Two things. I have two degrees in chemistry, which many people don’t k — Ronald C. Arkin

"If we are to create robotic systems to reside among us, they must also adhere to a set of related values that humans operate under. This talk first describes."

"Well, at the time, the behavior-based paradigm was emerging. If you look at the early work by Brooks, and others, as well, too, it tended to be rule-based. Schemas themselves were concurrent asynchronous processes, which could be multithreaded and run independently. There are also things – those are the motor schemas. Perceptual schemas were the same, so it became an interesting question of how you schedule and manage these particular processes, kind of like, one could argue, the brain does, as well, too, with all these different processes, and how do you make sense of it. My thesis title, if I remember correctly, was Towards Cosmopolitan Robots: Intelligent Navigation in Manmade Environments – Extended Manmade Environments. So we’re looking at inside a building, and outdoor structured sidewalks and the like, as well, too, but not the wilderness or something like that. The key factor, I think, which distinguished my work was – and the advantage of using schema theory, was the ability to create what I call hybrid architectures – hybrid deliberative reactive architectures. The early work in behavior-based robotics, I would say, threw the baby out with the bathwater. All the high-level reasoning and high-level planning no longer played an effective role. My work recognized that maybe we do have a cortex, and there is some value in being able to deliberate about certain things, and the schemas themselves gave us the ability to instantiate change parameters, reason over these things in ways that other forms of reactive systems, if you will, were not as easily amenable to. So the real focus of my dissertation work was hybrid deliberative architectures. The schema theory got most of the press because that’s what made the robots actually do the cool stuff that they were doing, but the deliberative side was what configured those particular control systems."

"Get a solid foundation. It’s a question of how young you’re talking about, but if you’re in high school or younger, pay attention to the basics. Pay attention to mathematics. Pay attention to chemistry and physics. Don’t be seduced by the quick pull to creating cool little robots that are moving around. You can do that. That’s okay. But you need to have a deep understanding of the fundamental principles upon which robotics, which is a science, is based upon. Pay attention to that, and work hard, and you have to have a passion for it. If you don’t have a passion for robotics – and almost any field, for that matter, as well, too – you probably shouldn’t go into it. Don’t – although you can make a good living in it, it shouldn’t be about money. It should be about joy, fulfillment, and creating new knowledge."