Professor George M. Whitesides, Harvard University: "Soft Robotics"

everybody should have favourites you should have a favorite member of the of some sex like we have to be dispassionate about it that's a spouse and you should have a favorite animal and that's a totem mine happens to be rhinoceros because they are extraordinarily stupid animals that solve problems by running through them and then everyone should have a favorite equation and I actually have two one of those is the second law of thermodynamics but the other is Maxwell's equations and Maxwell's equations leads me to Austin and I went I had the chance to come here regardless of anything else I would have , because to me one of the most marvelous experiments that's ever been done is the experiment in which mr. earth did ran a current in this direction and found that a magnet oriented perpendicular to it I just thought that was a phenomenal experiment as did everyone else I still don't understand it but I think it's a wonderful experiment so in that spirit thank you for inviting me and I'm now going to talk about nothing that has to do with rhinoceri or with wristed or anything else I'm going to talk about robots now I want to do this in a slightly unusual way because I'm sure that all of you are accustomed to well-ordered scientific talks you know careful thinking and all the rest of it this is mostly going to be movies so it's really intended for those of you who are students who no longer read so soft robots what are they this is fairly easy to explain my generic question in Sciences who cares and that has to do with robotics you know why do you care about robotics and it's actually a very philosophically interesting question and then what you do with them a little work about applications and how you make them work now let me start with this picture which is you say what does this have to do with anything or even what is it those are two gold coins and there was a period when competition between nature nations involved wealth you know people would invade one another to get the gold this is what Spain did with Mexico and then there was a period in which it was other kinds of resources and then there were people and this and that and now the world has changed and what you really compete for his knowledge and smart people that's the basis of what goes on and the reason for that is not that we have an aesthetic interest in smart people and information but rather we care about jobs because jobs is the basis for economic prosperity in a country and for those of you who are finishing your studies something that has to be on your mind in the back at least is the question of what comes next I mean how do I make a living in a society in which we are in a sense our work to a significant extent what's it going to be will there be a job so it's a it's a very important issue now there's a generic problem now with jobs in that in part because of the efficiency of computer systems there are simply too many people for the number of available jobs the efficiency productivity per person has gone up by about 15 percent in the last 15 years and that sort of means that there are too many smart people around for the number of jobs now this problem is compounded and for those of you who like amusements you see this discussed in a way that makes one giggle if it weren't so serious in the American political campaign one way it's phrases in terms of high wages versus low wages the argument is the United States and Europe have high wage jobs and in China you have low wage jobs well now less and less true another is skilled vs. unskilled the same kind of argument and that's certainly not true you go to many parts of the world and you find the Philippine world and you find people who are at least as good as anyone in Europe or in the United States so it's not skilled versus unskilled here is the one that I think you need to pay attention to and it's not people versus people it's a question of how human beings and machines are going to get along not in the next five years but in the next hundred years so that's for you and for your children this is I think the big issue and one of the key points in this will be this issue here of are we going to be collaborative or are we going to be competitive that is well machines displace people or will machines make people able to do jobs that they couldn't otherwise to do how is that going to work and so the new element in this is robots and robots are not just machines that operate on a assembly line we are in process we humans are in process of constructing a pure competitor which is robots that is machines able to do things that we can't do with artificial intelligence systems they may look at us as meat based intelligent systems and inferior in that way but artificial intelligent systems which may be at least as competent as we are in many of the things that we do so it's an interesting problem here are robots in you're familiar with all of these in one or another fashion they're just a couple of points I want to make about them this is an assembly line and these are robots that are involved in the assembly the characteristic of these systems is that you cannot come anywhere near them there's a fence that you don't see around this but when one of these arms swings its accustomed to holding an automobile and if you happen to weigh it Snickers threw you as if you weren't there and doesn't even notice so these are decidedly not collaborative the military has of course been very good at drones and drone is just an airborne robot this is an effort to make a consumer robot this is a so-called Roomba which is an exceedingly stupid and inefficient way of trying to sweep the floor this is a picture of the so called da Vinci Surgical robot which may or may not give