- [Announcer] Funding for the "Secret Life of Scientists" is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
(air transitory music) (soft music and keyboard clicking) - My goal is to make robots that make a practical difference in the world.
By understanding a need, trying to create an intelligence that can understand that need, sensors to understand the environment and mechanical parts, arms, hands and motors put that all together, so when you push a button and the robot comes alive, the right thing happens.
That makes sense (filming crew chuckle).
I got more time, I can make use of that.
(air transitory music) (soft music and keyboard clicking) I do think of myself as a normal guy.
I've always been very interested in understanding how things work.
As a kid, I was given the opportunity to break things, blow things up, take things apart.
Radios, remote controlled cars and when the lawn mower would break I would get all excited if it was broken because that mean I was allowed to go finish breaking it.
And so from a very early age I was trying and exploring new activities and new things.
When I was a graduate student at MIT, the idea of of sending robots into space was very exciting to me.
NASA at the time was building robots to go into space but they're the size of a bus, size of a hummer, they're huge.
And scratch your head and say, "Well, why not build a little robot?
So you can put it in a smaller spacecraft."
And so my undergraduate thesis we created a six-legged walking robot, which showed you can make a very small thing with legs that could climb over large obstacles, rocks that you might find on another planet.
It wasn't very practical, it didn't go very far, but it got people thinking.
The second robot that I built was a small robot called Tooth and it was a little mini dune buggy had claws on the front, and that got noticed.
That little robot led to a next generation which I wasn't involved in called Rocky.
And Rocky 6 was actually the soldier of rover that went to Mars.
(crew applauding) That was tremendously exciting to just watch on TV, watch on the internet and see this robot going to Mars and know that that small effort could ultimately change the world, in a small way.
Robots are cool because you're creating actual creatures things that can move around and can help people.
I'm Colin Angle and I build robots.
(air transitory music) (soft music and keyboard clicking) Folding laundry.
Just because I hate folding laundry.
Benjamin Franklin.
He was multidimensional.
Come on, don't you have better things to do, just push a button and leave.
I think I vacuumed once, two years ago.
Backside RE-360.
You're going backwards and pop off the back of the board into the air and do a complete 360 and then land it.
So, I can get some cred for doing that.
"WALL.E".
"WALL.E" is practical, "WALL.E" has a mission and you could actually build "WALL.E".
She was sitting at the breakfast table eating Cheerios, and she was two-and-a-half years old and took her hand and went, knocked them all onto the floor.
And she looked at me and said, "Don't worry Daddy, the robot will get it."
Needs to have a motion, frankly, because logic is wholly inadequate to make it through an average day.
Mr. Spock probably would make it about to nine AM before he was hopelessly muddled by something.
Engineers have some amazing lives that you would never guess.
Stand-up comic, pilots, triathlete.
If you get a chance to get to know an engineer or two you might find something unexpected.
How about her Harrison Ford?
(air transitory music) (soft music and keyboard clicking) I like to think of myself as being sufficiently crazy to try new things.
(upbeat music) The science that I'm involved with requires comfort in uncertainty.
I spent a lot of time not knowing exactly what's going to happen and how it could all come together.
And that's cool.
And I scratched the same itch outside of work where I can't wait to try something that I've never done before.
Done wakeboarding, snowboarding, hikeboarding, martial arts, wrestling and recently started rock climbing.
Well, when I was learning to shoot archery, the idea of sort of repeatedly trying to hit the center of the target over and over again may have offended my restlessness.
And so I spent a long time trying to hit the back of another arrow with the first arrow, which is hard.
And I never succeeded in that.
I kept thinking about, rather than trying to hit the center of the target, maybe I could figure out how to knock the target off the stand and that seemed like good fun.
So I went through a number of years at summer camp trying to figure out how to cause as many problems as I could on the archery range.
(soft music) It wasn't till the last year where the instructor said (indistinct) we've been having fun for a long time, why don't you try to hit the center of the target?
And I found that I actually could.
You can keep giving yourself these experiences of being on a learning curve by trying new things whether it be snowboarding or canoeing, wakeboarding or designing a new robot, it's incredibly exciting.
The next frontier for me is dancing.
That's gonna be even more scary.
(soft music)
