(deep electronic music)

My name's Brett Kennedy.

I'm a roboticist here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Looking at the BB-8 droid, I would have to say

that the physics, it doesn't follow particularly well.

Trying to roll up and over anything is extremely difficult.

If you only have on wheel, you're sorta stuck,

and if you don't have enough height,

the physics just doesn't work out.

So it's very neat.

You know, this is, you know, a nice flat ground

that was working on there.

I mean, if you can imagine rolling a soccer ball along it,

that's a good surface for it,

but how many peoples do you think

that you got enough flat ground

that you can actually roll a soccer ball.

(boom)

But it looks cool.

The thing that's closest to my heart is actually R2-D2

because it's this engineer droid.

It's there to fix things.

Hello.

We can build an R2 today,

and a lot of what it does is perfectly possible

with what we have.

Even when they're shooting these scenes,

they're actually creating a semi-robotic system

to do that in the first place.

C-3PO's also strangely close because if you married

the capabilities of our humanoid systems

with what you can get out of your phones today,

marrying the two together

shouldn't be particularly difficult.

There are even some humanoid systems that we have today

that can outperform a C-3PO system.

We're doomed.

Just to pick NASA's examples,

both the Robonaut and the Valkyrie robots,

I would say today are better robots than C-3PO is.

One thing he does do that we don't do

very well with our robots,

is he actually has a flexibility in his spine.

They're just things that human technology

has trouble emulating in the biological world.

I'm going to regret this.

We're often comparing what we do to C-3PO and R2-D2

and it's, in some ways, unfair to both parties.

They're not story-telling tools

and they're not characters.

You know, I feel as a a roboticist,

and in particular, what I'm interested in is best achieved

when people stop thinking about them as robots

and they start thinking about them as solutions to problems.

Wonderful. We are now a part of the tribe.