better surgery but it certainly enables higher billing so it's a good thing in a capitalist universe this is a robot which is of entirely legitimate use human beings cannot presently go here and I'm going to show you a little bit more about this in just the equivalent of this in just a second but I want to make this point before we begin and this has to do with the question of whether robots are intrinsically a bad idea and I would point to early robots otherwise known as machines otherwise known as dishwashers and washing machines which took half of the population otherwise known as women and release them from the task of washing dirty diapers and washing you know dirty dirty dishes and made them into teachers and CEOs and whatever they might be so this was a case in which machines didn't compete but cooperated they eliminated an unattractive job and replaced it with much more interesting and attractive jobs so it can be good it's a question of how you use these machines and how clever we are so let me show you an example of a non collaborative robot this is what we don't do but I think it's nice to look at this this is not what you watch is a babysitter but there's a point here that I want you to look at carefully look at the grace with which this thing balances shifts its weight it's just unbelievable that I mean I've in with my cataracts I can't tell whether that's alive or not alive in some ways is better alive but the the underlying issue in this is that if you look at that kind of development remember that doesn't have a brain all it has is a series of accelerometers and things of that kind so without any control systems at all other than the most primitive feedback loops it does things that I can't tell are not something an animal does now you take that and you couple it with artificial intelligence and all of a sudden you begin to see our pathway to something not next year but something in the next 50 years that begins to look a lot like us and there's a deep really important underlying question here which is if a system becomes sufficiently complicated that it has the power of advanced information processors the knowledge of the web the ability to move autonomously the ability in various ways to improve itself it can arguably be set on a pathway for independent evolution and I don't know whether this is going to happen but I don't think it's just a question of trivial machines it's more interesting than that so here's where we started now you say what on earth does that have to do with anything with much of technology it started with the military and our friends and DARPA were interested in developing a system that looked like a coke can and would have the characteristic that on command it would unfold into something that would autonomously walk across the floor find a door all under the door through the crack at the bottom and then reassemble itself into something look like a coke can on the other side now you can see why they might be interested in that you could understand that I might not be particularly interested in that but many aspects of the technology of doing that have turned out to be very interesting and very practical to look at now to do that you need always a model and here is our model and I just think this is among the most fabulous of organisms this is an octopus and this octopus is as you can see squeezing through a hole much smaller than the octopus including squeezing its brain which is apparently pretty plastic and I would note in this that we couldn't do any of that or at least time without severe damage so here's something that can do something that we can't do and you know once it does it I want you to hear finally it's there look at that look of intense self-satisfaction it's just but this is a model and the point in this is that the reason I have skeleton and stuff like this is that I'm designed to withstand the forces of a gravitational field and an octopus doesn't need that because there's effectively no gravity if you're a buoyant density but there's no real ofnews and why I need that except for the fact that this was an evolutionary solution that could be done in other ways so you know we're going to start with things that are fairly soft but they nonetheless are move around quite handsomely in a gravitational environment here is the other of our motivations and that's simply a bicep it's not for those of you who lift weights it's not a particularly impressive biceps but the fact is that there is nothing after 50 years of trying there's nothing that really replicates the function of a muscle in the sense that it's a linear actuator that operates pretty rapidly pretty efficiently but doesn't in fact you know change volume very much so we're interested in octopi and we're interested in muscles not in replicating the mechanism of muscles but the function of muscle now let me start with this picture which illustrates a lot of what's going on that is a raw egg down there and this is a early gripper this was the very first thing that we published in this just to give you a sense of time line which is 2011 and the technology itself is as simple as it could possibly be it's simply a effectively a balloon over here and elastomer with an empty chamber on the inside you pressurize it and if there is a layer here that has the characteristic that it can bend but not stretch as this expands in volume it causes that to bend I mean a really trivial idea and we make this in a straightforward process that I'll show you in a moment but what's neat about this this string here is just to pick it up and lower it and this is the input line for pneumatic pressure here and when this thing wraps itself around it's very hard to get a hard robot to do it because you have to have sensors that tell you that you're not breaking