NASA Would Take C-3P0 to Space But Not R2-D2 or BB-8
Released on 12/08/2015
(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.
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