Colin Angle: Big Inventions

(upbeat music) - 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 mean, I was allowed to go finish breaking it Then 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 were the size of a bus, size of a hummer, they're huge.

You would scratch your head and say, well why, not build a little robot?

So you can put it in a smaller spacecraft.

And so by 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 and had claws on the front and that got noticed.

That little robot led to a next generation, which I wasn't involved and called Rocky.

And Rocky six was actually the soldier of Rover that went to Mars.

(people cheering) I thought it 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.

(upbeat music) 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.