the crush strength of the shell but here because the pressure is distributed uniformly across all the contact area all you have to do is to regulate one pressure which is the input pressure and you're done and it's a first step in something which is really interesting about this which is what it does is to use the properties of materials and design to replace complex sensors feedback loops and controllers so it's a device which simplifies the technology so how do we make it we a lot of this came out of our work in microfluidics what we do is simply to design a mold which in our case usually contains a number of small chambers little bubbles for a variety of reasons we print it using a 3d printer this might take a day for a complex mold but then we mold a flexible silicone rubber against that we put in some kind of layer that gives us a the kinds of mechanical properties that we want we glue these together with a bottom on it and so we it takes essentially no brains to do it we like things with no brains I'm going to come back to that but I just want to give you a hint of something first as this gripper blows up you can see the little chambers that represent the the arm here but the other thing I want you to look at just something we'll return to is it starts to curl up from the end even though the pressure is uniform throughout that system and why does that happen and there's actually very interesting science associated with that but it's also easy to take these things and mold on the inside structures of that kind which improve adhesion if you want to do that there it's a very flexible technology now there are other things that make it interesting and here's one this is a related structure it's the same kind of thing but now in the shape of a hand comes down and grips the egg and we've made this a little bit more complicated in terms of internal structure you can see the fingers are almost articulated they have a joint like activity and it puts it down without crushing it and that's all fine it gets its finger stuck there but not to worry about but now here's the thing that's more interesting this differentiates it from hard robots that's a mallet ouch and you pound on it and this would break a small robot of that sort but just to give you a sense that this is real and after you do that it works just fine and in fact these are sufficiently light that you can throw of them off an arbitrary building it doesn't make any difference than their undamaged they they never reach a velocity that will cause impact damage on them so they're essentially unbreakable to most blunt trauma they can be cut without much trouble hard robots can't be cut but they're very easily damaged light ones by blunt trauma and then you can make a whole bunch of other things I mean here's something which is a millipede like object and there here's an example for those of you who like problems which is neat we do this by pressure each one of these in turn how would you make this all work with just one input here and the answer is we don't know right now here is another device which enables you to crawl up the inside of a tube if you want to crawl up the inside of a tube perhaps you don't want to crawl up the inside of the tube but this is doubtless useful for something there people are already trying to think about using these to clean out sewers and pipelines and things like that now these are all widgets which are pretty interesting I want to talk about one bit of mechanics here and it has to do with two components one is what's called snap through which is a bi-stability and you see that in in the little things that your kids have you have a sort of a bubble shape and you push on it it pops through to the other side both are stable but they're metastable and either in either phase so I want to briefly talk about stamp through and then also about beam buckling and this is much more sophisticated and quite interesting actually it's got the mechanics people all excited so what's going on here and this is an example of snap through what happens here is that as you pressurize this structure the pieces at the end expand all the way before the ones in here do so you have a system in which you pressurize this entire arm but because of an instability in the system the pressurization here leads to curling before the system here curls and this is again an example of using design and materials to get around the problems that you would have with conventional controllers because trying to achieve a motion of that complexity with electric motors and reels and things of this sort would be a major problem here it's just a trivial outcome of the basic design and all of this incidentally you can vary these properties by varying the mechanical properties of this and the structure of the pneumatic chambers and things of that kind now here's an example of being buckling and this was apparently you can see over here this was a heavy lift crane which I would suspect somebody got a little bit more ambitious than they should and picked up something which caused it to buckle at that point what is characteristic of this with the rigid material is once it's buckled its failed you see this and concrete pillars you take a concrete pillar and you push and you push and you push and nothing happens and then it buckles and when it's buckled it's failed with elastomers that doesn't happen so what we can do now is to build structures of this sort and I want you to look at this as having two components if you look carefully what you see is not two circles but rather two ellipses there's an ellipse and ellipse this and this is the same this and this are the same and think about these as being soft beams and what's going to happen in is the following I'm going to not expand these I'm going to contract