Robert Playter

Well, love is relevant because I think the deep fascination is really about movement.

And I was visiting MIT looking for a place to get a PhD, and I wanted to do some laboratory work.

And one of my professors in the aero department said, go see this guy Mark Raybert down in the basement of the AI lab.

And so I walked down there and saw him.

He showed me his robots and he showed me this robot doing a somersault.

And I just immediately went,

Whoa, you know, robots can do that.

And because of my own interest in gymnastics, there was like this immediate connection.

And, you know, I was interested in, I was in an aero-astro degree because, you know, flight and movement was all so fascinating to me.

And then it turned out that, you know, robotics had this big challenge.

How do you balance?

How do you build a legged robot that can really get around?

And that just, that was a fascination.

And it still exists today.

We're still working on perfecting motion in robots.

You know, we had this concept in gymnastics of letting your body do what it wanted to do.

When you get really good at gymnastics, part of what you're doing is putting your body into a position where the physics and the body's inertia and momentum will kind of push you in the right direction in a very natural and organic way.

And the thing that Mark was doing in the basement of that laboratory was trying to figure out how to build machines to take advantage of those ideas.

How do you build something so that the physics of the machine just kind of inherently wants to do what it wants to do?

And he was building these springy pogo stick type.