The new Stanford Robotics Center, which will develop machines for future use in medicine, art, ocean and space exploration and your own home, recently opened its doors for the first time.
Oussama Khatib is director of the Stanford Robotics Center. He said that when he first discovered robotics, he fell in love with it.
“We built this machine that can dive very deep, but at the same time interact with human divers,” Khatib said, gesturing to the underwater robot OceanOneK. Stanford’s humanoid diving robot is the only one in the world that looks like it.
Khatib said they designed the robotics center to bring together expert researchers in different fields to solve challenges using robots.
“In the medical field, we’re trying to study how robots can help medicine, and we’re taking interesting approaches,” said Steve Cousins, executive director of the Stanford Robotics Center. “Can we take little robots and avoid having to put a catheter all the way through your body? Can we have the robot swim its way through instead? This is a bit futuristic. People think of movies we saw as kids. “
Researchers are also working to integrate robots into our homes.
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“I hope it can do chores like getting me a package or doing laundry,” said Qi Wu, a computer science master’s student at Stanford. “Just like: anything I don’t want to do, I can do.”
“So when we walk here, these robots detect where we are and they can follow us, so they are aware of where we are moving in space, and you can see how they orient themselves to us and come here to follow us wherever we are,” said Stanford Computer Science postdoctoral researcher Catie Cuan during a demonstration. “We can walk over here and make some gestures, like if we put our right arm in the air, they’ll clap for us. And if we raise our left arm in the air, they will pirouette and spin in place. This is beautiful skating movement we’re getting.”
“There’s always this fear of robotics that they’re going to take over the world, and let me tell you, I’m not afraid of robots,” Khatib said. “I fear for robots. They are fragile. You can just unplug the robot, and the robot is lost. Now there is fear of AI. AI is a great tool, but of course there are a lot of concerns and legitimate concerns.”
Khatib said their concept is always the man with the machine as they innovate and create robots that have never been built before.
“It’s like you do that, you develop, you build and you deploy, and it works,” Khatib said. “It’s just incredible!”
Khatib calls his love for robotics ‘contagious’. He said seeing his students’ own discovery and excitement about robots drives him even more as they work to bring their research to life.