them by applying vacuum here and as I apply vacuum these chambers will shrink this is an empty space with the thin membrane of PDMS on top of it this will shrink as it shrinks this beam will buckle but it will buckle reversibly and amazingly what will happen is that this internal piece here will rotate now I don't know what's going to happen when I do that nothing is going to happen so let me go back and find this on my computer so what you're seeing here is a rotary motion here so I've converted the linear motion that I showed in other things into a rotary motion and you begin begin to do all kinds of interesting things with this I'll show you one here what this is is a single input which is a single source of vacuum leading to massively parallel motion which in this particular case Orient's a bunch of people a bunch of people a bunch of disks or plaques here this would be very hard to do again in a system that was as simple as this one if it were hard so by this kind of beam buckling it's possible to get to some very interesting sorts of structures here I think is another one now again requires the reason for pausing on this is that what you see here this part of it is going to rotate in that direction this part is going to rotate in that direction because of the symmetry of this series of holes here with ellipses of different orientation and when you do that what happens with a single vacuum input is this collapses grabs and picks up so I mean quite a sophisticated motion for just one pressure and the nice thing I should say about negative pressure is that it is prototypically cooperative because it can't blow up you're just sucking in so you can have this kind of thing embedded in you and there's really no risk of exceeding an overpressure and having it explode in your abdomen not a good idea this just can't do it so it's intrinsically safe now here's muscle what I'm going to show you here is our muscle equivalent I'm really very happy with this kind of thing you can see the structure it's the same kind of structure that I showed you under negative pressure that is to say vacuum and as the chambers that you will see collapse what happens is it contracts this way but it does not contract that way and it's designed for this kind of anisotropic motion and here it goes if I can find my cursor where is my cursor here we are so I apply a vacuum and it lists a big weight I mean this it does about the same thing that a muscle does it the same volume and if you pause for just a second and look at the structures that are here I should have that loop but that's okay if you look at the structures what they are is a series of beams that are again buckling the beam connection may be a little bit unclear but it this is can be considered as an ensemble of buckling beams now some examples this is Josh Lessing's armed with a volleyball and that's Josh Lessing doing his thing with the volleyball this is our arm which does its thing the the it's a little lower but that's only because on this particular piece we had a thin piece of tubing and then to show that it's just a step from here to the Appassionata it can do a flip and it only took a couple of tries to do that but you don't you know technical details but this is really quite interesting because if you look at the mechanical performance of this it's not really very different than that it's about a third the speed but we can actually have the same speed that we have with jostling it's about the same efficiency maybe 50% less and it will lift about the same weight so it's a essentially the functional equivalent of muscle now not the biological equivalent but the functional equivalent now applications and I'm a big believer that applications focus the mind so I'm going to talk about four one is to show you some work that's been done by a company named soft robotics which was founded on the basis of this and I want to make remark about this well let me just show you the other examples first I'm going to talk about some further biomimetic structures I'm going to talk about a topic that we're very interested in called life that never was by which I mean if you look around there are certain kinds of motions that creatures used to move around with but you could imagine a lot of others and why aren't they used and it's now easy enough to make models of things that we can examine the question of why weren't some of these alternatives used and then the last one is some examples in biomedicine and let me just pause to comment about this first one my good friend the next student David Walt was one of the founders of a company called Illumina and those of you who are biologists will have heard of alumina alumina makes all of the boxes that are basically used 80% of the gene sequencing is done with Illumina sequencers and I was at a meeting once in some student we used to hand her hand in that case and said professor Walt we know you continue to work on this and we know that you're also doing things with proteins and how do you avoid the conflict of interest in your laboratory by having a both a company and having a laboratory activities is there's no problem he's absolutely right the reason is he says that as soon as you hand one of these problems to a company with mature professional engineers you can never keep up in university you can't possibly do as well as they do so you don't bother when you hand it over you quit you go do something else with your life and that's our approach with this kind of thing there isn't a conflict of interest we continue to work in soft robotics soft robotics works in soft robotics but what they're doing we can't possibly do and we don't actually want to do it it's not our business so let me show you a little bit about what they do here is a soft robotics gripper picking up a