Can Robots Develop Human Senses?

[Music] this is star talks sports edition we're going to talk about sensors in this episode more on that in just a moment first my co-host Chuck Nice Jack hey what's happening professional stand-up comedian you do stand-up clubs right pretty regularly yeah I mean uh that's the only way you can be a comedian okay I guess also a Gary O'Reilly Gary former Soccer Pro and a commentator we're here my co-hosts all right Gary you you this is one of yours again I I just know the title of the show sensors but you don't have to take us into it where you come where it's coming from and where's it going so start us off so the show begins in space it's a with a suit that has been designed for the Planetary Exploration of the Moon and Mars in a galaxy far far away a Time long long ago yeah perhaps perhaps um we meet someone who not only worked on the space suit in question but who wants to give robots a sense of touch now this is going to press a button for you Chuck but oh my God who the hell idea was it to do this show this means us getting into soft robotic technology we will explore smart garments that are fiber optic based and therefore more photonic than electronic that I don't have a problem with that's more haptic oh that's okay that's that's more haptic augmentation than it is giving a robot a sense of touch okay that's helping me be able to touch things in a better fashion I'm cool with that because it helps me uh human being okay okay so I'm going to try and give you a soft Landing here Chuck we'll see if you get a few bumps along the way um right we also meet another co-founder who is part of this team that is driving forward this particular project in so many different directions the particular technology has multiple medical applications I think computer gaming wearables they'll go there it's the fashion item and yes you guessed it it has Sports applications as well in particular it'll be technique analytics injury risk reduction biodata feedback such as breathing analytics and much much more and you're gonna love this Chuck the the the inner house husband that you are it's also washable oh oh how thoughtful exactly right let me let me introduce our two guests we'll start with he later is CEO and co-founder of the organic robotics Corporation graduate of Cornell University in mechanical engineering we'll also meet Dr Rob Shepard associate professor at the Sibley School of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University studied at Harvard in George whiteside's Department of Chemistry and chemical biology where of all things he realized he was going into Robotics and no surprise to see that he is CTO and co-founder of the organic robotics Corporation Neo our guests welcome guys Eliza you should say your name sort of we cannot just like that and your last name please go ahead so so what is the Smart suit thing what like what is a smart suit we all we'll have these images of Neil and Buzz on the moon with these big bulky suits as they're skipping along but they don't look very Nimble and they don't look as comfortable as perhaps they could be I don't know so what uh so our image of being in space is that all right so how are you going to change this well I think uh I have a collaborator and a diazartias at um Texas A M and she makes she's into bioastronautics she wants to make spacesuits that astronauts want to wear that they can baby perform more like athletes here on Earth and what Buzz had to do was fight against pressure in the suit to Ben bent his arm and uh one of the things she wants to do is make mechanical counter pressure suits which is more like what you see on the Star Trek movies conformal stuff and it's squeezing your um your skin to keep that pressure differential from you know popping you a little bit so I hadn't really thought about that because if I have if because I'm in in basically zero pressure atmosphere right so you have to put pressure back on me so that my blood doesn't boil or weird things don't happen right right and so with that pressure I don't have I don't have I can't move it in my joints right because there's pressure everywhere so you need some kind of mechanism to get through all the joint parts not only my elbow but my shoulder my fingers yeah so there's two ways to do it one is to use the same suits are being used today and augment the force so that you can get help fighting against that pressure or you can remove the internally pressurized suit all together and just have like a compression garment that squeezes you and then your joints are less hindered to move kind of like is it kind of like I shouldn't say kind of like I'm asking like in a flight suit when you uh that squeezes your lower extremities so that the blood isn't draining down and it pushes everything up so you don't pass out yeah it's pretty similar to that and it's like a so a giraffe actually has something like an evolved G suit so they have a high pressure from their heart to feed blood to their brains but when they lean down to drink water um their heads don't explode because they have you know fascia and skin that's good that squeezing it drafts 101 their heads kept exploding right by the way that is a great name for a bar the exploding giraffe head come drinking our word a hole so the more so you can be like dress skin the better Elida what does organic have to do with any of this when I think of Material Science and I think of Robotics biology doesn't ever enter my head here so um what is the organic part of this well I think that's actually a better question for Rob because we just took his lab's name and then added corporation instead of labs so that's why I record what called organic robotics corporation instead of organic