Brian Gerkey

In the U.S., something like 80% of manufacturing facilities, if you just count them, have no automation at all.

The hardware is willing and the software is weak.

I've got this hammer, which is a robot, and I'd like to make it the best hammer ever.

That's not the same as knowing what to hit with it.

Somebody who doesn't even come from a robotics background, ideally, I think they generally have the best ideas.

I think robotics and AI today are going to be and will continue to be genuinely disruptive.

Like, there's a little bit of hubris in imagining that, like, this is the one time that it will be different versus all the other technologies.

The folks at NASA Ames did is they built a, what's called the Astra B. It's a cube-shaped robot that's like 18 inches on a side.

And it's, they've got, I think, three of them inside the International Space Station.

They got fans on each side and they free fly around inside the space station.

They could look over the astronaut's shoulder and give ground mission control a, like a over-the-shoulder view.

And that runs the, that runs Ross.

Knowing that there's some code that we wrote that's up there is just extraordinary.

Sure.

So I'll just give you a brief background on me because it's worth wondering, like, how do you get into robotics?

So for me, that journey started when I was an undergrad.

I was studying computer engineering and a professor named Jim Jennings came into the department and he started a robot lab.

And I remember walking past that room and looking inside and seeing these, what we affectionately called trash can robots at the time, because they were kind of shaped like cylindrical trash cans, but mobile robots that were moving around and people were writing code and making them move around.

I saw that and I thought, that's pretty cool.

I volunteered, started working in the lab, and that just hooked me.