pumpkin here is a soft robotics gripper picking up potato chips very hard to do with hard robots because they crush the potato chips or they don't have the strength to pick up the other thing this is fruit picking and the idea here is how do you get around the difficulties of you know being a farm worker here is picking up something which is a very fragile object and then the everyday tasks which we all experience of picking up a cactus and putting the cactus down I mean that I won't ask how many of you do that every morning and then here are some agility tests and you notice what this is is positioned on the end of a hard robot and I think this will be the major use at the beginning this is something which I actually quite liked and I'm told this only took four or five tries to do catching the ball but it's really not an easy thing to do with the hard robot and here is you know another thing that's actually quite hard to do with hard robots it's really easy to do here notice three fingers you just pop it off because it's a magnetic couple and put on four and that's critically important if you're actually thinking about industrial applications because you have end effectors that are changed out all the time for these arms then here is another example using one of your next-door neighbor's devices and you can watch this thing move it's really quite good here's celery this is real you know real speed real time and here goes and what the gripper is doing is adapting to the different shapes of the celery almost effortlessly because it's a soft gripper so you don't have to have controls that watch everything in detail you combine pre-existing vision systems and this amazing tripod alarm in order to achieve this kind of motion and why do you do this and the answer is that although you don't think of yourself this way you are filthy and so if you are in an industrial fruit processing line you may feel that you just have a minor cold but actually it's the beginning of a norovirus infection in which point a hundred people get sick because you're just there and the company that's involved Louie is 25% of its revenue for one-quarter from that sector of the United States so there's a very deep interest in the food processing industry to get people completely out of food process Industrial food processing lines and this solves one of the problems in that wishes to have something that has the characteristic that it's flexible enough to pick up food which is variable mechanical strength variable shape variable size it's just easy because it's pneumatic okay now more biomimetics this is one of my favorite animals this is a spider and although the spider is a very sophisticated creature it has joints that are actually among the simplest of the arachnid joints and the way this works is here there's a a exoskeletal part which is rigid and there's the Nexus skeletal part here that's rigid and then there's effectively a little balloon in here and what happens is that when the spider the natural relate relaxed state of a spider leg is curled up and all of you have seen dead spiders and dead spiders always have their legs curled and the reason is that what happens is that this tendon here naturally pulls it in this shape and what the spider does is to pressurize the structure on the inside and expand it like that so that this is the basic force diagram for a spider joint and what we do is the same thing of using a rigid exil structure we put in a little tension element here which is an elastomeric tendon and then here we have basically a balloon and you'll see in a moment that this works quite nicely I would also say that the basic sophisticated structural elements that we use here for these polymers are the same straws that you use for drinking soda so I mean it's cheap it's really wonderful and it's a circular cylinder beam so they're very satisfactory so here is an ant we happen to have spider legs but notice this is the way the arm the leg it's at any point there's three feet on the ground let's do it again let's see what happens I know that's not going to work at any point they're three feet on the ground so it moves as a series of two triangles and it's a actually a very sophisticated motion which enables the thing to maintain stability over a wide variety of rough terrains and we haven't spent that much time working on rough terrains but here it is galloping uphill so that's an example of a biomimetic structure here's another biomimetic structure this is a water Strider or a water Strider uses four of its legs to maintain balance and two of its legs to scull and one of the characteristics of a water Strider is it has to be light enough that will stand on the surface of the water held up by surface tension and this is so it's you know does the world care about another water Strider and I don't care because I thought it was a nice demo ok so then the next thing is life that never was here I think you will be amazed at how this all works here is one of the it works you know it's it's galloping after prey here but it's not not galloping very well so it's doing the best it can I could imagine an organism that did this I mean our here it is escaping from a predator here is this is actually a pretty interesting device it's just a incompressible disc and here we put a balloon and as the balloon expands it causes the disc the Buffalo buckle and this nonlinear motion here the buckling motion combined with legs provides actually pretty good motion and if you have two of these I couldn't find the video but if you have two of these you can steer it quite well so this is a perfectly practical way of doing things why this didn't occur during the Cambrian explosion I don't know but it doesn't seem to and then if you look at this carefully each one of these as it expands