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Robert: I'm going to start off with a bold
and probably unsubstantiated claim
which is that robotics is the next internet.
What I mean by that is it's the next big thing
to impact our lives whether
it's biomedical applications,
whether it's automating our daily lives.
Before I get into what I think are the big topics,
the hot topics in some of our research,
I want to give you a little bit of history.
Robotics as a term was coined actually back
in the 1920's by a Czech playwright
in a play called "Rossum's Universal Robots."
Apparently, the play wasn't very good but nonetheless,
it brought the word robots to the English language.
In fact, the word initially meant
the use of mechanized labor.
Basically, doing things that we didn't wanna do,
automating our lives.
The next example I'll give is from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"
which I'm sure most of you have seen or if not,
have seen some of the iconic art work from this film.
Another example progressing on in terms of time
is Asimov's robot series.
I won't keep going on forward through
Terminator movies and Star Wars movies
and that sort of thing.
You'll notice a theme in these examples
is the robot uprising and the dystopic view
of what robots will do to the world.
To depart from that, I'd like to give an example
of what I think are my two favorite robots in history.
Voyager 1 was a robot.
It was a teleoperated robot but it took
one of the most profound pictures,
I'm sure you now agree, of earth.
This is back in 1990.
The second photo that I think is very telling about
not just robots but human curiosity
and the advances of technology is what I would think
is one of the first robot selfies
which is the Curiosity rover on Mars.
These are two of my favorite images
and what I find the most powerful and moving
photographs that I've ever seen.
Okay, that said and if you think about
these examples and you think about
all the science fiction movies that you've seen
that have robots in them, you could be asking,
"Where are all the robots?
Why are there no robots that are making me dinner,
and folding my clothes et cetera?"
The answer is that there's a lot of big challenges.
There's a lot of difficulty
in bringing these things to real life.
I'll show you just a couple brief examples
of where these things actually exist
in modern life and technology.
One is the things that are welding the doors
on your cars in the assembly line.
These are big, bulky, very precise fast things.
One of the things you'll notice in this
is that there's no humans anywhere near these
because they're very dangerous.
Thinking about adopting these technologies
to more household or everyday use,
there's some challenges there.
Perhaps, you have one of these in your house.
Here's what might be the first useful, accessible
robotic technology that you can use.
The obligatory bullet points to tell you what we are working on
and our view of the world
in terms of the opportunities in robotics.
The opportunities to get these things
to be more useful, more ubiquitous, cheaper, et cetera,
we focus on a couple of things.
One is...
I guess they can be collectively combined
into where we get our inspiration.
The first one is inspiration from nature.
For a lot of the different functions
that we might to achieve with our robots
there is likely a biologic analog.
We work with biologists extensively
to try to extract out those principles
and try to embody them in our engineered systems.
The second one is non-traditional places.
That'll become a little bit more clear in a few slides
when I show you some of the ways
that we actually build these robots.
What I'm going to talk about
is one example, I guess a couple of examples,
but one example in particular of bioinspired robots
and to do this, we have to answer questions
in new manufacturing, new materials
in ways of building these systems.
Okay so to phrase this question,
let's watch these video.
This is a carpenter bee.
As an engineer, I can look at this
and start to ask some really well-posed questions
that drives some of our research.
How are the wings moving?
How are the wings interacting with the air
and generating vortices
that it's then manipulating through its wings?
What is the thoracic mechanics
that is moving the wings about?
What is the muscular that's driving thoracic mechanics?
What are the metabolic processes
that are driving the muscles,
that are driving the mechanics,
that are driving the wings?
What is the flight mode?
What are the sensors that it's using?
What are the control methodologies?
What is the neurobiology?
All these really interesting questions...
( audience laughing )
...that we as engineers can start to sort of boil down
into the topics that we have to work on
if we wanted to actually make one of these.
This is the... one prototype of our robotic insects.
I'm not going to pass it around.
I'd be happy to show it to you afterwards.
Questions about if we're going to make something
that operates like this,
this is just an animation of a hoverfly.
If we're going to make something in an engineered system
that works something like this,
how do we do it?
What are the answers to those questions
that I just posed that are derived from
these natural systems?
One of the biggest ones is how do you make it?
The first question that I had
is how would I piece together the components for this?
I would argue that I don't want to do it this way.
I don't want to take hundreds or even thousands
of very complex geometrical components
and piece them together under a microscope.
That would my drive my graduate students crazy.
That wouldn't work.
We had to come up with alternative solutions.
I'm contradicting myself because this is actually
an attempt to sort of a nuts and bolts approach,
to actually piece together components.
This is the old way before we had the discovery
which I'll show you in a minute.
This is literally what it looks like.
You're actually piecing together all the different components
and I won't get into the details what these things are.
There are the motors.
There are the wings.
There are the little mechanisms
that cause the thing to move properly
and that sort of thing.
If we want to get around that,
how do we do this?
Well, it turns out we took inspiration from,
I guess in hindsight, is a nontraditional place,
my son's library.
My son at the time, a couple of years ago,
was really into pop-up books.
