Robert Playter

Too often, if you are working with a very expensive robot, maybe one that you bought from somebody else or that you don't know how to fix, then you treat it with kit gloves and you can't actually make progress.

You have to be able to break something.

And so I think that's been a principle as well.

It's too... It depends if you could have built that car or just gotten another one, right?

That would have been the approach.

I remember...

When I got to grad school, I got some training about operating a lathe and a mill up in the machine shop, and I could start to make my own parts.

And I remember breaking some piece of equipment in the lab, and then realizing,

Because maybe this was a unique part and I couldn't go buy it.

And I realized, oh, I can just go make it.

That was an enabling feeling.

Then you're not afraid.

It might take time.

It might take more work than you thought it was going to be required to get this thing done.

But you can just go make it.

And that's freeing in a way that nothing else is.

There's a lot of science around it.

And trying to develop scientific principles that let you extrapolate from one-legged machine to another, develop a core set of principles like a spring mass bouncing system, and then figure out how to apply that from a one-legged machine to a two- or a four-legged machine.

Those principles are really important, and were definitely a core part of our work.

There's also, when we started to pursue humanoid robots, there was so much complexity in that machine that one of the benefits of the humanoid form is you have some intuition about how it should look while it's moving.