Marc Raibert

speaker

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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

Fun. Technical fun, I usually say. I have technical fun. I think that life as an engineer... is really satisfying. To some degree, it can be like crafts work where you get to do things with your own hands or your own design or whatever your media is. It's very satisfying to be able to just do the work, unlike a lot of people who have to do something that they don't like doing.

I think engineers typically get to do something that they like, and there's a lot of satisfaction from that. In many cases, you can have impact on the world somehow because you've done something that other people admire, which is different from just the craft fun of building a thing. So that's a second thing. way that being an engineer is good.

I think the third thing is that if you're lucky to be working in a team where you're getting the benefit of other people's skills that are helping you do your thing, none of us has all the skills needed to do most of these projects. If you have a team where you're working well with the others, that can be very satisfying. And then if you're an engineer, you also usually get paid.

And so you kind of get paid four times in my view of the world. So what could be better than that?

I think it's both being a scientist or getting to use science at the same time as being kind of an artist or a creator. Scientists only get to study what's out there, and engineers get to make stuff that didn't exist before.

It's really, I think, a higher calling, even though I think most of the public out there think science is top and engineering is somehow secondary, but I think it's the other way around.

That is the art. Bringing metal to life or a machine to life is kind of... It was fun doing the dancing videos where it got a huge public response. We're going to do more. We're doing some at the Institute and we'll do more.

But I think sort of with it going back to the pieces of that, you design a linkage that turns out to be half the weight and just as strong. That's very satisfying. There are people who do that, and it's a creative act.

I think having the robots move in a way that's evocative of life is pretty exciting. So the elegance of movement. Or if it's a high-performance act where it's doing it faster, bigger than other robots. Usually we're not doing it bigger, faster than people, but we're getting there in a few narrow dimensions.

I mean, I'd like to do dancing that starts... You know, we're nowhere near the dancing capabilities of a human. We've been having a ballerina in who's kind of a well-known ballerina, and she's been programming the robot.

We've been working on the tools that can make it so that she can use her way of talking, you know, way of doing a choreography or something like that more accessible to get the robot to do things. And she's starting to produce some interesting stuff.

There is.

We hope to take that forward and make it more tuned to how the dance world wants to talk, wants to communicate, and get better performances. I mean, we've done a lot, but there's still a lot possible. And I'd like to have performances where the robots are dancing with people. So right now, almost everything that we've done on dancing is to a fixed time base.

So once you press go, the robot does its thing and plays that thing. It's not listening, it's not watching, but I think it should do those things.

One of the cool things going on, you know that there's a class at Brown University called Choreo Robotics. Sidney Skybetter is a dancer, choreographer, and he teamed up with Stephanie Tellex, who's a computer science professor, and they taught this class, and I think they have some graduate students helping teach it. where they have two spots and people come in.

I think it's 50-50 of computer science people and dance people. And they program performances that are very interesting. I show some of them sometimes when I give a talk.

But it's also a challenge. We get asked to have our robots perform with famous dancers. And they have 200 degrees of freedom or something, right? Every little ripple and thing, and they have all this head and neck and shoulders and stuff. And the robots mostly don't have all that stuff. And it's a daunting challenge to not look stupid, physically stupid next to them.

So we've pretty much avoided that kind of performance, but we'll get to it.

And we can reverse things. If you watch a human do robot animation, which is a dance style where you jerk around and you pop and lock and all that stuff, I think the robots could show up the humans by doing unstable oscillations and things that are faster than a person. So that's sort of on my... you know, my plan, but we haven't quite gotten there yet.

I think you need to have an environment where interesting engineers, well, you know, it's a chicken and egg. If you have an environment where interesting engineering is going on, then engineers want to work there. I think it took a long time to develop that at Boston Dynamics.

Showing 181–200 of 243 · page 10 of 13