If you think about a pop-up book,
I think about it as fantastically
complicated structures and mechanisms
that are created by extremely unskilled users.
I'm not talking about the people that made the book.
I'm talking about the kids that operate the books.
You open up the books.
You do something very simple like opening a page
or pulling something
and out of this page comes these fantastic structures.
We do something very similar.
We call this process pop-up book MEMS.
It goes as follows.
You basically build all of the components that you want.
Like I said, the motors, the wings, et cetera.
You also build a scaffold around it.
That's what this sort of surrounding area is here.
Then by proper design of all the individual components
in this quasi two-dimensional composite.
If it's designed right and constructed properly,
which of course I'm not getting much into the details,
then all I'd have to do is push on it
and that's we'll show in this video.
All you have to do is push on it
and out pops the device that I want
because all of the trajectories that
are associated with the assembly of this device
are controlled by the mechanisms that
are built into this pop-up structure.
This allows us to build our computational origami friends.
This is a real thing.
Actually, you can prove that you can make anything you want
in terms of any geometric complexity,
any mechanism that you want to build
can be done in this way.
We can make things arbitrarily complicated.
We can make things with any material combination,
metals, composites, polymer, ceramics, doesn't matter.
We can do this very quickly.
We're experimental robotics,
we know actually very little about the physics
of the devices that we make.
Not for lack of trying but just because
it's complex, fluid structure interactions,
all these difficult things.
What we do then is we build and test,
build and test, and often test to failure
as I'll show you in a moment.
This is a resulting device.
You'll notice that every device
that I show you will look different.
That's just because we learn something
and change the design and reiterate on that.
I should mention the way that we're building things,
this concept of a scaffold
building all the components for you.
We like to think in some way
fulfills Richard Feynman's prophecy
about small robots building small robots.
That's the way that we think about this.
We can build things in bulk just by the fact
that this is inherently parallelizable process.
Bulk, for us, is only a few but that's okay.
We plugged these things in.
We test them.
Flap wings around, do some system identification,
all sorts of interesting things
to try to understand how this thing actually works.
Then plug it in, turn it on.
This has sped down by a factor of one eighth
and this is what happens...
( audience laughing )
...every time.
In fact, if you look at it in real time, this is very fast.
This is just a consequence of the dynamics of this system.
Insects are very unlike the airplanes that we ride in.
The 747s of the world are designed to be passively stable.
If the engines turn off, it should glide down to safety
without the presence of active control.
Insects are not that way.
They're unstable and this leads to the maneuverability
that you've experienced if you ever try to swat them.
( audience laughing )
What I'm saying is they're the fighter jets of the world.
If we can properly stabilize these systems
then they become quite maneuverable.
After plenty of trial and error,
again this has sped down one eighth time.
We are able to control the flight of these things.
One of the first demonstrations that we had,
which we were very excited about
a couple of years ago, was just hover.
It turns out that's one of the more difficult things
that we can try to do.
We can also take advantage of some of these fast dynamics
that I was alluding to and also some of
the physics of scaling to allow these things to perch.
Once we have these things working,
we're doing all sorts of cute demonstrations
of how they can behave like the insects that we try to mimic.
I just want to wrap up with a couple of other topics
and other broad statements of course.
We also make a host of other bioinspired robots.
I'm showing you these not just because they're cool or creepy
but because they actually represent one of our big pushes
which is all of our bioinspired work takes cues from nature
and tries to instantiate that in robots.
We're actually seeing that arrow of bioinspiration reverse
because now we can start to build robots
which mimics some of the features of natural systems
that we can test our hypothesis on natural systems
and I say us, our biologist colleagues,
in ways that would be difficult to do with the actual animal.
This is really exciting for us.
We also make little cockroach-like robots.
This is in real time.
I'm just showing you this because we can make claims that
these things are actually some
of the fastest robots in the world
if you normalize the body length which of course a caveat.
In fact, twice as fast as Usain Bolt.
Okay.
I often get the questions so I will preemptively answer it
which is what would you do with these things?
Why are you doing this?
The main thing that gets us excited
is that it's a basic research topic
that all of these topics in fluid mechanics
and microfabrication and bioengineering, et cetera
are what really drive us.
The technology fallout that comes from this
meaning technology fallout like I have a former student
that started a company that's trying
to find commercial applications for the way
that we build things.
We also have prototypes for making little,
minimally invasive surgical tools using the same techniques.
But you can also use these things in the future,
10-20 years down the road when they're working
for things like search and rescue where
a firefighter might have a thousand of these things onsite
that flies through a building looking for human survivors,
or even hazardous environment explorations,
space exploration, et cetera.
These are the common themes that are
the longer term goals of this.
Lastly, I'll say that these things turn out
to be extremely useful for education purposes.
We go from school to school,
and also festivals, local and national
to try to get kids excited in STEM.
It turns out and I mean no disrespect
to our theoretical physicist colleagues
that this is much more likely to get kids interested
in science and engineering than string theories.
I apologize if that's your area.
With that, I will stop and I'll thank you for listening.
Thank you.
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