(clapperboard claps)
- [Interviewer] So can you take me back
and tell me the first time
when you were introduced to Willow?
- So I snuck into
the computer science career fair at Stanford.
I wasn't supposed to be there.
(upbeat music)
I went to the booth that had Willow Garage there
because they had a weird name.
And I wanted to buy a robot for the lab
'cause I was tired of trying to build our own robot.
(upbeat music)
And they said well we don't have a robot yet.
So we can't like take your money and give you a robot,
but we're gonna build one, so do you wanna come visit?
(upbeat music)
(uplifting music)
When I walked through the front doors of Willow Garage
they had the prototypes working, not the real robots.
And the PR2 at that point was just like a hunk of metal
on wheels and kind of barely working.
And I remember walking down the hallway when the PR2
with this weird metal head and lots of cameras on its face
rolls up to me and just stops.
And so I said hi.
It didn't say hi back.
And then it spun its head around
and then spun its body around and then ran away.
And I felt like I'd been blown off.
That kind of hooked me.
Like there were so many issues there
in the interaction that I felt like we could fix.
(robot whining)
- [Robot] Wow.
- Human robot interaction is really,
I mean, people and robots.
I think of it as, you know, back in the day
when we went from mainframe computers to personal computers,
you had to bring in psychologists
and anthropologists and people who understand normal people,
not just software engineers,
and then build and design for them.
Robotics is kind of in that stage right now.
It's this awkward adolescence where we're going
from like big robots that only roboticists can use
to trying to build robots that normal people can use too.
- I've been in computing since the eighties, right?
And seventies.
In the old days it was like, you know, RTFM, right?
Read the fabulous manual.
Fabulous wasn't always that word.
And so, you know, that was the attitudes.
Like when I wrote something, you go figure it out.
- Open source culture often is folks who are building
really cool things for people
who are like themselves, right?
When you bring in user experience design
and human computer interaction,
suddenly you're designing for people who are not like you.
- Leila played an important role at Willow Garage
because she brought in this much needed new perspective
around how people experienced ROS
when they first discover it and they wanna start using it.
- And she was one of the key people who said,
hey, we really need to make sure the system
that we're gonna put out there and hope that people use,
we need to make sure that it is usable.
- One of the things that we did was brought in people
who should be able to use ROS, but really couldn't,
and ran user studies with them.
- But that's not where the magic was.
The magic I think is how she trained these engineers
to really shut up and listen.
- This is my favorite one because I think we
compare ourselves to robots all the time.
And we're using robots to play humans
even when they're not.
And that's where all the interesting questions
are at, right?
Like how's this all gonna work out
with people interacting with machines?
(cheerful music)
- So ROS was at one point barely usable
by people who weren't extremely good programmers.
- You know, there was this attitude that,
well if you can't use ROS you're just dumb, right?
You don't deserve to use it if you can't use it.
- There's nothing like watching somebody struggle
with your stuff, especially somebody who
you understand in advanced isn't stupid.
- But yeah, no, there was big pushback from a lot
of the engineers, not all of them.
- Including me who weren't that thrilled
about spending our time doing user testing
and writing better documentation to actually do that.
- [Leila] They felt like it was a waste of time.
Like we should just be coding.
Why are we looking at people?
- She actually used some of our internal engineers
to user test other people's stuff
to kinda create that direct empathy
where it's like this person you know, right,
is struggling with your thing.
- And I had this moment at one point where I was using ROS
and I wanted to record some data.
There was no documentation, the help really didn't work.
I became very obsessed as a Willow Garage employee
with trying to make ROS more usable at that point.
- I think that was critical
to growing the research and development community, right?
'Cause you can't just,
if you don't know the guy, who knows the guy.
who knows the guy who wrote the transfer function,
that should be fine, right?
You should be able to just use it.
You shouldn't have to know the person who wrote it
in order to use it.
- So the tutorials that we wrote for ROS at the beginning
ended up being enormously valuable because you felt like,
okay, I can spend an hour and I've just made a ROS program.
Oh, I get this.
Okay, now what else can I do?
Oh, I can do the next one.
And if you spend a day or two, you were pretty far
up to speed in terms of what you could make this robot do.
- That enabled other people
who didn't necessarily live in Menlo Park, California
to be able to try it out for themselves.
They could run robots in simulation at least
if they didn't have a real physical robot.
- And it really helped Willow build a better open source
product, community, and robot.
(soft music)
- It's not like you can just build a product and ship it.
You're building a community.
And that's a much harder thing to do.
And I think that was a more important thing to us
was that we were trying to build a community
that was supportive of each other,
that shared, right?
Then we get other companies to also share,
which is happening now, but it wasn't happening back then.
Microsoft wasn't gonna contribute to ROS then
and now they are, which is pretty great.
(soft music)