I'm Kagan Tumer.
I'm a professor in the robotics program here.
I'm the director of the collaborative robotics
and intelligent systems (CoRIS) institute,
which has just launched in 2017.
We have over the last eight built a very strong
core robotics program.
The moment you bring the robot outside of
the lab you need to start looking at a bigger
picture.
A lot of times, a bigger picture means human
interaction.
We want to go one step beyond that, it's not
just the robot, it's not just building the
robot, it's not how it interacts with you
now, but how does the robot interact with
you over a long period of time.
As the associate director of policy for the
institute, I think that's a key difference
between what we're doing and what other organizations
are doing.
We really want to make sure that we understand
how they integrate into different aspects.
So one of the big questions for autonomous
vehicles is, who's going to be responsible
for accidents?
If you don't do it right, now you have introduced
a lot of other issues.
How do we deal with that, what will be the
rules, what will be the regulations in governing
robots in your homes.
What we have here is a very unique situation
that all of the faculty are very collaborative.
You can see that we have this very integrative
environment.
We really want to create that cooperative
culture that really allows the students to
grow, allows the faculty to grow.
For the state of Oregon, I think that it starts
bringing in a lot of capabilities for people
to come learn more about robotics and understand
how robotics is going to be able to integrate
into our daily lives.
We are not in any way stuck with how things
were perceived in the past.
So we are building the robotics of the future.
The students are going to be dealing with
robotics of 2025, 2030.
That is the direction we are going.
I think that is one of the things that make
us unique is this brand of young faculty and
looking at how robotics ought to be rather
than how robotics was.
