure what were some of the other uh big
projects or research centers that you
funded early on
in the early robotics uh
let's see i'm afraid i'll insult
somebody if i leave them out
just the ones that you remember the best
oh it'll be our fault because we edit
this stuff so we could have edited it
out
yeah well we did a lot of work in
prosthetics
matter of fact i remember at mit we
funded something
which was laughingly not formally but
lovingly referred to
as the computer in the leg so we had
amputees
real amputees in there in their
human gait lab or whatever and
we were funding prosthetics
that would uh a matter of fact we funded
legged prosthetics arm prosthetics
and looking at various control
mechanisms
you can you can design a beautiful
prosthetic device a matter of fact
they're probably designed in the 1800s
for rich people
lost on a limb but
controlling them is the big problem
you can design the mechanical design
they look beautiful
but you can't control them so the
thought was to put a computer in the leg
but how do you control the computer how
does how do you connect the brain to the
computer
and that's still a very big problem they
try to use myoelectric signals they try
to use many different
types of signals and talking about human
interaction
the thing that was most interesting is
that
the uh amputee and we worked with some
at mit the amputee
who you would think would love to have
this device because we had him walking
at all
he didn't want it why didn't he want it
because if he stumbled
and the leg kept moving around he was
only afraid
that he would be laughed at so it was
more
you know he was willing to suffer the
old-fashioned way of moving
than to be embarrassed so the thing had
to be absolutely
he had to be absolutely insured that
there wouldn't be any uh
you know negative responses and walking
upstairs walking up a ramp it's a very
complicated
situation but i was always amazed by the
how the
amputee amputees we had a couple of them
they were really discouraging us
he said it sounds like a good idea but
if the battery runs out
if we fall the worst thing you can think
of is be falling there and have his leg
going up and down you know
uh that was one of the big projects
and that was that mit that was at mit
it was also carnegie mellon but the
fellow at carnegie mellon who was doing
legged locomotion moved to mit also i
forget his name he may be here
mark bravery braver yeah you know him
yeah i haven't seen mark in many a year
right
but he was very interested in that
subject
and see saint louis university
washington university at st louis they
were doing some good theoretical work
so cerrites was very interested in the
theoretical aspects of control
he was doing things that i never
understood
it was too complicated for me and very
fancy mathematics that were beyond me
but everybody else you know nsf sends
proposals out
for review so the program director
or the division director makes a
decision but only based on inputs
from other places which brings me nih
started a program because of us they
they won't admit it
but and this is a long time ago so it's
all uh you know nobody's there anymore
who remembers it but we started a
bioengineering program
and they sent a delegation down and said
oh you guys are interested
and you know nih is
i may say run by doctors as a physicians
so it's hard to get them into technical
things but
they came around and i think they've
started i'm not mistaken a
bioengineering program
at nih so we coordinated with them
we did a lot in imaging medical imaging
that was a big big subject
and acoustic imaging we got into
acoustic imaging
uh sonograms and so on
we had some projects that failed for
example we wanted to do characterization
of tissue
by uh ultrasound ultrasound vision
ultrasound imaging and characterizing is
the cancerous is not you know
that sort of thing but that that was too
complicated
we couldn't get we had physicians who
come in the first thing they said
what do you mean by tissue what's the
definition of tissue you know
well i think it's alive so
it never worked because it's too
complicated
i had another program called uh
non-invasive uh imaging non-invasive
diagnostics
non-invasive diagnostics but we used
imaging
cameras inserted in the throat and many
other ways
of uh
of diagnosing diagnosing
medical problems so that went on for a
few years too we got some good
good results out of that so you know i
was there 30 years or so
less than 30 years so too much to
remember them all
what were some of the biggest
technological successes
of those 30 years of robotics that you
saw
his big successes huh he's not like my
boss
he always asks the same thing what are
you doing
well i i think the bio because i happen
to be interested and i was doing that
personally even before i went to nsf i
was into bioengineering
i think i was the imaging we did
ultrasound imaging what you see today
all these machines
i have to say that many of them were
started at nsf
and they were picked up
the subject of success you can have a
technological success
but it won't be picked up for various
reasons
