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

Russ Tedrake is a roboticist and professor at MIT and vice
president of robotics research at TRI. He works on control of
robots in interesting, complicated, underactuated, stochastic,
difficult to model situations.


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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you
should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.


OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
04:29 – Passive dynamic walking
09:40 – Animal movement
13:34 – Control vs Dynamics
15:49 – Bipedal walking
20:56 – Running barefoot
33:01 – Think rigorously with machine learning
44:05 – DARPA Robotics Challenge
1:07:14 – When will a robot become UFC champion
1:18:32 – Black Mirror Robot Dog
1:34:01 – Robot control
1:47:00 – Simulating robots
2:00:33 – Home robotics
2:03:40 – Soft robotics
2:07:25 – Underactuated robotics
2:20:42 – Touch
2:28:55 – Book recommendations
2:40:08 – Advice to young people
2:44:20 – Meaning of life