robotics lab but you know we're now going for light lace which is the name of the technology which we can talk later but you can talk more about the organic stuff it's not food everyone's like oh it's a food organic means USD is certified yeah your organic robots in the in the organic aisle of Whole Foods right because that's what's going to be next uh it's just organic chemistry using chemistry to make um robots and now peop people better um than you know machined aluminum or and bolts and and stuff like that um soft robotic technology what does it actually mean and and am I right in saying it's kind of like biomimicry here are we or am I on the wrong paths yeah I'm glad you gave me an opportunity to do that because I think we're evolving towards where um the company started and you know my lab sort of has taken its own Direction so I started off at Cornell in mechanical engineering taking what I learned at Harvard making soft robot machines um and what they are is just um Continuum deformation smooth deformations that don't look like hinged robots from the you know that you think of from the 50s they're made up of materials like animals they move more like animals but everything we made at Harvard was um what's called feed forward in a robot like you issue a command and then it just does it but it can't respond to the environment because it doesn't have any sensing um so what we did in my lab here at Cornell was to add soft sensors to the system touch sensors so it could feel what it's interacting with and then respond to it make a truly feedback controlled soft robot um and so then it can feel and respond and look like an animal um and we use Optical like guides instead of electrical sensors for a variety of reasons and Elida was in my lab making these sensors for robots and then decided why don't we just use these on people instead and then that's when the company started and that's um the lab continued to make stuff for robots the company makes stuff for people okay by the way that's the plot of a disaster movie right with a brilliant engineer say let's do this on people right and everything turns for the worst so how do you how do you scientifically go from knowing as as our fingers can touch and sense to being able to interpret touch and replicate it for one of your Technologies it's very basic we cannot do it nearly as well as organisms do there's a variety of mechanoreceptors in our skin that respond to different pressures and different frequencies of pressure um temperature um and this is a lot of information that we have to encode and then send to our brains and we only have a limited space to do that with so we encode this multitude of information into electrical signals spiked through our neurons and then our brain interpretses that interprets that information and then sends commands out one of the reasons we use Optical systems in my group instead of electrical ones you can encode more information optically than you can electrically hence the urge to lay fiber optics for for media Communications right Paul said high frequencies but you also have phase information color information and intensity right um all of them can represent a different mode of touch feedback and you can encode that into one signal and then send that to the computer which then sends the response using light instead of electricity does that mean you're immune to the electromagnetic pulse that the aliens will send down and our civilization is that right it is a big it actually is a you know it's it's a very important point you bring up we're immune to electromagnetic interference so you can you could potentially use these things in like MRIs um or other places where magnetic fields can penetrate our electric field so yeah they're in a cockpit there's a lot of um places and be resistant to aliens every time the aliens come they shut off your electricity yeah which I am P yeah everybody knows that everybody knows they're gonna first first first uh line of attack is the EMP that's right and then they're just like clearly they're using some type of optic system we've underestimated them unfortunately we still have to convert it to electrical signals so there is in the end yes in the end right right right yeah oh well so how how accurate is this fiber optic ability so because I'm I I I it's as Neil said it's media it's it's TV it's it's a telephone connection but you're using it in a totally different way so you're obviously using how are you interpreting how that light changes in terms of the results that you then decode and interpret we use uh color and intensity right now and we make our sensors so that they can change color when they're stretched and they can change intensity when they're stretched stretching can be linear or pressing or something like that but um we're not as sensitive as something called a fiber brag grading Optical waveguide um which is they're sensitive to um hundreds of nanometers of movement um we are sensitive to tens of microns of movement that's like a human hair diameter but we think that's sufficient for robots and people and by making that trade-off we can make our systems much cheaper um and and much smaller right it seem Overkill if you had nanometer sensitivities that that's there's nothing we do in our life that that way yeah like that I think that was a nanometer off no wonder I missed that pool shot yeah I just think people want to know an enemies of billionth of a meter so right yeah we're not but a human hair that's something we can see that means something to us so we can feel that we decided that was a good Target um because yes exactly what we said you can feel that you can't feel an enemy right right of course we're going to take a quick break but