#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