[Music]
I’m going to start off with a bold and
probably unsubstantiated claim which is
that robotics is the next Internet and
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 but before I
get into what I think are the the big
topics the hot topics and some of our
research I want to give you a little bit
of history so robotics as a term was
coined actually back in the 1920s in by
a Czech playwrights 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 and in fact the word initially
meant the the use of mechanized labour
basically doing things that we didn’t
want to do automating our lives the the
next example I’ll give is from Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis which I’m sure many or
if not most of you have seen or or if
not have seen some of the iconic sort of
art work from this film another example
of sort of progressing on in terms of
time is Asimov’s robot series you know I
won’t keep going on forward through you
know Terminator movies and Star Wars
movies and that sort of thing you’ll
notice a theme in these examples is the
the robot uprising and the dystopic view
of what robots will do to the world so
to depart from that I’d like to give an
example of what I think are my two
favorite robotic robots in history
Voyager 1 was a robot it was a
teleoperated robot but it took one of
the most profound pictures and I’m sure
you now agree of Earth this is back in
1990 the second photo that I think are
is very telling about not just robots
but you know human curiosity and you
know 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 my favorite images
and what I find the most powerful and
moving
photographs that I’ve ever seen so okay
that said you know in a few if you think
about these examples and you think about
you know all the science fiction movies
that you’ve seen that have robots in
them you could be asking where all the
robots right why are there no robots
that are you know that are making me
dinner and folding my clothes etc and so
you know the answer is that there’s a
lot of big challenges a lot of a lot of
difficulty in bringing these things to
real life so I’ll show you a couple just
a couple brief examples of where these
things actually exist in modern sort of
you know life in technology one is you
know the things that are welding the
doors on your cars in the assembly line
right and so 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 and so if you’re
thinking about adopting these
technologies to more you know household
or everyday use there’s some challenges
there or perhaps you have one of these
in your house so here’s what might be
the first useful accessible robotic
technology that you can use so just the
the the obligatory bullet points to tell
you what we are working on in 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 etc
we focus on a couple of things one is
and I guess they could be collectively
combined into where we get our
inspiration and the first one is
inspiration from nature so so for a lot
of the different functions that we might
want to achieve with our robots there is
likely a biological analog and so we
work with biologists extensively to try
to extract out those you know those
those principles and try to embody them
in our in our engineered systems and the
second one is non-traditional places and
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 and so what we’re what I’m going
to talk about is one example or I guess
a couple examples but one example in
particular of bio-inspired robots and to
do this we have to answer questions and
new manufacturing new materials and ways
of building these systems okay so to
phrase this question let’s watch this
video this is of a carpenter beet and as
an engineer I can look at this and start
to ask some really well posed questions
that sort of drive some of our research
like you know 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 the thoracic mechanics that is
you know moving the wings about what is
the muscular that 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 so there’s all these really
interesting questions that we as
engineers that we as engineers can you
know can start to sort of boil down into
into the the topics that we have to work
on if we wanted to actually make one of
these right so this is the wanting one
prototype of our robotic insects
I’d be happy am I going to pass it
around I’ll be happy to I’d be happy to
show it to you afterwards and in the you
know questions about if we’re going to
make something that sort of operates
like this like this this is just an
animation of a hover fly 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
and one of the biggest ones is how do
you make it so the first question that I
had is how would I piece together the
components for this and I would argue
that I don’t want to do it this way
right I don’t want to take you know
hundreds or even thousands of very
complex geometrical components and
pieced them together under a microscope
that would drive my graduate students
crazy and it would you know I that
wouldn’t work okay so we have to come up
with alternative solutions this is
actually I’m contradicting myself
because this is actually an attempt at
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 but this is literally what it
looks like you’re actually piecing
together all the different components
and I won’t get into the details of what
these things are but you know they’re
they’re the motors they’re the the wings
they’re the you know the little
mechanisms that cause the thing to you
know move properly and that sort of
thing so 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 non-traditional place my
