Marc Raibert

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243 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2024 last heard Feb 2024

Marc Raibert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · 16 Feb 2024 podcast

Well, I was always a builder from a young age. I was lucky. My father was a frustrated engineer. And by that, I mean he wanted to be an aerospace engineer, but his mom from the old country thought that that would be like a grease monkey. And so she said no. So he became an accountant. But the result of that was our basement was always full of tools and equipment and electronics.

And from a young age, I would watch him assembling a kit, an Ico kit or something like that. I still have a couple of his old Ico kits. But it was really during graduate school when I followed a professor back from class. It was Bertolt Horn at MIT. And I was taking a an interim class. It's IAP, independent activities period. And I followed him back to his lab.

Somehow it spurred my imagination. I was in the brain and cognitive sciences department as a graduate student doing neurophysiology. I'd been an electrical engineer as an undergrad at Northeastern. The neurophysiology wasn't really working for me. It wasn't conceptual enough.

I couldn't see really how by looking at single neurons you were going to get to a place where you could understand control systems or thought or anything like that. And, you know, the AI lab was always an appealing, this was before CSAIL, right? This was in the 70s. So the AI lab was always an appealing idea.

And so when I went back to the AI lab with, you know, following him and I saw the arm, I just thought, you know, this is it.

Well, BCS is now morphed a bit, right? They have the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, which is trying to bridge that gap. And even when I was there, you know, David Marr was in the AI lab. David Marr had models of the brain that were appealing both to biologists but also to computer people. So he was a visitor in the AI lab at the time, and I guess he became full-time there.

So that was the first time a bridge was made between those two groups. Then the bridge kind of went away, and then there was another time in the 80s. And then recently, the last five or so years, there's been a stronger connection.

I mean, we were just doing gadgets when we were kids. I had a friend, we were I don't know if everybody remembers, but fluorescent lights had this little aluminum cylinder. I can't even remember what it's called now. You needed a starter, I think it was. We would take those apart, fill them with match heads, put a tail on it, and make it into little rockets.

I think it's still a balance between those two. There was a time though when I was, I guess I was probably already a professor or maybe late in graduate school when I thought that function was everything and that mobility, dexterity, perception, and intelligence, those are sort of the key functionalities for robotics, that that's what mattered and nothing else mattered.

And I even had kind of this platonic ideal that if you just looked at a robot and it wasn't doing anything, it would look like a pile of junk, which a lot of my robots looked like in those days. But then when it started moving, you'd get the idea that it had some kind of life or some kind of interest in its movement.

And I think we purposely even designed the machines, not worrying about the aesthetics of the structure itself. But then it turns out that the aesthetics of the thing itself add and combine with the lifelike things that the robots can do. But the heart of it is making them do things that are interesting.

Well, let me tell you about how I got started on legs at all. When I was still a graduate student, I went to a conference. It was a biological legged locomotion conference. I think it was in Philadelphia. So it was all biomechanics people, researchers who would look at muscle and maybe neurons and things like that. They weren't so much computational people, but they were more biomechanics.

And maybe there were a thousand people there. And I went to a talk. One of the talks, all the talks were about the body of either animals or people and respiration, things like that. But one talk was by a robotics guy, and he showed a six-legged robot that walked very slowly.

It always had at least three feet on the ground, so it worked like a table or a chair with tripod stability, and it moved really slowly. And I just looked at that and said, Wow, that's wrong. That's not anything like how people and animals work. Because we bounce and fly, we have to predict what's going to happen in order to keep our balance when we're taking a running step or something like that.

We use the springiness in our legs, our muscles and our tendons and things like that. As part of the story, the energy circulates. We don't just throw it away every time. I'm not sure I understood all that when I first thought, but I definitely got inspired to say, let's try the opposite. I didn't have a clue as to how to make a hopping robot work, not balance in 3D.

In fact, when I started, it was all just about the energy of bouncing. And I was going to have a springy thing in the leg and some actuator so that you could get an energy regime going of bouncing. And the idea that balance was an important part of it didn't come until a little later. And then I made the one-legged, the pogo stick robots. Now I think that we need to do that in manipulation.

If you look at robot manipulation, we, a community, has been working on it for 50 years. We're nowhere near human levels of manipulation. I mean, we can, you know, it's come along, but I think it's all too safe.

And I think trying to break out of that safety thing of static grasping, you know, if you look at a lot of work that goes on, it's about the geometry of the part, and then you figure out how to move your hand so that you can position it with respect to that, and then you grasp it carefully, and then you move it. That's not anything like how people and animals work. We juggle in our hands.

We hog multiple objects and can sort them. Now, to be fair, being more aggressive is going to mean things aren't going to work very well for a while. It's a longer-term approach to the problem. That's just theory now. Maybe that won't pay off, but that's how I'm trying to think about it, trying to encourage our group to go at it.

I don't know if you know my friend Matt Mason, who is the director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. And we go back to graduate school together. But he analyzed... a movie of Julia Childs doing a cooking thing. And she did, I think he said something like there were 40 different ways that she handled a thing and none of them was grasping.

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