Six-legged, surprisingly social, and under the sea: my journey working with robots
Diving in Santorini with Oussama Khatib’s humanoid underwater robot

Six-legged, surprisingly social, and under the sea: my journey working with robots

In 2013 I first got my first real life glimpse at robotics. That year ICRA, a robotics conference, was taking place in my university town of Karlsruhe and my brother-in-law tipped me off on how to sneak into the conference. I was able to visit the showrooms (and even some talks!) and I was instantly mesmerized by all these robots. Some were small and cute and looked like toys, and others, big and metallic, looked like they just came off the factory floor. Some were even driving through the crowd handing out sweets! Inspired, I started looking more into robotics and all its cool applications. Think rescue robots! Or social robots! 

That same year, I did a semester abroad in Prague and for the first time in my undergraduate studies, I was able to choose my classes. I decided to take a class where we programmed Lego Mindstorm robots to compete against each other in 3 rounds, as well as classes on Machine Learning and Computer Vision. And while building Lego was fun, I enjoyed the programming part even more, and was intrigued by Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and how to replicate human intelligence. 

Right after Prague, I went to Japan to write my bachelor thesis at Denso IT Laboratory, working on a topic in Machine Learning. In Japan — besides many other cultural shocks —  I noticed a completely different mentality towards technology. Nobody there feared it— rather they embraced it. Even back in 2014, there were already robot sushi places (although the extent of the robotic part of this was a conveyor belt that stopped right in front of you…). While I was there, Softbank introduced a robotic salesman to their stores, the robot Pepper. Of course I had to check it out! 

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My first time meeting Pepper in Japan

Pepper was programmed to greet people, figure out what they were looking for, and then guide them to a human salesman. Unfortunately I did not speak much Japanese, so I was neither able to talk to the robot nor understand what it was telling people, but it was still fun to watch—and fun to observe where it got the interpersonal communication wrong. The robot wasn’t able to recognize when people wanted to leave, so a human operator had to be constantly on standby to rescue people that felt trapped in a conversation with the robot, but were too polite to walk away.

Back in Karlsruhe, I decided to get some hands-on experience with robots and started working on a research project with the robot LAURON, a 6-legged bio-inspired robot modeled after a stick insect. I noticed quickly how difficult it could be to work with robotics hardware. My job was to write software for the robot, but I’d sometimes find myself tweaking the hardware too. And because of the robot’s design, if there was something wrong with one leg, there was something wrong with all six legs – which took many hours of disassembly and reassembly to correct. Back then, I decided that working with hardware was not for me, and instead chose to pursue aspects of Machine Learning that were further removed from the literal nuts and bolts of robotics.

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LAURON, the six-legged bio-inspired robot I worked with, modeled after a stick bug

In my Master studies at Stanford I focused on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, taking classes in computer vision, natural language processing and robotics. I couldn’t resist another shot at working with a real robot, though, and decided to do some research with Oussama Khatib on his humanoid underwater robot OceanOne. After all, I rationalized, if I only worked on adding cameras and some basic vision capabilities to the robot, I would be far enough removed from the actual hardware to avoid hours of repairing bolts and gears (it kinda worked). The highlight: Going on a mission to Santorini, Greece, where the robot was starring in a documentary for TerraX, and getting to dive with the robot!

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Craning OceanOne into the sea for his stunt in the documentary, in Santorini, Greece. 

After a short excursion at Apple making iOS smarter, I’m now excited to continue the passion that was sparkled all these years ago at ICRA 2013 with my work at Intrinsic. Given the highs and lows of my relationship with robots, I'm especially excited to make robots more accessible and easier to program. Learn more at www.intrinsic.ai.





Carina Mieth

Mieth & Greet 👋 | Industrial AI & Quantum Computing | Smart & Sustainable Manufacturing | Women in AI & Robotics

2y

I just stumbled across this by accident and am deeply inspired by your story. Thanks for sharing!

Hauke Sandhaus

PhD Student Information Science at Cornell. Experienced in UX, AVs, AI.

2y

Congratulations Martina! What an exciting opportunity!

Ahmed Eldeeb

Machine Learning and Data Science

2y

This is so cool! Congratulations! I’m excited for you, and I’ll check out the documentary 😊

Diana Skaar

Technology Executive at (Google) X | Community Organizer | Changemaker

2y

I'm so excited to be on this next journey with you

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