son’s library and so my son at the time
a couple years ago was really into
pop-up books and so if you think about a
pop-up book I think about it is
fantastically complicated
gated structures and mechanisms that are
created by extremely unskilled users and
I’m not talking about the people that
made the books I’m talking about the
kids that operate the books so you open
up the books you do something very
simple like you know just opening a page
or pulling something and out of this out
of this page comes these fantastic
structures and so we do something very
similar and we call this process pop-up
book MEMS and it good and it goes as
follows you basically build all of the
components that you want like I said the
motors the wing is etc and you also
build a scaffold around it that’s what
this sort of surrounding area is here
and then by proper design of all of the
individual components in this sort of
quasi two-dimensional composites if it’s
designed right and constructed properly
which I’m of course I’m not getting much
into deep into the details then all I
have to do is slow to push on it and
that’s that’s what I’ll show in this
video all I 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 and this allows us to build
our computational origami friends and
this is 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 so we
can make things arbitrarily complicated
we can make things with any material
combination you know metals composites
polymers ceramics doesn’t matter and we
can do this very quickly we’re
experimental robotics we know actually
very little about the physics of the
devices that we make and so not for lack
of trying but just because it’s you know
complex fluid structure interactions all
these all these sort of difficult things
and so what we do then is we build and
test and build and test and often test a
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
learned something in change of the
design and reiterate on that I should
mention the way that we’re building
things this sort of 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
because that’s that’s the way that we
sort of think about this okay so we can
build things in bulk just just by the
fact that this is an inherently
parallelizable process bulk for us is
only a few but that’s ok we plug these
things in we test them flap wings around
do some system identification all sorts
of interesting things to try to
understand
this thing actually works and then plug
it in turn it on this is sped down by
one factor of 1/8 and this is what
happens right every time right and in
fact if you look at it in real time this
is you know very fast but this is just a
consequence of the dynamics of this
system so you know insects are very
unlike the the airplanes that we ride in
right so you know the the 747 of the
world are designed to be passively
stable if the engines turn off it should
you know glide down to safety without
the apps without the presence of you
know ActiveX control but insects are not
that way they’re unstable and this leads
to the manoeuvrability that you’ve
experienced if you ever try to swat them
right so so what I’m saying is they’re
the fighter jets of the world and we can
if we can properly stabilize these
systems and they become quite
maneuverable so after plenty of trial
and error
again this is 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 years ago
was was just hover when 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 sort of like the insects that we
try to mimic we also just want to wrap
up with a couple of other topics and
other broad statements of course we also
make a host of other bio-inspired robots
and 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
bio-inspired 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 mimic
some of the features of natural systems
then we can test our hypotheses on
natural systems and I say us our biology
our biologists colleagues in ways that
would be difficult to do with with the
actual animal and so this is really
exciting for us we also make little
cockroach like robots this is in real
time and 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 normalized
the body length which is of course a
caveat in fact twice as fast as Usain
okay so I often get the question so I
will preemptively answer it which is
what would you do with these things why
are you doing this and the main thing
that gets us excited is that it’s a
basic research topic that we you know
all of these topics in you know in fluid
mechanics in microfabrication
and bioengineering etc are what really
drive us and the technology fallout that
comes from this meaning technology
fallout like you know 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 when they’re
working for you know things like
search-and-rescue where you know the
firefighter might have a thousand of
these things on site that flies through
a building looking for human survivors
or even hazardous environment
exploration space exploration etc so
these are these are the sort of the
common themes that there are the
longer-term goals of this and lastly
I’ll say that these things turn out to
be extremely useful for education
purposes so we go from school to school
and also the festivals local and
national to try to get kids excited in
STEM and it turns out and I mean no
disrespect to our theoretical physicist
colleagues that this is much more likely
to get to get interested in science and
engineering and string theory so I
apologize if that’s your area so with
that I will stop and I’ll thank you for
[Applause]
[Music]
you
I’m going to start off with a bold and
