#114 – Russ Tedrake: Underactuated Robotics, Control, Dynamics and Touch

Russ Tedrake is a roboticist and professor at MIT and vice president of robotics research at TRI. He works on control of robots in interesting, complicated, underactuated, stochastic, difficult to model situations. Support this podcast by supporting our sponsors. Click links, get discount: – Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex & use code LEX at checkout – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex – ExpressVPN: https://www.expressvpn.com/lexpod If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 – Introduction 04:29 – Passive dynamic walking 09:40 – Animal movement 13:34 – Control vs Dynamics 15:49 – Bipedal walking 20:56 – Running barefoot 33:01 – Think rigorously with machine learning 44:05 – DARPA Robotics Challenge 1:07:14 – When will a robot become UFC champion 1:18:32 – Black Mirror Robot Dog 1:34:01 – Robot control 1:47:00 – Simulating robots 2:00:33 – Home robotics 2:03:40 – Soft robotics 2:07:25 – Underactuated robotics 2:20:42 – Touch 2:28:55 – Book recommendations 2:40:08 – Advice to young people 2:44:20 – Meaning of life