when we come back more of the secrets of this emergent technology of these spacesuits that will basically replace humans and we'll all die I'm pretty sure is that where this show is going Gary dude no I I did Envision a happier note okay all right so we'll be right back start talk sports edition we're back StarTalk sports edition we're talking about sort of robotic suits for all manner of applications that not only that we've thought of but maybe stuff we haven't even dreamed of yet we've got two mechanical engineers turn roboticist here we've got eladas and Rob Shepard as our guests so let me start off uh ilada tell me in my notes Here we say something about light lace and fiber optic Tech what what precisely is that so light place is the name of our technology it's a fiber optic sensor but unlike other fiber optic sensors it's soft and stretchable and that's why we're applying in to humans because if you're wearing a wearable device you don't want to have bulky or uncomfortable fibers or Electronics on you so um that's our technology is soft and stretchable fiber optic sensor and it measures things like motion it measures your missile fatigue it can measure your chest extension respiration heart rate so basically it is a way to track your vitals as well as your biomechanics while being comfortable whoa because you know this reminds me I haven't heard this reference lately but Chuck Chuck and Gary might remember but there's something uh there's a there's an expression that says uh it was all over you like a cheap suit yeah right and a cheap suit doesn't fit you well right but and but it needs to in order to look good on you but if it doesn't fit you well you move one arm and other pieces of the cloth move and it climbs up your neck and so so what you're saying not to put words in your mouth is that previous suits were wearing you whereas now you get to wear the suit is that a fair characterization of this I think we can say that and it's like one of our selling points is that you wear compression garments or like tight fitting clothing to exercise anyways so just gonna feel the same way but now we're making them smarter right right so everything and a little lemon is is snug fitting on everybody's body who buys clothing there so now it's going to know all about you is what you're saying how is the data retrieved like I mean what is it how is this speaking to whatever uh it's speaking to so that we get all this information yeah it's pretty similar to other wearable devices we have a phone app like an IOS app you can download and it speaks to the device via Bluetooth so you can just look at yours measurements real time all right stop your exercise and just log in and see how you did cool so when you've put the fibers through fabric is there an optimal pattern for those fibers fibers to be woven into or is it basically a simple grid system there is an optimal pattern because our fibers are made so that only parts of the fibers are sensing and we want the sensing mechanism to be wherever we want to sense so if you want to sense your tricep the fiber has to be the sensing part of the fiber has to be woven into or integrated into the Garment in that specific area Okay elada I want to monitor my I want to monitor my belly fat so would you put sensors we've done something where we place our sensors around the abdominal area axles when you're doing certain exercises so what we could do is you could wear this every day and it will eventually tell you if your belly got larger in size or it got um smaller in size or it's stiffer when you touch it you know you could we could also measure um the response back when you touch it so if it's soft we can measure that if it's no longer soft we can measure that snow definitely are you able to weave this into Fabrics that are very slight high performance say like for a dancer a performer an athlete or do the fibers and you said they're the sort of diameter of a human hair are they necessary to be in thicker more heavy weight Fabric or can you really go into lightweight we can't go into lightweight but just a clarification the fibers we currently make are not as thin as human hair it is possible currently they're around 800 microns um in diameter and we prefer actually thinner fabric for them to go into because like especially if we're going to wear it outside then summer you don't want to wear something thick but we could do either so right now we're talking about Diagnostic and if I'm getting ahead Gary then we'll skip it go for it go for it um instead of listening to the body which is what you're doing is there an opportunity to tell the body what to do so we can tell the human that they need to do something about it but we're not trainers ourselves so we're gonna have to rely on a trainer to look at the data and say oh okay when you do this training five times in a row 10 minutes intervals this is how your body reacts so maybe you should change this and then they can take more data and see how that change affected that oh and then you get real-time data multi-dimensional data there that's excellent I think Chelsea wants to know about actuation and how you can modulate the force um the sensors are hard enough so we're going to do that and then there you go you're like okay I got you you're like you're in that side you're in the Sci-Fi uh mode there too there are people working on it it's very hard my lab is working on it but it's for a company it's very difficult but but if you could then it could be like like the force you you can go on your app and just change what the body the human body is doing in response to your wants and needs yeah that's why that's one of the things the bioastronautics application is for it's the sensors for measuring