The Pransky interview: Dr Aaron Edsinger, CEO and cofounder at Hello Robot Inc

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 710-714
Author(s):  
Joanne Pransky
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Systems Engineering ◽  
Industrial Robot ◽  
Humanoid Robots ◽  
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD-turned entrepreneur regarding the evolution, commercialization and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market. Design/methodology/approach The interviewee is Dr Aaron Edsinger, a proven entrepreneur and inventor in the field of human-collaborative robotics. Dr Edsinger shares his journey that led him from developing humanoids at Rodney Brooks’ Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, to cofounding four companies, two of which got purchased by Google. Findings Dr Edsinger received a BS degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford, an MS in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and did post-doctorate research in the Humanoid Robotics Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. He co-founded his first company Meka Robotics in 2007 and that same year, he started his second company, HStar Technologies. In 2011, he cofounded Redwood Robotics, and in 2013, he sold Meka and Redwood to Google. From 2013 to 2017, he was a Robotics Director at Google. In August of 2017, he cofounded Hello Robot Inc. Originality/value Dr Edsinger’s work in robotics grew out of the San Francisco robotic art scene in the 1990s. Since then, he has collaborated and built over a dozen research and artistic robot platforms and has been granted 28 patents. His world-class robotic systems encompass Dr Edsinger’s innovative research in dexterous manipulation in unstructured environments, force controlled compliant actuation, human safe robotics, integrated mechatronic engineering and the design of humanoid robots. Domo, the humanoid robot he built, was named one of Time magazine’s Best Inventions of the Year for 2007. Out of the eight robot companies Google purchased in 2013, two were cofounded by Dr Edsinger. In 2017, Dr Edsinger left Google to cofound his new company, Hello Robot Inc, a stealth mode consumer robot company.

The Pransky interview: Dr Rodney Brooks, Robotics Entrepreneur, Founder and CTO of Rethink Robotics

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Joanne Pransky
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Industrial Robot ◽  
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology ◽  
Subsumption Architecture ◽  
Faculty Position ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ◽  
Rodney Brooks

Purpose – This article, a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal, aims to impart the combined technological, business, and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding the evolution, commercialization, and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market. Design/methodology/approach – The interviewee is Dr Rodney Brooks, the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab; Founder, Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and Chairman of Rethink Robotics. Dr Brooks shares some of his underlying principles in technology, academia and business, as well as past and future challenges. Findings – Dr Brooks received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He is also a Founder, Board Member and former CTO (1991-2008) of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT). Dr Brooks is the former Director (1997-2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He founded Rethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics) in 2008. Originality/value – While at MIT, in 1988, Dr Brooks built Genghis, a hexapodal walker, designed for space exploration (which was on display for ten years in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.). Genghis was one of the first robots that utilized Brooks’ pioneering subsumption architecture. Dr Brooks’ revolutionary behavior-based approach underlies the autonomous robots of iRobot, which has sold more than 12 million home robots worldwide, and has deployed more than 5,000 defense and security robots; and Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, the world’s first interactive production robot. Dr Brooks has won the Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the 2008 IEEE Inaba Technical Award for Innovation Leading to Production, the 2014 Robotics Industry Association’s Engelberger Robotics Award for Leadership and the 2015 IEEE Robotics and Automation Award.

The Pransky interview: Dr Ken Goldberg, Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, UC Berkeley; Inventor and Artist

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-191
Author(s):  
Joanne Pransky
Keyword(s):  
Computer Science ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Operations Research ◽  
Industrial Robot ◽  
Electrical Engineering ◽  
Medical Robotics ◽  
Industrial Engineering ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The University

Purpose The following article is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business, and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD and inventor regarding his pioneering efforts and the commercialization of bringing a technological invention to market. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The interviewee is Dr Ken Goldberg, an inventor working at the intersection of art, robotics, and social media. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1995 where he is the UC Berkeley William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering and recently served as Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. He has secondary appointments in UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering/Computer Science, Art Practice and the School of Information. Goldberg also holds an appointment at the UC San Francisco Medical School’s Department of Radiation Oncology where he pursues research in medical robotics. Goldberg is Director of the CITRIS “People and Robots” Initiative and the UC Berkeley’s Laboratory for Automation Science and Engineering (AUTOLAB) where he and his students research machine learning for robotics and automation in warehouses, homes, and operating rooms. In this interview, Goldberg shares some of his personal and business perspectives from his career-long pursuit of making robots less clumsy. Findings Goldberg earned dual BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990. Goldberg also studied at Edinburgh University and the Technion. From 1991-95 he taught at the University of Southern California, and in fall 2000, he was visiting faculty at the MIT Media Lab. Goldberg and his students pursue research in three primary areas: Geometric Algorithms for Automation, Cloud Robotics, and Robot Learning. Originality/value Goldberg developed the first complete algorithms for part feeding and part fixturing, and developed the first robot on the Internet. His inventions have been awarded nine US Patents. Goldberg has published over 250 peer-reviewed technical papers and edited four books. He co-founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE). He is also Co-Founder of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), the African Robotics Network (AFRON), the Center for Automation and Learning for Medical Robotics (CAL-MR), the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative (DDI), Hybrid Wisdom Labs, and Moxie Institute. He has presented over four hundred keynote and invited lectures. Goldberg's artwork, closely linked with his research, has appeared in over seventy venues. Ken was awarded the Presidential Faculty Fellowship in 1995 by Bill Clinton, the Joseph Engelberger Robotics Award in 2000, elected IEEE Fellow in 2005, and selected by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for the George Saridis Leadership Award in 2016.

