On Journalism and Robots
Disclaimer: The following thoughts and opinions are not indicative or representative of the IHMC or any other individual involved with the Institute save for myself. I am not a member of the FastRunner team. The purpose of this is not to understate the involvement of Dr. Russ Tedrake and the rest of his team at MIT. Their experience in controls is legendary and it’s pretty safe to assume that their involvement on the project provides value that can’t be measured or else we wouldn’t have teamed up with them. What follows here are my own personal thoughts on some events that unfolded yesterday, and serve mostly as an idictment of Gawker Media, an organization that has fallen so deep in to the depths of sensationalist faux-journalism that they should be ashamed to wake up in the morning. This is, of course, just my opinion. But it’s what that I’m going to support by calling them out on some of their bullshit.
Yesterday, the lab that I work at made a splash on the tech blogs. It was really, really cool. Although not a project that I am involved with directly, it’s a project that friends have worked on and is definitely a project that has held my attention for a while now. The project is the brainchild of a guy who’s been independently studying the behavior and biomechanics of ostriches for ages. It’s being worked on by some of the sharpest mechanical and robotics engineers in the world. And it’s a project with immeasurable ambition. It’s called FastRunner, and it’s in response to a DARPA challenge. We are working with MIT on the project, and their team is led by Dr. Russ Tedrake. IEEE Spectrum posted about the robot the other day, posted a clip of Dr. Tedrake talking about it, and it went on a roll of getting picked up from there. One little thing is that most everyone who picked it up assumed that the project was MIT’s baby. The blogs that DID mention us, only did so in passing. Even the IEEE Spectrum did the same thing at first. They have since gone back to change their posting to identify us as the lead on the project and to discuss our lab’s history with legged robots (which is almost all of our history with robots).
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