the environment and they're also built-in actuators into the um mechanical counter pressure suit to help them perform better in in right right right wow that is crazy so go back to what uh Elida just mentioned when you're talking about we have this tranche of data and then we offer this reservoir of data is it possible one at one point you'll be putting personal trainers out of work because that data will be uploaded to a AI cloud and it will make those determinations for you oh yeah I like that I like that um I mean I think this can go yeah we can say that for many other jobs like a lot of technologies have the potential to take over or complement it we want to be on the side of complementing the physical uh personal trainer or physical therapist or a coach but we're not trying to take anyone's job I see what you're doing there I see what you're doing there Elana because you're like look these personal trainers they're pretty large people and they're very very we don't want to piss them off we don't want to piss these guys off so the thing here is major major league sports has already taken note of lightless and you've Congratulations by the way uh were awarded an NFL award for fifty thousand dollars first and future award for your product um what was it that they saw in light lace that made them so enamored the new China Light pun intended on that for us we get a lot of light pants for sure um you know there are a lot of selling points of our product I think one being we can measure different things at the same time instead of relying on like three devices you can just use one shirt that has light lace and it can measure both your respiration your muscle fatigue and your emotion so if you want to do this currently you would need three different devices so maybe like a strap that does respiration you would need sensors that go in your muscles to do that and then you'd need camera based systems for motion tracking we combine all of it I think there's a lot of value in that and because we're an optical based technology we have higher sampling rates so if there's any consistency between each movement we're more likely to measure that compared to any other sensor so I think that was another reason why they were interested and lastly I also add this this is a short like we have some shorts behind me but it doesn't have to be a shirt and for NFL for example leggings lower body those are also very important and it's very very simple for us to just integrate the sensor into leggings or lower body garments and measure that as well so there's a potential to measure full body gloves shirts leggings socks shoes it doesn't depending on what the person wants to know we don't really have a lot of limitations when it comes to the form factor how how well do you think Rob your light lights will perform in an NFL game when it comes to contact because Google pressure sensors here well yeah and that it's contact and weather conditions as well because you're you're playing in every single conceivable weather condition in the AFL plus you're sweating and you're sweating your fiber optics yeah and you're having a car collision on every single place so you put it right as they describe it yeah they describe the the impact of every tackle as though you're in a car accident every single time there are rapid decelerations for sure um we can capture those as elata mentioned we we can sample a really really fast think of this as a wearable ultra high speed motion capture system that can also measure pressure interactions um it has to be worn close to the body so the temperature variations aren't that big a deal because your body's going to sort of maintain that it's so important temperature right it's not electrical so you can get it wet um there's not really that many environmental sensitivities for using Sports and they can handle High pressures there um they're soft but they're very tough and toughness means you could absorb a lot of energy before you break so you know what this sounds like with if you if if you have a full body a lace is everything right neck everything and then you go up with your with your IOS app that's a tricorder yes isn't it man it's great isn't that a tricorder the tricorder measures everything that's going on in the body without cutting you open that's kind of what you've done there we don't have to just use our sensor we can fuse lots of different sensor information right um your Apple watch uses photo plus eismography which shines light in measures a reflected light out right and from that they can you can get a lot of things you can get systolic pressure yeah um you can get respiration rate um but what what those systems are missing is also you get your aux numbers too right I mean yeah the Pulsar right right the amount of signal processing that goes on to get all that information from that little bit of blood flow is incredible yeah um what is not there is the the amount of air inhaled um which is extremely important you can you can calibrate that by seeing the expansion and contraction of the chest cavity can't you we can right so yeah that's part of it so this is better than a tricorder without a doubt you have exceeded 25th Century technology right here if we take a step back you said this is more accurate than the high speed cameras now we've done shows in the past discussing high-speed cameras and it was exclusively on baseball and in particular pictures are you now being co-opted to bring this product to baseball bear College be it minor league or major league and are you working with the pitchers if you can if you can outgun a high speed camera um you've got to be in there surely yeah we're definitely baseball is going to be our beachhead Market we think there's