The Pransky interview: Professor Robin R. Murphy, Co-founder of the Field of Disaster Robotics and Founder of Roboticists Without Borders

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 591-596
Author(s):  
Joanne Pransky
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Industrial Robot ◽  
South Florida ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Search And Rescue ◽  
Georgia Tech ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Field Robotics ◽  
Rescue Robots

Purpose This paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned successful innovator and leader regarding the challenges of bringing technological discoveries to fruition. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The interviewee is Dr Robin R. Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University; Co-lead, Emergency Informatics EDGE Innovation Network Center, Texas A&M, Director of the Humanitarian Robotics and AI Laboratory and Vice President of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) http://crasar.org. In this interview, Dr Murphy provides answers to questions regarding her pioneering experiences in rescue robotics. Findings As a child, Dr Murphy knew she wanted to be a mechanical engineer and obtained her BME degree from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). While working in industry after her BME, she fell in love with computer science and received an MS and PhD in Computer Science at Georgia Tech where she was a Rockwell International Doctoral Fellow. In the mid-1990s, while teaching at the Colorado School of Mines, she pioneered rescue robots after one of her graduate students returned from the Oklahoma City bombing and suggested that small rescue robots should be developed for future disasters. The National Science Foundation awarded Murphy and her students the first grant for search-and-rescue robots. She has since assisted in responses at more than 20 worldwide disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse, the Tohoku Tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Originality/value The response to the World Trade Center attacks after September 11, 2001 by Dr Murphy’s team from the University of South Florida (the only academic institution), along with four other teams brought together by CRASAR, marked the first recorded use of a rescue robot at a disaster site. In addition to being a founder in the field of rescue robots, she is also a founder in the field of human–robot interaction and the Roboticists Without Borders. She has written over 100 publications and three books: the best-selling textbook, Introduction to AI Robotics, Disaster Robotics and Robotics-Through-Science-Fiction: Artificial Intelligence Explained Six Classic Robot Short Stories. Dr Murphy has received approximately 20 national awards and honors including: the AUVSI’s Al Aube Outstanding Contributor Award, the Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics, CMU Field Robotics Institute “Pioneer in Field Robotics” and TIME Magazine, Innovators in Artificial Intelligence. She is an IEEE Fellow.

The Pransky interview: Dr. Hugh Herr – Professor, MIT Media Lab; Director, Biomechatronics Group and Co-director, MIT Center for Extreme Bionics; Founder, BionX Medical Technologies Inc.

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 795-799
Author(s):  
Joanne Pransky
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Neural Control ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Industrial Robot ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Medical Technologies ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Media Lab

Purpose The following paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD-turned successful innovator and entrepreneur regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing his technological inventions to market. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Considered one of the top biomechatronics researchers in the world, Dr Hugh Herr heads the MIT Biomechatronics Research Group and Center for Extreme Bionics. His research programs seek to advance technologies that promise to accelerate the merging of body and machine, including device architectures that resemble the body’s musculoskeletal design, actuator technologies that behave like muscle and control methodologies that exploit principles of biological movement. Herr’s methods encompass a diverse set of scientific and technological disciplines that are advancing an emerging field of engineering science that applies principles of biomechanics and neural control to guide the designs of human rehabilitation and augmentative devices. Findings As a teenager, Herr was a highly competitive mountain climber until he had to have both legs amputated below the knees after suffering severe frostbite during a 1982 mountain expedition at the age of 17. As a result of this experience, he directed his efforts and talent to try to improve the mobility of people with disabilities. He graduated in physics in 1990 from the Millersville University (Pennsylvania). He subsequently earned a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1993 and a PhD in Biophysics at Harvard University in 1998. He then was a postdoctoral fellow in medical devices at MIT. He was Assistant Professor at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard Medical School. Since 2000, he has been heading the MIT Biomechatronics Group within the Media Lab and has been Co-directing the Lab’s Center for Extreme Bionics since 2014. To bring his inventions to market, Herr founded a spin-off company out of MIT under the name iWalk in 2007, which was relaunched as BionX Medical Technologies Inc. in 2015, and acquired by Ottobock in 2017. Originality/value Herr is a world leader and inventor in the field of bionics and biomechanics whose research accomplishments have already made a significant impact on physically challenged people. Herr has produced several groundbreaking products, starting with a computer-controlled artificial knee in 2003, called the Rheo Knee™ System and commercialized by Össur Inc. He also designed his own bionic lower legs, the world’s first powered ankle-foot prosthesis to emulate the action of a biological leg and, for the first time, provides amputees with a natural gait. The Empower ankle system is now marketed by Ottobock. He is presently working on NeuroEmbodied Design methodology to restore proprioception to amputees. Herr has received major accolades including the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Leadership Award (2005), the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment (2007) and R&D Magazine’s 14th Innovator of the Year Award (2014) and a No Barriers Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2013 No Barriers Summit. His innovations were listed twice among TIME magazine’s Top Ten Inventions (2004; 2007) and which called him “Leader of the Bionic Age” in 2011. His life story has been told in the book Second Ascent: The Story of Hugh Herr (1991) and in the film Ascent: The Story of Hugh Herr, made in 2002 by National Geographic. He is the author and co-author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and patents.

scholarly journals Research in Progress at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

AI Magazine ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Berthold K. P. Horn ◽  
David Marr ◽  
John Hollerbach ◽  
Gerald J. Sussman ◽  
Patrick H. Winston ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Computer Architecture ◽  
English Language ◽  
Vlsi Design ◽  
Human Memory ◽  
Engineering Problem ◽  
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

The MIT AI Laboratory has a long tradition of research in most aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Currently, the major foci include computer vision, manipulation, learning, English-language understanding, VLSI design, expert engineering problem solving, common-sense reasoning, computer architecture, distributed problem solving, models of human memory, programmer apprentices, and human education.

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