one is money
the thing with medical is that companies
will pick them up
which is a third-party payer called the
insurance company
so you're not dealing with the public
you had to deal with the public
like selling automobiles you got to make
something that's affordable
sometimes technical research is not
affordable
when it comes to commercialization
so i think we came up with a lot of
success but they
maybe blended into something else
just one of the purposes is to publish
you know that's uh
absolute necessity was to publish so we
published
everything in nsf does is there's no
no restrictions on publications
public funded it's public money to fund
it it's in the public domain
and what are some of the biggest
challenges facing robotics now
one of the biggest challenges you should
be asking is the kids walking around
they shouldn't be asking me i should ask
these young kids who are
getting into it now i think from what i
see
in in the field
utilization is probably you know it's
still
if you go into humanoid you have to look
at the different programs
you know humanoid robots not undersea
robots and so on
undersea is a very another another big
area that i think was very successful
we had we had a project at woods hole
which uh you know involved uh
going deep and i think the the same guy
found the titanic if i'm not mistaken
went down in the vehicle
and found the titanic i think he was a
professor at woods hole
i can't remember his name either yeah
it's escaping me right now
yeah but he's a big he writes papers and
all he's well known
uh so i think one of the problems is
transferring
robotics into uh
usage in a more general sense
it's happening in the medical profession
because in the medical profession as i
say
the doctors will decide if it's
beneficial
it's efficacy and so on and they'll
encourage people to build these machines
and then the public of course
has to pay sooner or later insurance
rates go up and so on
but a humanoid robot we have one section
in iarp
called personal robots personal robots
for helping handicapped people
personal robots for you know you'd like
to have a butler and you'd like
somebody to wash your dishes for you but
very expensive very slow dangerous in
many cases
now with another area of human
interaction we got into is the
is the relationship between humans and
robots
in a safety sense if nothing else you
know so there was a safety
we had a big compartment on safety
human safety
so i think the promise of robotics in
your house
you know the uh the uh
futuristic cartoons that you see i
forget what they are
lying around robots and so on i've never
been
never been into that much but the uh
these these uh animated things and the
uh cartoons very far away from that
very car
and even you know assuming there are
people who could
afford you know somebody wants a robot
in the house
i don't i wouldn't really know anybody
who would do that
you're much better off in the sense of
not having a humanoid robot but
automating the
the house so that can function in an
automated way
rather than having something that looks
like a human
what do you uh what's your advice to
young people who are interested
perhaps in a career in robotics how to
go about it
follow my advice to young people
you have to have a passion that's the
only thing it's a tough subject
technologically scientifically very hard
subject to deal with
and you've got to have a passion
i know when i worked at hopkins a couple
of years getting out of
that helping them start that center i
was amazed these
graduate students came in
and it was you know we probably had six
or seven graduate students male
female come in the morning and sit down
at their computers and all day long
they're
typing and timing and god knows what
they were doing but they had the passion
to sit there
i couldn't do that i would find it
boring probably but they didn't
so you got to have passion in order to
be ahead in this business
and uh because you're not going to make
a lot of money
i don't know of any anybody in the
robotics field
that has made a lot of money even
companies
don't make a lot of money
so where it's going to go in the future
whether it'll ever be
you know a household item uh
more likely it's it's it's going to have
specialized application
warehousing we did some work with the
i was on a committee that looked at the
air force
it was the air force air force
material distribution and we automated
gave them suggestions to automate
their whole system that was that's again
a huge
you see some of these warehouses that
the army has
so and you know in applications like
this the uh
i think you'll find specialized
applications undersea stuff
you can do that where there is
government support or an activity
you won't even know what they're doing
because a lot of it's classified the
military are doing it offers doing and
so on
you'll see progress being made there in
specialized fields where there's
insurance companies or some third-party
payer
but when you get out to the consumer
they're going to find very very slow
progress in robotics
outside of toys lego toys and things
