Robert Playter

But robots need to be able to deal with uncertainty.

If they're gonna be useful to us in the future, they need to be able to deal with unexpected situations.

And that's sort of the goal of a general purpose or multi-purpose robot.

And that's just darn hard.

And so some of the others, these curious little failures, like I remember one of the, a robot,

You know, the first time you start to try to push on the world with a robot, you forget that the world pushes back and will push you over if you're not ready for it.

And the robot, you know, reached to grab the door handle.

I think it missed the grasp of the door handle, was expecting that its hand was on the door handle.

And so when it tried to turn the knob, it just threw itself over.

It didn't realize, oh, I had missed the door handle.

I didn't have...

I didn't, I was expecting a force back from the door.

It wasn't there.

And then I lost my balance.

So these little simple things that you and I would take totally for granted and deal with, the robots don't know how to deal with yet.

And so you have to start to deal with all of those circumstances.

Which is why you need to be able to predict forward just a little bit.

And so that's where this model predictive control stuff comes in.

Predict forward what you think's going to happen.

And if that does happen, you're in good shape.