probably unsubstantiated claim which is
that robotics is the next Internet and
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 but before I
get into what I think are the the big
topics the hot topics and some of our
research I want to give you a little bit
of history so robotics as a term was
coined actually back in the 1920s in by
a Czech playwrights 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 and in fact the word initially
meant the the use of mechanized labour
basically doing things that we didn’t
want to do automating our lives the the
next example I’ll give is from Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis which I’m sure many or
if not most of you have seen or or if
not have seen some of the iconic sort of
art work from this film another example
of sort of progressing on in terms of
time is Asimov’s robot series you know I
won’t keep going on forward through you
know Terminator movies and Star Wars
movies and that sort of thing you’ll
notice a theme in these examples is the
the robot uprising and the dystopic view
of what robots will do to the world so
to depart from that I’d like to give an
example of what I think are my two
favorite robotic robots in history
Voyager 1 was a robot it was a
teleoperated robot but it took one of
the most profound pictures and I’m sure
you now agree of Earth this is back in
1990 the second photo that I think are
is very telling about not just robots
but you know human curiosity and you
know 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 my favorite images
and what I find the most powerful and
moving
photographs that I’ve ever seen so okay
that said you know in a few if you think
about these examples and you think about
you know all the science fiction movies
that you’ve seen that have robots in
them you could be asking where all the
robots right why are there no robots
that are you know that are making me
dinner and folding my clothes etc and so
you know the answer is that there’s a
lot of big challenges a lot of a lot of
difficulty in bringing these things to
real life so I’ll show you a couple just
a couple brief examples of where these
things actually exist in modern sort of
you know life in technology one is you
know the things that are welding the
doors on your cars in the assembly line
right and so 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 and so if you’re
thinking about adopting these
technologies to more you know household
or everyday use there’s some challenges
there or perhaps you have one of these
in your house so here’s what might be
the first useful accessible robotic
technology that you can use so just the
the the obligatory bullet points to tell
you what we are working on in 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 etc
we focus on a couple of things one is
and I guess they could be collectively
combined into where we get our
inspiration and the first one is
inspiration from nature so so for a lot
of the different functions that we might
want to achieve with our robots there is
likely a biological analog and so we
work with biologists extensively to try
to extract out those you know those
those principles and try to embody them
in our in our engineered systems and the
second one is non-traditional places and
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 and so what we’re what I’m going
to talk about is one example or I guess
a couple examples but one example in
particular of bio-inspired robots and to
do this we have to answer questions and
new manufacturing new materials and ways
of building these systems okay so to
phrase this question let’s watch this
video this is of a carpenter beet and as
an engineer I can look at this and start
to ask some really well posed questions
that sort of drive some of our research
like you know 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 the thoracic mechanics that is
you know moving the wings about what is
the muscular that 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 so there’s all these really
interesting questions that we as
engineers that we as engineers can you
know can start to sort of boil down into
into the the topics that we have to work
on if we wanted to actually make one of
these right so this is the wanting one
prototype of our robotic insects
I’d be happy am I going to pass it
around I’ll be happy to I’d be happy to
show it to you afterwards and in the you
know questions about if we’re going to
make something that sort of operates
like this like this this is just an
animation of a hover fly 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
and one of the biggest ones is how do
you make it so the first question that I
had is how would I piece together the
components for this and I would argue
that I don’t want to do it this way
right I don’t want to take you know
hundreds or even thousands of very
complex geometrical components and
pieced them together under a microscope
that would drive my graduate students
crazy and it would you know I that
wouldn’t work okay so we have to come up
with alternative solutions this is
actually I’m contradicting myself
because this is actually an attempt at
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 but this is literally what it
looks like you’re actually piecing
together all the different components
and I won’t get into the details of what
these things are but you know they’re
they’re the motors they’re the the wings
they’re the you know the little
mechanisms that cause the thing to you
know move properly and that sort of
thing so 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 non-traditional place my
