Transcriber: Brian Smiga Reviewer: Denise RQ
Hi, I'm Gabriella Levine.
I work as an artist and a technologist,
and I build robots.
Two things in my early childhood greatly affect what I do now.
When I was eight, I had Lyme disease,
and my summer started off as a bad one.
I couldn't go outside and play as I loved to.
What I did instead had an immense impact.
I stayed inside and for hours on end,
I built up giant masterpieces out of Legos.
I also have always had an obsession with snakes,
particularly the way they move.
I've had snakes growing up as pets,
and I've also done research in Arizona on desert snakes.
These two passions, Legos and snakes, greatly influenced my work now.
I work in electronics,
but I have a passion about building biological forms in hardware,
specifically, I build snake robots,
(Laughter)
but even more specifically, open source robots.
I want to talk to you today about the power of sharing information,
and how open source could change the world.
Last year, Richard Van As, a South African construction worker,
decided to design a set of mechanical fingers,
after he had an accident on the job.
He lost four fingers,
yet there was no preexisting prosthetic
that could fit his hand the way it was injured.
So he decided to design his own.
He was collaborating online with a man in Washington,
who he met on the web, who was a special effects artist
who had just designed a mechanical hand.
Then Richard got a Makerbot
which is a 3D printer that's consumer-friendly,
pretty easy to use, and inexpensive.
Now that he had this in his workshop,
he was able to cut down his production time
[from] what took weeks to just minutes.
Now, if he made a mistake or broke a part,
he was able to print a whole new finger in just 20 minutes.
He then started publishing his designs online
on a website called ThingVerse, which is specifically dedicated
for people to publish designs for the 3D printer, the Makerbot.
Others started to see his success.
One boy was Liam.
Liam was born with no fingers on his right hand.
Liam's mother saw what Richard had created,
and asked if he could create a new hand for Liam.
And so he did.
For the first time, Liam was able to feel
what it felt like to grip a baseball.
And then others started coming to Richard as well
like Dylan,
and Dave,
and Junior,
and Esethu,
and Angel, and Thomas.
Soon others started building this hand in their own homes
with the Makerbot based on Richard's design.
This is a primary example
of the power of sharing technology and open hardware.
Open hardware is any hardware or physical technology
whose design is shared for others to use, modify and distribute.
The open hardware movement has already begun to allow
artists, designers, technologists, creators
to have access to open technologies
that are already proliferating into amazing innovations.
Let me tell you about an open hardware project
that I'm working on, called "Protei."
Protei is a shape-shifting, unmanned sailing robot.
It was originally designed to clean up oil and enable local communities
to take an unmanned approach to cleaning up oil on the water,
but now it's expanded into a general platform
to allow people to use it
for any type of ocean preservation and exploration.
The unique part of Protei
is that its hull moves flexibly, like a snake.
It's optimized to drag a long and heavy load on the water.
Protei was started in the Gulf of Mexico by Cesar Harada.
It was then, during the BP oil spill,
that he was aiding the fishermen with the cleanup efforts.
Cesar was an artist, an inventor and an entrepreneur,
and he was disheartened when he saw the terrible conditions
in which they were working.
The current methods for cleaning oil
were using over 700 of these repurposed fishing vessels
driven through giant patches of oil on the water
with oil-absorbant booms,
but they only collected 3% of the oil
and they were extremely hazardous to the health of the workers.
Cesar knew immediately that what the world needed
was an unmanned technology
that could reach the hands of many.
But Protei is not just for oil.
We realized that if we could develop
a system that could carry a heavy payload on the water
it could also carry sensors for things
like measuring radioactivity off the coastline
or even garbage-collecting nets for picking up plastic trash.
But these problems are huge,
and nobody could solve them alone.
So we published our designs online
and formed a centralized website,
and an online community began to form
of people from all over
who wanted to collaborate to develop a new technology
to have a sustainable method of cleaning the ocean with wind power.
In the summer of 2011, I moved to Rotterdam,
to work in a giant workshop.
We had electronics, wood, raw material,
it was the best summer of my life.
I was working with artists, designers, engineers,
naval architects, marine biologists.
We came from all over, together, to develop
the sixth and largest prototype.
In just three months, we built, together,
a ten foot robotic sailboat that was able to drag
a long oil boom behind it to absorb oil.
There were problems, but we kept working on it.
By the next summer, we had developed four more prototypes.
We kept documenting the work,
and people kept working on the project.
From the people who had started collaborating on the Protei project
a massive community was beginning to form.
That's how we work.
We work hands-on, we test often, and we document.
Now people in Korea, Peru, and Mexico have all built versions based on ours.
I built this in New York and published my designs online
and students in Netherlands copied, modified and improved the designs,
and they published theirs,
which was seen by over 11,000 people.
We work with students and kids all over the world in workshops.
Now, we're aiming to manufacture and distribute
boats and boat kits by the end of this year.
We've gone all over the world, building and testing
and user testing and field testing.
We measured radioactivity off the coast of Fukushima in Japan,
we're talking with top ocean scientists about how to develop a system
so Protei can sense plastic trash in the Great Pacific Gyre.
Before starting Protei, I wasn't an engineer
but I did not have to be.
As Richard learned by experimenting with the Makerbot 3D printer,
all of the tools that I needed
in order to get started building and coding were already available.
What I had to learn was how to piece them together,
and I did this only with patience and a lot of imagination
and getting over the fear of failing.
I worked a lot in open communities with people who were collaborating
and all of my knowledge coming about hardware,
electronics design, even robotics, stems from these open communities.
I did a lot of work in Maker Spaces such as TechShop in San Francisco,
and NYC Resistor in New York.
It was from these open communities
that I learned and I thrived.
From "Instructables" and other websites
where people share their innovations and designs online,
I was able to build upon other successes.
I was able to use precompiled code libraries
and follow other schematics
and in doing so, I was able to build up entire designs
for sustainably powered robots,
and then share those designs back on Instructables.
So just from experimenting with tools, experimenting with new media,
and leveraging documentation,
in a few years, I was able to develop enough skills
to build my own snake robots, and other types of robots,
to go out into the world and sense environmental data.
It's from these open, collaborative communities
that comes the amazing potential,
but it's already proliferating into real innovations.
The power is immense, and it's just beginning,
but the tools, and the tech, and the communities are here.
So it's not just scientists or engineers who can create and invent.
It's all of us.
Every one of us has the capability and the knowledge
to contribute to the ideas and the technology
for world-changing concepts.
Thank you.
(Applause)