MAGGIE JOHNSON:
The way that Google
started was an academic venture.
JEFF DEAN: How do you
find interesting problems
in the world?
ALFRED SPECTOR: Google
depends on academia.
So many of the good ideas
that we've brought forward
to the world come from academia.
JEFF DEAN: One of the real
reasons to engage with academia
is to get a really
fresh perspective.
MAGGIE JOHNSON: We
empower academics
to work on real problems.
And in the other
direction, academics
bring ideas and
new approaches that
are put into practice
much more quickly
than in an academic environment.
JEFF DEAN: You know,
oh, that's interesting,
that's interesting,
that's interesting.
All of a sudden,
you've knitted together
something that is really,
really, tremendously powerful.
MAGGIE JOHNSON: We need their
help because of the problem
we're trying to
solve internally.
ALFRED SPECTOR: Academia can
look far out into the future,
it can take greater risks, and
look for really interesting
solutions that industry
sometimes cannot.
KEN GOLDBERG: My
name's Ken Goldberg.
I'm a professor at UC Berkeley
in the College of Engineering
and School of Information.
And I run a robotics lab
there where we do research
in areas like surgical robotics.
And what I'm really
excited about right
now is cloud robotics.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: And
I am Matei Ciocarlie.
I'm a research scientist
here at Google.
I am part of the
robotics effort hoping
to advance the state of
robotic mobile manipulation
and allow robots to do
things that they're not
able to do today.
KEN GOLDBERG: Well, I've
been interested in this field
for a long time,
since I was a kid.
I think every kid gets
interested in robots.
We sometimes talk about
them as the gateway drug
for STEM- science, technology,
engineering and math.
And it's because
that are robots are
very compelling at all levels.
I think kids are
captivated by them.
But really, adults and anyone
is interested in the idea
of making something
that can become alive.
Cloud robotics has
a long history.
The way I think about it is
it goes back to early work
when the internet emerged
in the early '90s,
and a number of groups started
putting together robots
with the internet.
And the idea was that we could
use the resource of the world
wide web as a standard to allow
people to come in from anywhere
in the world and operate
industrial robots.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: It truly is a
symbiotic relationship, right?
At Google, one of the
things we deeply care about
is understanding the world.
KEN GOLDBERG:
Well, the one thing
that's really emerged in
the last couple of years
is a way of thinking about the
cloud as an active resource.
When the building
that my office is in
was constructed
only 10 years ago,
there's an enormous
basement that
was dedicated for
computing facilities.
It's empty now, because
we don't do that.
We don't actually have
computing in the building.
Everything is done on the cloud.
We need vast computation.
We use cloud clusters on demand.
And that makes a lot more sense.
Because it can be
centralized, it can be shared,
they could be upgraded
and maintained.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: Sharing is a
really important part of it,
right?
Imagine if we had
to advance science
but we couldn't
leverage anything
that any other person
has done in the past.
We couldn't teach
each other verbally
or through the written text.
And in a sense, that's what
robots are without sharing.
And the cloud can enable
robots to share knowledge,
to share things that they've
understood about the world.
KEN GOLDBERG: We were saying
about it's interesting
that sharing has become this
very whole new-- it reaches
new levels where people share
every detail of their life.
What they had for
breakfast, where they were.
And in a sense though,
there is this idea
that robots can start
doing something similar.
They can say, hey,
I just learned
how to pick up this pair
of eyeglasses in a new way,
and instantly share that
with every other robot.
So if another robot comes and
sees that pair of eyeglasses,
they know exactly what to do.
And I think that idea of
accumulating information
is really what's been happening
with the web at one level,
but can now enter an
entirely new level.
Working closely with
James and his colleagues,
we were able to actually get
access to the computing engine
and we were able to take
images and do experiments
that we reported in a
conference paper last year.
And we're very excited now about
taking this to the next level.
We have a number
of ideas about how
image libraries-- or actually
libraries of 3D objects,
of solids and mechanics,
could actually
be used to enhance
grasping using ideas
that Matei has
pioneered where we
can do, for example,
very complex computation
about grasp strategies.
But these can be pre
computed in the cloud
and then stored so that
they can be indexed online
very rapidly when a new
object is encountered.
The field has really
changed dramatically
in the last couple of years,
and particularly last year
with the announcement
by Google that it
was getting into this
field in a big way
and acquiring a number
of major companies.
This has been a big
boost for researchers.
I think bringing a critical mass
of people like Matei, James,
and many of my former
students together here
is really creating
this critical mass
where lots of interesting
things are happening.
Getting this agenda together
where they are bringing skills
from many different areas to
focus on problems of robotics
is very exciting.
I think that also
because Google is really
at the forefront
of the cloud, you
have all the skills in
robotics, traditional robotics
or advanced robotics
I should say,
and then you're combining
them with all the skills
of the cloud.
And the potential
here is enormous.
One of [? the good ?]
questions is
what are these robots
going to look like.
And my own feeling,
because I work also
in factories and
factory robots, I'm
not convinced that
robots are necessarily
going to be humanoids.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: Exactly.
KEN GOLDBERG: I think
that they're not
going to look-- this comes back
to Sigmund Freud, actually, who
wrote about the uncanny.
And the ideas about
the uncanny valley
indicate that if a robot
looks too much like a human,
it actually leads to a sense
of discomfort for many people.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: Right.
KEN GOLDBERG: And
so I don't think
we necessarily need to go there.
I think we want a robot
to look like a machine.
It'll do something that will go
around and clean up our house,
for example.
Keep our floors clean, or
maybe someday keep us company.
But I don't think it needs to
look like a human to do that.
MATEI CIOCARLIE: To me, trying
to copy the human [? for the ?]
robot, you get what you
had hundreds of years ago
when people were trying to
build flying machines by copying
the birds.
And you had devices that
flapped wings and look
more or less biological
and fell off cliffs.
Right?
Whereas when we
finally understood
the principle of lift,
that's when flight took off.
Right?
So a robot doesn't necessarily
have to copy the human.
If you try to copy the human,
we'll copy the wrong things.
A robot needs to have a function
and get a job done for us.
And if it doesn't look human
when doing that, that's fine.
KEN GOLDBERG: Right.
So we might not even
recognize-- right now
when we look-- what robots
may evolve to are things
that we may not even be
able to imagine right now.
I mean, they may
not look like what
we think they're
going to look like.
So it's a pleasure to come down
to Google where all this is
happening, really at the
center of all the action.
And for a lot more details
on all these topics
we talked about, see my Talk.