a lot of value there because they move really fast especially pitchers and even with human eye or motion capture camera based motion capture systems it's hard to capture that because everything happens in less than two seconds so if you take a camera based system and you get maybe like four data points throughout the pitch we can give you let's say 400 data points and that's right so you don't have to interpolate between the pitch you can just look at the pitch and you'll be able to see oh Pitch one versus pitch 10 at this millisecond you behave differently and maybe that's why you're not pitching as fast or maybe that's why you're gonna get injured well more importantly well not more importantly uh just as important is form for everything yes form is all of sports it's all about having that form become a a non-conscious second nature muscle memory muscle thank you yeah muscle memory you guys are actually able to teach muscle memory yeah um so there's a study in 2015 by the first author I think is Wilk and uh what they showed is that um after they sampled 300 baseball players um the ones that had the greater shoulder Mobility were four times less likely to need Tommy John's surgery so if you can help them increase their external internal rotation um uh degree of Freedom then they can re increase their lifetime with some reasonable probability so teaching form is really important and um these these things a pitch takes two seconds but the initial accelerations take milliseconds and it's obscured so if you are trying to capture it with external cameras those cameras need you really and these are we're talking about 10 000 degrees per second shoulder rotations if you're capturing at a thousand samples per second you're under sampling and you really need to be sampling at you know maybe 10 times the rate for a non-periodic motion um there's something called the Nyquist Criterion which says twice but that's for a periodic motion for something aperiodic like this you need to think even more than that just to clarify so if you have something that repeats you can and you want to measure it you can say how many data points on this repeating feature do I need to characterize exactly what's going on and that's your Nyquist frequency you're describing but if it doesn't repeat you don't you can't right you all bets are wrong doesn't repeat no right that's it and and that's a really important point we think that pitching inconsistency is a huge variable that cannot be measured right now to to what matters this is a hypothesis and we need to validate it but we think by measuring faster you will reveal that the accelerations are faster than are being measured right now and then if you can't re if you don't know it and you can't repeat it you can't get these consistencies and further the torques generated in this we think are being radically under reported um and that that can result in injuries and you wonder why can't people tell when these injuries are going to happen you should know the soft tissue loading conditions that are viable but people put pictures enter themselves all the time you know this is even outside of sports yeah I'm just thinking about these applications um for rehabilitation not of athletes but I'm talking people who have catastrophic injuries yeah where they have to learn again how to walk everybody thinks that we walk you learned how to walk you actually learned how to do all the things that you do that you take for granted your brain is running you know a process that lets you do these things and if you damage your brain then it doesn't work anymore you have to relearn it this kind of Technology could greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to do that yeah definitely rehab applications Physical Therapy applications it's just a way to get feedback if you know if your brain can't get that from your sensors you can use external sensors like light lace and see that feedback on an app and then try to behave that way and see how change of behavior or change of the way you're moving change of your motion is affecting that light lace reading uh one of the scenes here is that uh we have sensors we can feel our ourselves but we have imperfect memories and biased memories and so being able to digitally think of course I constantly think I'm six too um so but anyway we have uh we have these if we can digitally record this information then we can go back not just with ourselves but with other sports scientists and physiologists and help you with less bias interpret what's happening and and physical therapy a great application where I'm horribly doing physical therapy I've never successfully completed a physical therapy regimen um and I think if I was reporting my information to the doctor they would be able to call me out I'm not actually doing it you know and help me improve faster and I just want to highlight for something because you just said it and I want to make it clear when you refer to the acceleration in the picture just what's going on the ball is going from zero miles an hour to a hundred miles an hour in a fraction of a second all right and you know from you know the the pitcher gets ready and then they their arm and as their hand goes forward they're accelerating the ball from zero to 100 miles an hour there's nothing we do in life that accelerates that fast right in a car your head would snap off and roll backwards so but there's not only that there's also there's some rotation of the wrist there's a lot of sort of joint action going on there and you capture all of that I'm very impressed by what this is and what it can can do for us thanks for saying that it's really a lot of who who identified that each Head Market and I've been fascinated with