because there are rigid slits it expands the balloon expands but it rotates and because it's again the ant-like construction of 3 and 3 it manages to make its way forward this must be among the least agile and beautiful walkers you've ever seen but nonetheless it works just fine so you can explore these kinds of ideas and then the final thing is actually important this is probably as important as the food handling and mechanics and the incidentally the application for that first thing that I showed you of picking up potato chips and and pumpkins and things of this kind why would you ever want to do that and the answer is you want to do that if you are working for Amazon and people buy you know they go online they buy potato chips and 5qo cans of lube oil and sweaters and slippery plastic bags and so the idea for that is to replace people who do one of the world's most horrible jobs which is packing boxes for Amazon so here's just an example of a system which will probably go into development pretty soon because it works what we have here is just a glove that this is a glove that you buy from Sears & Roebuck and we've put a simple you know bender on the outside here and connects to a pressure source in this case could be done with vacuum source if you want to do it so didn't see you move fingers why do you care and as I said an example of the use of this kind of thing is as aids to nurses surgeons get all kinds of care nurses don't get so much even though they really run lots of the medical system and one of the things you have to do if you're a nurse is the following you are in a rehab unit a patient comes in the patient has had a stroke and the stroke effects a hand and it's critically important that that hand be manipulated to begin to return it to motion otherwise you develop as a patient something called spasticity in which everything freezes in place and you sort of can't get it going again ever no matter what you do so it's really important to do that but by the way it's also not really very interesting to do it you know to sit there and help somebody move their hand this is a fine solution for that kind of problem because you can arrange it so the pressure and the timing is anything that you want it's more convenient for the patient it's more convenient for the nurse it's probably just a better deal all around and you can also take a step with this and go one further which is that it turns out these are going to be I think very useful as assist devices so if you've had a stroke you may recover some motion but not all of the motion and you would like to have something where you get a little bit more strength to pick up an apple or a cup or whatever it might be and this will provide that very gently it just gives you a little bit more strength to hold on to things and all it requires is a little compressor on a belt and some batteries and you can go ahead and do this so I think there going to be lots and lots of very useful uses of this kind of thing so let me begin to summarize first with some comments about soft robotics the first thing is that we do not think of soft robotics as competitors for hard robots I think of them as supplementary and there will be areas where there is competition because there are vast effort has gone into making hands with reels and electric motors and things of this sort and there may be cases where hard are hard hands are better but I think in general sort of soft hands are going to work better they're much cheaper and they're more adaptable the second thing is collaboration is really important if you talk to the people who make hard robots they will freely admit that the big problems with hard robots is that they are non collaborative and they don't have good mechanisms for making them collaborative they're also pretty expensive for what you get they're also very energy inefficient the the hard systems a pony sized object that is a hard robot run by a motor will typically about a factor of a hundred less efficient than a pony will be and why the biological systems are so much more efficient is not completely clear at least not completely clear to me it's an interesting basic problem in motivation in motives motion so anyway collaboration being absolutely safe around people is critically important cost is a big advantage of these soft systems lightweight means that they can operate in an unstable environment their damage resistant they're complementary kinds of things I mean they're it's different systems in different ways a very interesting issue is that if you look at hard robotic systems a lot of their cost is the control systems and there will be applications with soft systems in which you also have to have controllers but as I show you you can get conformal gripping of an irregular shaped thing an apple or whatever it might be with no controllers at all you just have one pressure controller and the materials do all the rest and I think that's very interesting this issues of nonlinearities I told you about snap through and about beam buckling but and then also I showed you the Maha disk system which is another buckling instability but there are a very large number of interesting nonlinear motions that you get in buckling in materials if you combine elastomeric and rigid materials so that looks like it's going to be very engaging and then I really believe that applications and products focus the mind so surgery and Rehab and prosthesis we've talked about agriculture both food picking and fukken handling I haven't talked about search and rescue but I'll touch on that in just a moment single-use you send the robot into Fukushima to have a look around and see what's going on by the time it's been there it's so radioactive that you don't want to get it back but you can't afford to send a stream of