Tech Topics - Fall 2008 - (Page 13) THE HILL FACULTY PROFILE Magnus Egerstedt: Integrating Robots into Daily Life Magnus B. Egerstedt is an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, director of the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory and associate director of research at Georgia Tech’s Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. A member of Tech’s faculty since 2001, the Swedish-born Egerstedt earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Stockholm University and a master’s in engineering physics and doctorate in applied mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology. Winner of a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2003, Egerstedt serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. Why did you choose a career in academia? As a graduate student I really enjoyed the intellectual freedom that comes with an academic career, and I also realized that I was actually pretty good at it. My particular talent seems to be a knack for asking new and interesting questions — as opposed to actually answering them. What brought you to Georgia Tech? The fact that Georgia Tech is a dynamic, worldclass research institute, combined with the fact that my wife was born in Atlanta, made Georgia Tech a no-brainer. Please explain your research in just a sentence. I try to build up complex dynamic behaviors from collections of primitive motion patterns, with applications ranging from swarm robotics to self-driving cars. What’s with the puppet? The Magnus look-alike puppet is a robotic marionette, produced in collaboration with the Atlanta Center for Puppetry Arts. Marionettes have highly complex dynamics — much more so than most other robots — and, at the same time, people are incredibly skilled at controlling them. This project aims at understanding and automating what human puppeteers do, with implications to how all sorts of other robots should be controlled, such as hopping, swimming, rolling, flying and slithering robots. Fill in the blank: I don’t leave home without Giving my kids a hug and making sure I’ve got my BlackBerry. What are you reading? David Sedaris’ “When You Are Engulfed in Flames” and Elizabeth Kostova’s “The Historian.” What’s on your iPod? Nouvelle Vague, a wonderful French group playing bossa nova versions of classic punk and rock songs. What was your first car? A Honda Civic that I got when I moved to Atlanta. Where will the world be in regard to robotics in 10 years? Twenty years? In 10 years, we will finally have seen a massive transition from research prototypes to safe, reasonably cheap and robust, commercially available robotic gadgets, ranging from service robots — vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, chefs, pet sitters — to transportation, namely autopilots for cars, to biomedical applications such as robotic prosthetics and robot surgeons. In 20 years, these robots will be much more tightly integrated into all aspects of our daily life so that we hardly notice them anymore, much like embedded computing devices are today. TechTopics | Fall 2008 13
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