it and yes in two seconds 100 miles an hour but how fast is it does it get you know in the first eighty percent of that velocity how does it what time duration does it achieve that and we think it's um and this is backed up by some other data um that it happens in like very soon in the in the pitch and then this is also why people with longer arms are viewed as better pitchers because they can apply that acceleration for longer periods of time um and but or they can do the same speed um by by uh accelerating a slower rate over a longer period of time which can preserve their joints for longer but we have examples of pitchers who defy that um and then how do they defy that like Pedro Martinez was not a tall pitcher for the Red Sox or or he might have been sub six feet Tim Lincoln Lynn's income was 510 I believe and and if you look at his biomechanics he he extends his most pitchers will pitch over something like 80 35 percent of their wingspan they'll move that but he did it like 125 or something like that you know there's all kinds of stuff to learn for biomechanics and injury reduction and and these it's been it's great that systems like um what do they attract men and um Hawkeye trackman all of these motion capture systems that are out there now and some that are some are even getting higher in sampling rates um are providing all this information but being able to have that unobscured at rates I mean there's really nothing limited we could potentially do millions of samples per second um versus they all use cameras they all use cameras you're at the actual Source yeah exactly exactly there is not a sport that will Embrace detail detailed data like this like baseball yeah which is and the GMS are gonna love you they'll eat it up they'll eat it up we gotta take a quick break when we when we come back we're gonna find out what the future of all of this can be because just to have this capability oh my gosh there there are problems solutions that people didn't even know they could attain once they had X you know until now that they have know that they have access to this technology we're gonna hit that up in the third segment of star talk sports edition we return we're back StarTalk sports edition film of the future of monitoring what your body is doing on the inside but you're doing it from the outside with this magic material that are two guests have pioneered and I think I perfected your names here so you have iliata Elijah you like yeah okay Elijah you moved to an A minus from B plus okay thank you and Rob Rob Shepherd uh you guys are mechanical engineers and but you're into robotics you're into robotic monitoring uh The Human Condition on and sports has a huge benefit from this particularly which we're spending time on which we spent time in the last segment the the rate at which you can gather information on something that is moving fast and is non-repetitive is without precedent here so what it what are your best applications today and what do you see coming down the pike tomorrow yeah I'd say as we briefly discussed earlier the best application Brighton uh would be baseball and pictures specifically because of the high-speed motion they go through and how often they could go through that motion which usually results in injuries it's very common to have a tummy jaw surgery there but whether we see this in the future like I said we want to make full body garments not just shirts or not just straps but also leggings shoes socks really anything you want to measure or any area you want to measure and we want to apply not only to sports but also provide medical benefits like clinical application Physical Therapy we've looked into robotics of course and even car seats you know we had an interest in measuring Comfort levels driver attentiveness did you forget your child it happens a lot in the car so hey hey it only happened twice and the third time it was on purpose no judgment look when you dis you later when you discuss those applications outside of the sporting realm I'm sitting here wondering and I'm not a computer gamer but this sounds like it is absolutely set to walk itself into VR and AR now as that universe come to you yeah definitely I'm I'm surprised I forgot to mention that but the why is there are two different routes we think of where when it comes to arvr training so we can do training so instead of just seeing a reconstruction of your hands or your body in the VR environment you'd also receive feedback on how much force your appliances if you're learning say medical training you need to know how much exactly to push when you're doing a surgery and you could get that measurement with our sensors if you were wearing them and then gaming the same thing instead of just seeing your body on the VR environment you can get feedback on how much you're pushing how much you are pulling something what that results in inter like in the gaming environment so it makes it more real yeah so now your this is information flowing in One Direction do you have the ability to send information back so you know if if I'm I'm talking for corrective purposes so if I'm throwing and your um fabric is saying hey man what you're doing right now is you're stressing right here in this part of your rotator boom and if you continue to do that we know when that's going to happen but at the point where it's happening is there something is there a signal that can be sent that lets me know oh I just did that and then if I don't feel that oh that's I did it right that type of deal yeah there are a couple different ways we can do this one of them being we can send the information back via uh different light patterns so our sensors glow oh we can make them not glow or we can make them glow in different