fifty thousand dollar robots in and throw them away these makes no difference you couldn't care less you could make them for you know fifty dollars hazardous tasks you know all of these kinds of things I think are legitimate applications for the soft robotics now a couple of other things one question is always what next everything that I've showed you up to this point is involved rubber with the same general sort of elastic properties as rubber bands we don't actually use rubber bands because they are oxidized but PDMS is you know it's an elastomer and you can get pretty good elastic strains on it this is a kind of elastomer I'm very interested in that is automobile or bicycle tires because the pressure that we use for most of the grippers that I showed you was about half an atmosphere so seven pounds per square inch and you say that doesn't sound like very much but I would point out that that's the difference in pressure between the top and the bottom of a 747 wing when the thing is flying it takes about half an atmosphere and if you don't believe that estimate the number of square inches in the wings and the the difference in pressure and you end up with about in the order of a million pounds that that can pick up so with this a kind of structure it becomes less elastomeric but I can do a hundred to a thousand pounds per square inch with those and that means that one of our longer-term objectives is to make a robot that has the characteristic that it can tear an automobile in half and my students have not embraced this project yet because they say they don't have a spare automobile but that's a lack of imagination on their part and then for a number of things in in biological applications there are truly soft materials like that's jello or some tomato aspect and there's no reason why I can't make low pressure low force things for that but that might be just the thing to hold a liver out of the way or something of that kind so I'm I think there are both opportunities here obviously a lot of these but then new kinds of structures both here and new kinds of applications here now just two final things which have to do with this this is again a kind of how does this fit into a university kind of issue then for those of you who haven't seen this this is a diagram that was put together by a guy named Don Stokes at Princeton and it's become the basis for endless debate in the United States about policy of science and the argument is the following in the period since World War two we have had a model in which there was a strict division between research that was done basically for curiosity and on a scale with low and high quest for fundamental understanding we have mr. Bohr who was not interested in applications when he thought about atoms and so he is percent used to his name is used to personalize this quadrant of high fundamental understanding and then mr. Edison is down here for high practical use and mr. Edison incidentally despised the whole idea of research he thought that if you wanted to make a better light bulb you went to your storeroom and you got fragments of bamboo and bits of ox wolf and whatever you could find and you just saw what worked there was no point in screwing around with this science stuff but as it really didn't work very well and so this was supposed to be industry and this was supposed to be university and you know we know the distinction was not that clean but many people and I fall very clearly in this category believe that this is where we really want to be and this is called in the trade the past or quadrant and who was mr. pastor and mr. pastor did two things that were interesting the first was that he was around at the time that the very first microscopes were being developed and he looked at milk and fresh milk looked like nothing and spoiled milk had all sorts of little things moving around in it and he said there must be some correlation between these little animals moving around and spoil II should milk so I'll try heating it and it'll spoil this rapidly and that became pasteurization but by the way he's often called the father of microbiology because that was the first he solved there was a problem which was food spoilage there was no science to deal with that so he invented the science to deal with a big problem in application he also was one of the very first people to do vaccination and so he is often also in a different world known as the father of applied immunology because he was I think he did rabies although I've forgotten so the question is what about this as a way of doing things I argue that this is where university should be we should look at big problems and to me robots fault is a big problem because of the arguments that I made at the beginning and there is a very much science for the soft part of big robots issue we should find ways of solving the problems with robots to deal with this big problem to enable human beings to do things that they don't want to do like for example substituting something more interesting than standing in a field being crop dusted with insecticide while you're picking fruit in the Central Valley and the summertime at a 140 degree temperature so if we can find and it's in a sense your also responsibility find jobs that are more interesting so that when you don't have to pick fruit you can go do something that's really you know more fun to do and more profitable so that's an argument for having at this end of things a component that's a company at this end of things a component that's smart students and trying to put them together you note that there is a blank quadrant here low quest for fundamental understanding low consideration of use in Washington where I spend too much of my time this is called the university quadrant and that's not where we want to be so