Meet Madeline, the Robot Tamer | Short Film Showcase

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I'm really passionate about inventing better ways to communicate with machines that can make things. For a long time, industrial robots have been the culprit of automation and replacing human labor. Basically, all the easy tasks to automate have been automated. Now, what we're working on is using these tools to enhance or augment human labor, and that, to me, is very exciting.

Industrial robots are really fantastic. CNC machines— you put a different tool at the end of the arm, and all of a sudden, they can do a whole different thing. So, in the morning, you can be doing spot welding; in the evening, you can be doing painting. It's just highly adaptable.

Another thing that I'm really working towards is finding ways to bring these machines out of factories and into live environments— onto construction sites or onto film sets. There's a chance for unpredictable objects, like people, to be moving into the environment. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to build the system: to give this robot eyes so that it could actually see me, and we can safely collaborate in a shared space.

If I'm wearing or if I'm holding these motion capture markers, it knows where I am in space; it knows how I'm moving in space. Now, all of a sudden, we can give the machine a nuanced understanding of our intention in that space. You can get someone who's never seen a robot before and have them begin to do creative things with just a couple of minutes of interacting with the machine.

Finding ways to bring in digital design and fabrication technologies to that could be monumental. If we can figure out how to do that safely, it's really an amazing benefit of being here in Pier 9. It is physical space and the mental space to just experiment, and it's been really fantastic to have the freedom to question how we do systems now and push the boundaries of what's possible with [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] robotics. [Music] a