like that
it's uh too expensive and
and not uh utilitarian enough
so that's really a challenge to try and
move that field
conferences like this that's the purpose
of getting people together and trying to
to move it currently the nsf has the
robotics initiative
um the national robotics initiative and
it is really focused on this notion of
collaborative robots so really robots
interacting with humans and so that
seems
like a like veering in the direction of
having more and more of this um
human robot together like maybe in some
so not in necessarily just the warehouse
but in a lot of
other uh areas so why do you have a good
direction why they went
that way well i mean there's many many
aspects of the of robotics and robotics
research that they could have gone into
a lot is already being supported in
other places
and uh one of the newer fields and again
irp has had a confidence on this and all
is uh robot interaction in other words
more than one robot
working together and that's a
fascinating field
bsrs but i read up on what they're doing
there that
so i think they're basically looking for
interesting problems to use
as platforms for research and sensing
and in
haptics research and so on where they
can develop
more basic knowledge to be able to be
applied to other things you know
were there ever any controversies that
you know in terms of should we go this
way that were
different projects to fund or different
directions to go in in terms of robotics
or maybe even getting rid of robotics or
were there any controversies that you
witnessed
by by the management people both just in
terms of discussions of
kind of where to go well yeah i mean
there's always discussions on it
but nsf is really a responsive
organization
in other words the researchers the the
research that we funded there
was always in response to a proposal
so you could organize proposals under an
initiative like that robotics research
initiative
or you could just let the
interests of the community which was the
basic
idea of nsf to begin with that you had
interested researchers
and they will submit proposals and it
will be peer-reviewed
and funded so i think what
the way nsf has evolved is in trying to
develop platforms
so there's still i don't know i haven't
looked into it but
in my days there was a lot of money we
we divided up
the budget most of the money would go
into individual investigators
unsolicited proposals some money we put
aside for young investigators we had a
young investigator program
some money we put aside for projects
and that's still probably the way it has
to has to go
what the future holds i don't have a
crystal ball
but as i think i think that
in my view maybe i'm cynical i think
consumer
robotics is a far far-off thing
you got to change some basic physicals
first
what about robots as a way to draw kids
into engineering and science
kids are going to go in that direction
because it's sexy you know
robots are sexy you don't want them to
go into some
you know mathematical formulation of
equations because that's not sexy
but they see robots and cartoons and so
on
so people interested go into that
but you know i think that young people
have to get
a good fundamental education maybe i'm a
traditionalist but i still think
you're an electrical engineer first then
you're in robotics
you're not a robotics engineer and then
become familiar with electricity
and so you know you have to get a
fundamental
understanding of engineering or computer
science
and then specialize in robotics so these
kids who think they're going to
get a job building robots it's it's not
going to happen
you know it's too complicated a subject
get a good education that's my advice
great great thank you
but i'm exhausted yeah no you shouldn't
unless you have a really really funny
one
that's short i have a funny one but i
can't tell a mixed company
close your ears
you don't even have that many funny ones
in that subject no
i'd rather we had a lot of fun in the
old days
but uh you know there's no bearing on
the science or the other field or
anything
it's just a human one thing i have to
say
is the the community this community
in my days at least were very friendly
there was uh rivalry and research and so
on
but i never saw well i shouldn't say
that occasionally
there would be somebody who accused
somebody else of stealing his work or
something
but generally speaking this the ierp
is really a remarkable camaraderie
people get along very well
especially if you don't have any
political uh
forces working on you or financial
forces
you stay with the technical stuff you
know i'll have drinks with everybody
later
you know you can have a good time and
then the subject always goes
you know to something technical because
that's that's what we're in
you know i don't know anything about
your personal life so
what do we talk about you sit and have a
night cap at night and you're going to
get into technical subjects
and that's how a lot of information is
and people have started a joint project
just based on having some drinks tonight
that's the way life works humans
thank you thank you very much