let's try to think about that problem and I put this up because I believe as a you know I'm a professor and I believe in reading lists and so this is a reading list and let me just go through these four things my colleague clay Christensen made a brand in a sense by talking about what he called the innovators dilemma which was the inability of big companies to change their products and business model when technology changed so you know what did all of which made mechanical typewriters do Quinn computers and things like that came along and the answer is they went out of business so the question is how do big companies do this kind of innovation it's a really good and interesting question he was answered by my other colleague Jill Lepore who is a historian I think I'm not exactly sure which but someone who as one of my colleagues has said writes more rapidly than he can read so Jill just pours out really interesting stuff and she at one point worked with clay and she said not a word of this is true it has nothing to do with innovation what happens is that innovation is really a gradual accretion of improved ideas you have a product you improve it you have that product you improve it and that what we have now in the internet and what you have in automobiles is not the result of a single dramatic thing it's the result of constant improvement I happen to fall more in this category than in this category but it's interesting to read these this has to do with the question of whether industry should deal exclusively with short-term work that has the characteristic that it basically can't involve anything in terms of longer term research because the argument goes it is the obligation the fiduciary obligation of boards of directors to maximize stockholder return and what this woman Lynn stout has to say is that it is not the fiduciary obligation of boards of directors to do that rather it is the obligation of boards of directors to maximize the welfare of the corporation and that in fact might mean making sure it's around in 20 years which would be a long term investment this is not popular with goldman sachs but you know this is something you have to think about and then this is a for all of you who are students I think an absolutely wonderful book which was put together as a history of Bell Labs which everyone you know everyone believes was this giant playground in which brilliant physicists unconstrained by economic reality did brilliant physics and created the transistor and the Internet and the entire I mean and there's no question that Schreiber and and Bardeen and Shannon and the rest of these were brilliant physicists I mean they did fantastic work however the book makes it very clear the reason they were doing this was to make a more profitable telephone system and there were people who actually wanted to be in New York and talked to customers in San Francisco and they were willing to pay a lot of money to do that and as a result of that there was a demand a market for the production of ideas leading in that direction and so I think it was Baker who is the head of this operation at that point divided the process of innovation into four steps there was a step which we do was his science and then there was a step which he called invention which meant making proposing a kind of prototype product and then there was a much longer and harder step which was development which was the engineering development and regulatory clearance and product safety and shelf-life and all the rest of this kind of stuff and pre manufacturing manufacturing set up at the end of that you had a product he said if you get those three things done you've accomplished nothing because the only thing that counts is is there a market and in universities we don't know very much about markets so those of you who are interested in being entrepreneurs it's not taking your thesis and converting it into a prototype product it's figuring out that somewhere out there there is a payer who isn't necessarily the customer or the beneficiary it might be the insurer or somebody else who will actually pay you do this most intimate of human interactions which is to write you a check in return for what you have and it's a different point of view and it's very worth the effort learning how to do that and then my final slide is this one and I put it up for one reason you don't know any of these people and they're terrific people in various ways what's in to me is this red list here because there was a period not so long ago you know 20 years ago 30 years ago in which if you'd looked at that list there would have been 80% us and bits and snatches of other things and the world has truly changed the best people come from everywhere not from everywhere but there are places that are just particularly good for example the people I get from Turkey and from Iran somewhere there's an Iranian are spectacularly good I mean really spectacular and I don't know why that is I can speculate but you notice there's 1 2 3 us people on here and all the rest are other things I think this is an important part of understanding how we run a university in the future as well I don't know exactly what lesson to take from it other than to do interesting stuff you need the best people you can find from anywhere and you got to figure out where they are and how to get them and how to bring them up to speed and all the rest of that and what happens later but I suppose it goes without saying that these people did everything that I told you about so I'm here simply for advertising and I thank them and I thank you that's it you

Channel: DTUdk

Views: 24,065

Rating: 4.9083967 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 6j7FB4pCumU

Length: 53min 28sec (3208 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2016