patterns so maybe having them glow three times or glow having them glow red could mean you are about to get injured you should have stopped we could have them glow green to mean something else and the other way to go with this is have the app tell you so if you have your phone or iPad or the device in front of you it could also just tell you there it has great feedback truck we'll build that in there another thing we do is put uh put a little vibrotectile thing in the Pod like I said yeah this has an electrical portion too which is located a small pod located depending on you're gonna make you're gonna make garments glow and change color you're gonna sweep up you're going to sweep up the team Market you're going to get the 20-somethings you're going to get the 30-somethings and the 40-somethings you still think they're 20 something not to mention all the ravers that will go into a club and get rid of their light sticks so that they can just use their shoulders that's it that's what I'm saying I gotta I gotta ask you now I have and what you're doing is is incredible but now is there a dialogue between yourself I find what you're doing entirely credible it's not incredible it's entirely credible thank you that's great yeah I stand correct oh sit correct it are you now in discussions with biomedical Engineers the work that biomedical Engineers are doing trying to map and code signaling the neural signals how long before you guys talk to them and you come up with something together this is where we both work on wearables and Robotics which is Prosthetics um and so measuring signals from that outside world and transmitting it to our body through electrical impulses is something we have worked on in the past and are continuing to work on but it's a such a long slog and um well electrical impulses that you feel on your skin or that you somehow impart into the brain uh that you would impart into sensors in your skin which then would send that information to the brain right yeah and it's almost the same thing right because your brain is sensing the rest of your body yeah and we've worked on the hardware part which is making a prosthetic hand um that actually has pretty good and it had it's lightweight High Force it's quick um feedback controlled and everything um and it's quite simple at least for us to add the capability for that Hardware to Output electrical impulses that could be then used so something I saw that you've been working on is embodied Energy Systems and I've seen a little tiny little video of your soft aquatic robot which I would call a fish but no it's being called a soft aquatic robot so talk to me about embodied Energy Systems because that's I think that's going to talk Chuck out okay yeah uh yeah so if you look at uh the best example the general purpose robot today I think is spot from Boston Dynamics that yellow quadruped that walks around yes um so we can do that for about at least the last time I I heard is 90 minutes um is that the one that opened the door two of them opened the door and the other one walked through yeah there's actually just now that have hands and so it can yeah it's really useful in a general purpose way we've had robots for a long time but they're very specific this one you can tune to do lots of different things um but I can only do it for 90 minutes where if you look at something I like to use a walrus as an example um a walrus has a ton of fat on it but that fat is multifunctional that you can a walrus can operate without recharging for you know weeks at a time um and it can just sit still for you know theoretically months at a time but it can do has all kind of agile things it can it could outrun you it definitely me um they're fast on land they can swim they do all kinds of things and they can do it because they're using their energy in a multi-functional way it's not just a battery pack that isn't adding anything else to the system so what we've decided if a walrus is chasing me on the ground on the land It's not catching me I would never lift that one down okay yeah they can charge really fast they're pretty fast they're like no think of a hippo in the water you would think big fat ass HIPAA will never catch me but you put a hippo in the water those suckers are moving like a little motorboat I know I'm just saying like the way they never live it down the next day or willpower would uh chase me down on land okay that's funny so we've decided to make liquid that can be used as hydraulic fluids for moving robots around also as the battery so the liquid has electrical potential that we use to power the robot so we've called it robot blood um and now we recently published something called the robot heart which is a stretchable pump that behaves it's electrical it's not the same way it's our body works there's no muscle my heart is electrical too though that's a good point Thank you for yeah that's great I'll start using that the stretchable soft pump that it also pumps the same blood that powers the heart um and then gets gets everything moving so the energy is doing a lot more than just powering the system you're creeping me out I told you yeah you're creeping me out because now you got robots that have a heart and they got blood and they can feel and they and they don't need to be recharged and chuck chuck if it bleeds we can kill it that's a good point yeah yeah that's it you've built a synthetic vascular system into your robots as well so if it if this fluid is is it energy dense it's just not just as a hydraulic it's is it creating how is it created it's got to be a conductor hydraulic is it just connect is it kinetic or is it chemical or is it both it's electrochemical so the hydraulic liquid has electrical potential in it and