Pittsburgh – in the first few months of his new job as director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Matthew Johnson Roberson still felt that the whole experience was a bit surreal.
As a robotics engineer and researcher, he received a doctorate in robotics from the University of Sydney, Australia, and co founded a start-up company “refraction AI” to develop AVS for last mile delivery using bicycle lanes. He had previously held the position of joint command of the Ford autonomous vehicle center at the University of Michigan, and founded and led the deep robot optical perception (drop) laboratory.
But his new role brought him back to the starting point. Johnson Robertson is an undergraduate of CMU School of computer science. He once produced AV for the 2004 DARPA grand challenge under industry pioneer red Whittaker.
“It was a turning point in my career and made me want to enter the field of robotics,” said Johnson Robertson, who described his new role as a “comprehensive experience”
As a local interest in the Pacific Northwest, Johnson Robertson spent some of his childhood in Seattle and attended Garfield high school when his mother was still a graduate student at the University of Washington.
Since its establishment in the late 1970s, CMU’s Robotics Institute has been the source of many breakthroughs in the field of robotics and automation, developing robot innovation in the fields of nuclear cleaning, automatic vehicles and space exploration.
This week, we sat down with Johnson Robertson at the Robotics Institute in his office to discuss his new role; Experience in robotics in two industrial zones with a long history; Opportunities and obstacles faced by robot technology; And the sometimes challenging relationship between research institutions and technology giants.
Listen to the tape and continue reading here.
The next big challenge for robotics is that in a few years, you will enter a series of different industries, and you will see robots adjacent to people. This is the next big challenge: making robots work safely and effectively inside and around humans.
You will see this on the streets of AVS, and I think we will continue to see progress in this regard. But you’ll see it at home, in the restaurant, in the kitchen. In these places, I think the work being done today will really bear fruit.
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Robots and the changing labor market: the pandemic has exposed many fault lines in the supply chain, the dangers and costs of some jobs people do, but these fault lines have not received real attention. It’s an incredible acceleration that makes people think about what we can automate. It also pointed out that we still have a lot of work to do.
But now many topics in society are related to things that have been discussed in the field of robotics for a long time. Therefore, I am very excited about the future.
You need a different type of robot to solve this problem than Amazon’s robot. Sidewalk robot is one of them. They can handle the last quarter of a mile, the last tenth of a mile. (for longer distances), we firmly believe that these robots should travel in this extreme area between sidewalks and streets. Fast travel on the sidewalk has these basic restrictions.
Research and commercialization, and cooperation with technology giants: we need to focus on things that are not driven by the business model of existing companies, especially in the development of new technologies such as robots. The business model of robotics has not yet been developed. And they don’t look like faang’s information capitalism in the world.
If we don’t invest in the long-term future of robotics, we may win some victories in the short term, but I think if we really continue to invest, we won’t see the benefits to mankind. That’s 100 years, not the next quarter.
Let me not feel negative about trying to translate your research into business. I am deeply encouraged by this point of CMU and the teachers engaged in this work here. It’s important to make sure you do it with your eyes open.
Compare the industrial development of Pittsburgh and Detroit: with the withdrawal of steel, you will see the rise of health care as an important part of the economy of western Pennsylvania. This provides an economic foundation for the real development and growth of universities.
In southeastern Michigan, the auto industry experienced ups and downs, but it did not leave immediately and eventually, forcing a massive restructuring of the economy (in Pittsburgh).
They’re just on different tracks. They all face many of the same challenges and are trying to figure out how to bring economic benefits to all residents of both cities.