James Vincent

I'd actually rather be called a professor of robotics at UC Berkeley.

That sums it up a little better.

I'm also an artist, if that matters.

It does.

Okay.

And I'm glad you made the clarification on the robotic side, because as far as I can tell, you've been into robots since before they were, I don't want to say cool, because something about robots has always been cool to us as humans, but at least since before they were so trendy as they are now.

Yeah, well, I've been interested in robots since I was a kid, but that was back in the days of the Jetsons in the 60s.

When, you know, I, like most kids, were just fascinated by the science fiction.

My father was a tinkerer and an engineer also.

He and I built a robot for, it never worked, but it was ahead of its time back in the 70s.

And I got interested in this.

And when I was in college, there was a robot lab that I discovered.

It used pen.

And I got very excited, so I built a tactile sensor, a hand that could feel, to basically have it feel around for objects and try and determine what their shape was.

I did some work on running machines, and then I started working on grasping in particular.

I've been really, like I like to say, I've been studying the same problem for 45 years, which is how to pick up a glass.

It turns out that's incredibly difficult to do reliably.

Why is it so difficult?

All right.

Well, it all boils down to one word, uncertainty.