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

So there's a calculation about where to put the foot and we did something, you know, relatively simple. And then there's a third part to keep the body at an attitude that's upright. Cause if it gets too far, you know, you could hop and just keep rotating around, but if it gets too far, then you run out of motion of the joints at the hips. So you have to do that.

And we did that by applying a torque between the legs and the body. Every time the foot's on the ground, you only can do it while the foot's on the ground in the air. You know, it, it, the physics don't work out.

Well, you're asking an interesting question because... In those days, we didn't actually optimize things. And they probably could have gone much further than we did and then had higher performance. And we just kind of got a sketch of a solution and worked on that.

And then in years since, some people working for us, some people working for others, people came up with all kinds of equations or algorithms for how to do a better job, be able to go faster. One of my students worked on getting things to go faster. Another one worked on... climbing over obstacles. Because when you're running, on the open ground, it's one thing.

If you're running up a stair, you have to adjust where you are. Otherwise, things don't work out right. You land your foot on the edge of the step. So there's other degrees of freedom to control if you're getting to more realistic, practical situations.

Probably the smartest thing I ever did is to find the other people. I mean, when I look at it now, I look at Boston Dynamics and all the really excellent engineering there, people who really make stuff work. I'm only the dreamer.

Did you experience a lot of people around you kind of... I don't know if they doubted whether it was possible, but I think they thought it was a waste of time.

I think for a lot of people. I think it's been both, though. Some people, I felt like they were saying, oh, why are you wasting your time on this stupid problem? But then I've been at many things where people have told me it's been an inspiration to go out and attack these harder things. And I think it has turned out, I think legged locomotion has turned out to be a useful thing.

I mean, at first, I wasn't an enthusiast for the humanoids because, again, it goes back to saying, what's the functionality? And the form wasn't as important as the functionality. And also, there's an aspect to humanoid robots that's about functionality. all about the cosmetics, where there isn't really other functionality, and that kind of is off-putting for me.

As a roboticist, I think the functionality really matters. So probably that's why I avoided humanoid robots to start with. I'll tell you, after we started working on him, you could see the connection and the impact with other people, whether they're lay people or even other technical people.

There's a special thing that goes on, even though most of the humanoid robots aren't that much like a person.

I'll tell you, I go around giving talks and take Spot to a lot of them. And it's amazing. The media likes to say that they're terrifying and that people are afraid. And And YouTube commenters like to say that it's frightening.

But when you take a spot out there, now maybe it's self-selecting, but you get a crowd of people who want to take pictures, want to pose for selfies, want to operate the robot, want to pet it, want to put clothes on it. It's amazing.

What the connection was is that at that point, Boston Dynamics was mostly a physics-based simulation company. When I left MIT to start Boston Dynamics, there was a few years of overlap, but the concept wasn't to start a robot company. The concept was to use this dynamic simulation tool that we developed to do robotics for other things.

But working with Sony, we got back into robotics by doing the AIBO Runner. We made some tools for programming Curio, which was a humanoid this big that could do some dancing and other kinds of fun stuff. And I don't think it ever reached the market, even though they did show it. When I look back, I say that we got us back where we belonged. Yeah.

That's right.

One of the robots that we built wasn't actually a robot. It was a surgical simulator, but it had force feedback. So it had all the techniques of robotics. And you look down into this... mirror it actually was. And it looked like you were looking down onto the body you were working on. Your hands were underneath the mirror, so they were where you were looking.

And you had tools in your hands that were connected up to these force feedback devices made by another MIT spin-out, Sensible Technologies. So they made the force feedback device. We attached the tools and we wrote all the software and did all the graphics. So we had 3D computer graphics.

It was in the old days when, this was in the late 90s, when you had a silicon graphics computer that was about this big. It was the heater in the office, basically. And we were doing surgical operations, anastomosis, which was stitching tubes together, tubes like blood vessels or other things in their body. And you could feel and you could see the tissues move. And it was really exciting.

And the idea was to make a trainer to teach surgeons how to do stuff. We built a scoring system because we interviewed surgeons that told us what you're supposed to do and what you're not supposed to do. You're not supposed to tear the tissue. You're not supposed to touch it in any place except for where you're trying to engage. There were a bunch of rules.

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