IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2015 - 161

broader range of people than just the
robot whisperers.
SH: I am not sure I can answer this
with a single distinct memory. I think I
was always attracted to research in general, but not necessarily decisive about
the particular road I wanted to take. I
guess my general interest in understanding how
the human
Two awards were
works and my
technical trainpresented in 2015,
ing led me to
the RAS Early Career
robotics.
RJW III:
Award for academic
The first robot I
and industry
built was for a
class project as a
or government.
freshman in college, and it was
made from LEGOs and used Hall effect
sensors to find its way through a maze.
Today, this seems mundane, but you
have to remember that this was before
LEGO Mindstorms and before First
Robotics had succeeded in getting kids
of all ages building robots-I did not
know much at all about robots before
college.
But perhaps the more transformative, career-changing event for me with
robots was Operation Lindbergh, where
the Zeus surgical robot was used by a
surgeon in the United States to remove
the gallbladder from a patient in France.
Reading news articles about this my
senior year is what got me excited about
going to grad school. I may not have
gone to grad school or become a roboticist at all if this event had not happened
when it did, opening my mind to the
potential of robots in medicine.

Q: What is the single most important
(robotics related) question your
research/work is aiming to solve?
LT: How do we prepare robots for
everyday people and how do we prepare
those people for robotics?
SH: How do you make robots that
exist safely side by side with humans
and support them in every possible
way?
RJW III: The single most
important question for me is how can
we help surgeons do better surgeries,

and, hence, patients have better outcomes. I am happy building any kind
of device or doing any kind of research,
whether it is a robot or not, if it has the
potential to cure a disease, or improve
quality of life. In my career so far, this
overarching goal has been expressed
through building a variety of robots to
make surgeries less invasive-which
means smaller robots-which means
robots that are highly elastic and can
bend. Therefore, I have spent a lot of
time translating ideas from mechanics
to robotics; to design, model, and control thin, flexible robots we call continuum robots.

Q: You are all working on robots/systems/concepts that can/could directly
affect people's life. At what point will
your research become part of our
everyday life?
LT: My human-robot interaction
research on remote presence systems
spun out from Willow Garage into Suitable Technologies, who are producing
the Beam, which you can try and buy
today. Beams are already in offices,
homes, and have even visited the White
House.
SH: I think it is rather safe to say
that it has started already. I guess that
my own work, and the work of many
others whose great impact on robotics
has also inspired me, on safe robots and
soft-robotics control has changed
robotics substantially over the last
years. Robotic coworkers, teaming up
with humans in industrial tasks, have
already become reality and do fundamentally change manufacturing as we
know it. Furthermore, our results and
technologies will presumably enable
the first true service robotics generation, entering our everyday life in applications such as healthcare or basic
domestic tasks.
RJB III: Some of the devices
from my lab are ready for commercialization right now, and we have had several patents licensed by industry
partners. Products arising from these
have yet to reach the market, but a couple of our simpler (nonrobotic) devices
have been used in live human patients.
Bridging the gap (regulatory hurdles,

market forces, and so on) between a
system that works well in a lab and a
widely disseminated medical device is
one of the grand challenges in surgical
robotics, and one we continue to work
hard on every single day in my lab at
Vanderbilt.

Q: What motivates you to work extra
hours (late in the evening/early in the
morning)? Where do you see the benefit of it?
LT: I am trying my best to live a
more balanced life, which means working more efficiently, not necessarily the
same long hours I used to work before.
There is benefit to being able to sprint
when there's an important deadline, but
I see my life more like a marathon than
a set of back-to-back-to-back sprints.
That said, a recent set of late nights and
weekends of work was dedicated to coorganizing the program for the ACM/
IEEE Human-Robot Interaction conference and that was worthwhile,
because this research community is so
important to me and to the advancement of our field.
SH: I feel privileged to be able to
do what I love and do not need particular motivation, except for my natural
curiosity. Apart from that, I aim for generating technology that could make a
difference in people's lives.
RJW III: My students! They
work so hard for me, how can I not
work hard for them? I was up past 1
a.m. last night editing a Ph.D. thesis to
help a student meet a deadline and did
not mind it at all. It is exciting stuff, and
it hardly feels like work. I truly enjoy
the mentoring aspects of my job as a
professor. Seeing students mature in
their thinking and research ability from
when they arrive fresh out of an undergrad program, until they leave as faculty/industry peers I respect and
admire in so many ways is one of the
great joys of being a professor.
Q: How do you see the work-life balance in your life?
LT: I am working on this, but I am
far from successful so far. As much as
possible, I do the kind of work that I
would do even if I was not being paid.

DECEMBER 2015

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

161

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