Christopher G. Atkeson

"I don’t think they had internal divisions or titles or anything. My advisor was a neuroscientist, called Emilio Bizzi. He was interested in how the brain worked, obviously, but in particular how the brain controlled movement and how you coordinated movement. At that time robotics was starting to happen at MIT, I guess in a more visible way, and he reached out to two people, a guy named Neville Hogan in the Mechanical Engineering Department and a guy named John Hollerbach who was at the MIT AI lab and they collaborated trying to ask the question, “What can robotics tell us about how the brain works?” Because clearly the body is a robot, so the brain has to be a robot controller and maybe some of the theory that’s being developed for robot controllers could be useful, and that was the context in which I oper – I was in graduate school. First year I studied human movement, second year I – yeah, it’s all coming back to me now – I studied more human movement or human movement in a slightly different way, I’m happy to go into more detail on that kind of stuff later, and we also did some monkey studies and then at that point I decided, “Oh, let’s go try to understand robots, they’re a lot simpler,” and that’s what I did. So, my thesis was on the question of, “If you pick something up, how do you know how much it weighs?” The example I loved to use was, “When you reach into a refrigerator and pick up the milk, how do you know it’s frozen?” Now, that’s not a question I actually answered in my thesis, but that was a motivating question."

"Okay, there’s a basic split, there are two kinds of robotics people. There are people who want robots to be useful and there are people who want robots to be like humans, and those are pretty much disjoint sets of people and they fight with each other and I’m clearly on the side of, “I want to understand what it means to be a person,” robots are a way for me to do that understanding and my idea of a good robot is it’s like a person, behaves like a person, looks like a person. Isaac Asimov, and of course many, many other science fiction writers and movie generators, so, “Metropolis,” the robot looks like a person. It’s a lot easier, you have an actor be your robot so they naturally look like people, but a lot of these people believe that that’s what a robot should look like and so they’re on my side. In the 1970s I can remember as a graduate student, or I guess 1980s, a professor named Warren Seering in the Mechanical Engineering Department wrote an article for I guess the MIT alumni magazine, Technology Review, which basically said if you wanna build VCRs your robot should not look like a person, it should look like a VCR making device, and he was absolutely right but the politics of this message were really bad. It basically said, “Don’t fund all these crazy people who want to build people or artificial people, fund people who are going to do something useful to society,” because at that time the reason robotics was hot was because we were trying to deal with the Japanese and the perception that automation was making them much more competitive relative to us and our trade balance was therefore terrible. That fear has receded now and we have terrible trade balances with places like China, which has little or no automation, so there are other issues going on as well."

"So, a big underlying question at that time was it seemed that robots or the way to make robots useful was to develop something called a general purpose controller, which meant that whatever you were asked to do you had some planning machinery that basically operated in the same way and just did it, and a signature of that kind of approach is no matter how you moved, you’re always gonna do things in the same way, so maybe you move in straight lines or something like that. So, the obvious thing to do is to then look at humans and apply that kind of test and see when we ask humans to do different things, is there some commonality or are they coughing up some sort of special purpose solution to everything they do? And it turned out most of the time you ask people to move from point A to point B, and we developed some measurement system to do that, they move with a hand in a roughly straight line and more importantly with what’s called a bell-shaped philosophy profile, so they start up in a particular way and they slow down symmetrically. So, it’s a nice smooth movement. And that was actually an argument that whatever’s going on in your brain, there seems to be a general purpose movement system, at least for move from point A to point B in a human with your arm. Later, the bell-shaped philosophy profile was extended to all sorts of things like jaw movements, tongue movements, leg movements, so it actually seemed that whatever’s going on, it generalized across limbs as well."