then we pass it by electrodes which then turn that electrical potential into electricity that's very clever thanks and Chuck any any any um liquid will have a uh have that property not the electrical properties but it'll have the the pressure properties so right yeah uh he's just being clever and double dipping that's what I'm saying yeah yeah it's like our circulatory system you know it does many different things it does many different things so you know uh it's it's making use of one thing in several different ways which that's the nature does yes yeah so yeah that's very very clever thank you and uh and by the way stop it all right is that is there anything you could tell us about where you like to to look at going in the future what your aim is where your aim is well we in my lab we want general purpose robots and for that they need to be adaptive unplanned environments space exploration is a great place for that um operate for long periods of time without needing to be recharged um also ocean exploration so we're focused on Ocean exploration robots and space exploration robots but to be adaptive you need feedback control it's not just Vision like you know there's um I don't think there's an example of an animal that only uses Vision I mean touch is an important part of adaptivity so that's why we've spent a lot of time uh making a robust adapted which these with these stretchable fiber optic touch sensors yeah that makes sense because once again talking about nature you know like so many animals in nature use sensors that we would never even begin to understand well we would never understand them for our use because we couldn't do it you know even like something as simple as a snake sticking out its tongue or or a dog you know sniffing another dog's butt you know they're really yeah no come on let's be honest they they're not just perverts of information no no no no no Chuck Chuck the question for the ages is if dogs can smell things like miles away yeah why do they have to get within a quarter inch of what to smell it okay I take it back they are perverts doesn't that mean yeah it's like hey uh you know what Jim I know it was you from a block away but yeah what the hell I'm gonna double check get up in there anyway I knew it so guys we gotta Land This Plane oh before we do Neil I need a practical answer just how washable is it are we talking one more two washes can I get a year out of this can I iron it yeah we're in my tests to okay be able to say that but we've done tons of tests and they survived the the electronics part is fully removable so you can just slide it out and then put it in the washer and dryer but to be able to say if it will last a year we need to test it for a year which we haven't yet yes all right okay as long as you don't mind me asking cool now one last point I just want to verify and I think it's true um rob you were describing the limits of the pitching uh activ the pitching motion that would put a picture at risk of requiring Tommy John's surgery that presumably you don't know any of this in advance you have to teach the system what will and will not be the consequences of what someone does in the system to then have a baseline of data so that you can advise the next generation of people on what the causes and effects are of their problems isn't that correct you need yeah don't you need actual people to try this get the Tommy John surgery and say oh here's why you needed the Tommy John surgery that's after the fact so that everybody that comes later they can know it before the fact yeah that's that's a we need to provide a benefit um that is not just on injury prevention to get people wearing these so that we can develop the probabilistic models that will allow us to predict yeah when these injuries will happen but there's also the possibility that we can analytically predict this based off of again we think that accelerations are being radically underpredicted right based off of motion capture data and if we can say that the acceleration is actually you know more than 500 degrees per second squared it's 700 in the first couple of milliseconds and that'll greatly that'll change just to be clear that's an angular acceleration correct yes when you say degrees right and uh that could end up with torques that are you know 40 more than what people think and like no wonder you're you're you're tearing your um your shoulder muscle musculature ligamenture and you know not just the elbow although the UCLA is what fails mostly um but then that's because that acceleration is being transferred into that elbow no snap so we think that yes we want a probabilistic model but maybe along the way we can capture information at high enough frame rates that we can actually understand just from a fundamental level of course you're you're breaking your ligaments because you're applying torques that are beyond what they can handle wow technique all right guys it's been Delight to have you as a guest on as guests on StarTalk sports edition I will be monitoring your space going forward and if you make new developments be sure to come back on and talk about them absolutely sports edition all right excellent uh Chuck Gary always good to have you there man always a pleasure as my co-host this has been star talk sports edition uh all about the future of stuff figuring out what you're doing inside your own skin For Better or For Worse okay I even kneel the grass Tyson your personal astrophysicist keep looking up [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 90,078

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, robots, robotics, AI, artificial intelligence

Id: 3LGVQB0nzK4

Length: 51min 15sec (3075 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2022