Happy little robots
Playing with wires.
Growing up, I was always the electrician at home. People who’ve grown up in Pakistan will know — there is no such thing as good wiring anywhere in Pakistan.
No, seriously. There just isn’t. We had short circuits all the time. The first time we got a microwave, we couldn’t have it running at the same time as any air conditioner in the house. The electricity grid for most (all) cities is also in shambles. Electricity gets cut off on a daily schedule for “load-shedding”, but whenever it got turned back on by the city — you better have your important electronics unplugged or else the power supply might get fried due to an electric surge. Surge protectors were a luxury — still true for most towns.
As a kid with no concept of the cost of things, this always felt like a great opportunity to open up a new electronic device to see if I could fix it. Whenever things broke down, I’d be excited about it.
By grad school, I was the one fixing CPUs and laptops, mostly upgrading them, for other students in the girls’ dorms. The most impressive and intricate devices I upgraded back in the day were macbooks, no surprise there. They’re almost works of art. But, honestly, I felt privileged to have had the opportunity to play with electronics so freely from a young age so they didn’t scare me. My mother encouraged it. She’s a fixer herself. She doesn’t do much electronics, but she’ll build you a designer shelf with her own hands in less than a day!
Robots can fold laundry.
The first time I attended SIGGRAPH was as a Student Volunteer in 2010. It was during my Masters at the VizLab department at Texas A&M and I was super excited that I could attend (thanks to SIGGRAPH’s awesome student volunteer program!). One of the jobs I had to do as a student volunteer was to help the folks demoing their new projects in the “Emerging Technologies” program. The one team who’s demo I was part of that I’ll always remember was these very nice guys from Japan who had made a laundry folding robot. They called it FOLD-E, a nice little homage to WALL-E that had just recently come out. I thought it was all brilliant — the name, the robot.
It was a prototype of a robot using computer vision and motors to solve a fairly complex problem — clothes are very deformable. It worked well. You had to lay the shirts in a very specific way. Then you had to have a very specific lighting. They brought their own lights. The robot would take a moment to analyze the clothes, then start folding. The robot worked, but very slowly. Sometimes it got confused and crumpled up the shirt so you had to set it right again. It could only work on t-shirts and pants. They told me they were working on programming it to fold dress shirts next. I got to demo this robot to a number of folks, and I got to troubleshoot it quite a few times whenever it got stuck. It was a good learning moment for me to realise how slowly robots will actually evolve with the technologies we had at the time.
It’s 2024 now, and we still don’t have a laundry folding robot. Turns out, folding laundry has always been a much more complex problem than we anticipated.
God bless the Arduino!
I never had actual electrical engineering education. It wasn’t until grad school at Texas A&M where I got a real taste of soldering electronic circuits for LEDs, sensors, motors, actuators, etc. and then controlling them through code — thanks to the mighty little Arduino! This was during the one short course at the VizLab Department at A&M, newly introduced by the phenomenal Phillip Galanter. Funnily enough, the course was called Generative Computing — would have been a very popular course these days, what with the hype for generative methods nowadays. But back then it was just a handful of people in the class. Once I got the hang of how to work with sensors, how to program them to respond to certain inputs, and how to control motors and other end effectors with code — I made Heidi.
Heidi.
Heidi was a shy little robot. In a crowded space, she’d keep her head tucked in so that nobody could see her. She was shy, but very curious about people, so she’d perk up when she saw someone approaching. She had mismatched eyes, one green, one yellow. She was ticklish on her ears so if you scratched either of the ears she’d start giggling. She was sensitive about her nose though. “Do not touch my nose”, said a sign next to her. People would still do it and she’d immediately duck her head back in. If you kept bugging her like that, she’d duck her head in and roll away from you.
I was also a bit too shy back then to talk about things I built. It was interesting to me, and I knew the things I build were super awesome. But only to me. So I didn’t tell people much about Heidi back then — I just quietly brought her to our annual VizLab studio demos. But since then, whenever I’ve told people about Heidi, they’ve loved the story. Young and old, tech / non-tech, and especially groups of younger girls at our Open House sessions in Germany or at conferences. It makes them realise they can also build their own little robots. It makes them realise they can make any kind of electronics. So that’s why I tell people more often about Heidi now.
Someday, I’d like to go back to building more robots with emotions, behaviours and personalities. When I joined Max Planck Institute to work at Michael Black’s lab as a scientific engineer, I told Michael that if I ever did a PhD, I’d want to do it with Cynthia Breazel. I want to build robots with emotions and interactions like people. I think Michael took that as a challenge. He is now my co-founder at Meshcapade and we’re now starting to make interactive behaviors for robots that live inside the computer for now. With a little bit more time and a few more people at Meshcapade, we’ll also finally bring these robots into the physical world!
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