Marc Raibert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Well, we’ll talk about what it means to what is the actual thing we’re trying to optimize for a robot, sometimes, especially with human robot interaction, maybe flaws is a good thing. Perfection is not necessarily the right thing to be chasing. Just like you said, maybe being good at fumbling an object, being good at fumbling might be the right thing to optimize versus perfect modeling of the object and perfect movement of the arm to grasp that object as maybe perfection is not supposed to exist in the real world. I don’t know if you know my friend Matt Mason, who is the director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, and we go back to graduate school together, but he analyzed a movie of Julia Child’s doing a cooking thing, and she did, I think he said something like there were 40 different ways that she handled a thing and none of them was grasping. She would nudge, roll, flatten with her knife, things like that. And none of them was grasping. So okay, let’s go back to the early days. First of all, you’ve created and led the Leg Lab, the legendary Leg Lab at MIT. So what was that first hopping robot?…

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