son’s library and so my son at the time
a couple years ago was really into
pop-up books and so if you think about a
pop-up book I think about it is
fantastically complicated
gated structures and mechanisms that are
created by extremely unskilled users and
I’m not talking about the people that
made the books I’m talking about the
kids that operate the books so you open
up the books you do something very
simple like you know just opening a page
or pulling something and out of this out
of this page comes these fantastic
structures and so we do something very
similar and we call this process pop-up
book MEMS and it good and it goes as
follows you basically build all of the
components that you want like I said the
motors the wing is etc and you also
build a scaffold around it that’s what
this sort of surrounding area is here
and then by proper design of all of the
individual components in this sort of
quasi two-dimensional composites if it’s
designed right and constructed properly
which I’m of course I’m not getting much
into deep into the details then all I
have to do is slow to push on it and
that’s that’s what I’ll show in this
video all I 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 and this allows us to build
our computational origami friends and
this is 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 so we
can make things arbitrarily complicated
we can make things with any material
combination you know metals composites
polymers ceramics doesn’t matter and we
can do this very quickly we’re
experimental robotics we know actually
very little about the physics of the
devices that we make and so not for lack
of trying but just because it’s you know
complex fluid structure interactions all
these all these sort of difficult things
and so what we do then is we build and
test and build and test and often test a
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
learned something in change of the
design and reiterate on that I should
mention the way that we’re building
things this sort of 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
because that’s that’s the way that we
sort of think about this okay so we can
build things in bulk just just by the
fact that this is an inherently
parallelizable process bulk for us is
only a few but that’s ok we plug these
things in we test them flap wings around
do some system identification all sorts
of interesting things to try to
understand
this thing actually works and then plug
it in turn it on this is sped down by
one factor of 1/8 and this is what
happens right every time right and in
fact if you look at it in real time this
is you know very fast but this is just a
consequence of the dynamics of this
system so you know insects are very
unlike the the airplanes that we ride in
right so you know the the 747 of the
world are designed to be passively
stable if the engines turn off it should
you know glide down to safety without
the apps without the presence of you
know ActiveX control but insects are not
that way they’re unstable and this leads
to the manoeuvrability that you’ve
experienced if you ever try to swat them
right so so what I’m saying is they’re
the fighter jets of the world and we can
if we can properly stabilize these
systems and they become quite
maneuverable so after plenty of trial
and error
again this is 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 years ago
was was just hover when 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 sort of like the insects that we
try to mimic we also just want to wrap
up with a couple of other topics and
other broad statements of course we also
make a host of other bio-inspired robots
and 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
bio-inspired 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 mimic
some of the features of natural systems
then we can test our hypotheses on
natural systems and I say us our biology
our biologists colleagues in ways that
would be difficult to do with with the
actual animal and so this is really
exciting for us we also make little
cockroach like robots this is in real
time and 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 normalized
the body length which is of course a
caveat in fact twice as fast as Usain
okay so I often get the question so I
will preemptively answer it which is
what would you do with these things why
are you doing this and the main thing
that gets us excited is that it’s a
basic research topic that we you know
all of these topics in you know in fluid
mechanics in microfabrication
and bioengineering etc are what really
drive us and the technology fallout that
comes from this meaning technology
fallout like you know 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 when they’re
working for you know things like
search-and-rescue where you know the
firefighter might have a thousand of
these things on site that flies through
a building looking for human survivors
or even hazardous environment
exploration space exploration etc so
these are these are the sort of the
common themes that there are the
longer-term goals of this and lastly
I’ll say that these things turn out to
be extremely useful for education
purposes so we go from school to school
and also the festivals local and
national to try to get kids excited in
STEM and it turns out and I mean no
disrespect to our theoretical physicist
colleagues that this is much more likely
to get to get interested in science and
engineering and string theory so I
apologize if that’s your area so with
that I will stop and I’ll thank you for
[Applause]
[Music]
you
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