Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department - The New York Times

9/12/2015 Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department - The New York Times

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Uber Would Like to BuyYour Robotics Department

ByCLIVETHOMPSON SEPT. 11, 2015

In the center of the lab, CHIMP stretched out one huge arm, then gracefullyunfurled its three metal fingers, as if about to beckon someone. On its head,two rapidly rotating laser scanners enabled it to monitor its surroundings,but the engineers standing nearby were wary nonetheless. If the robot afive-foot-tall, crimson-colored humanoid machine designed to emulate thecomplex movements of the human body moved suddenly and hit one ofthem accidentally in the chest, it could easily break some ribs. Thecontraption weighs 407 pounds and is powerful enough to bench-press 150pounds.

Its a hazard for humans to be around we wear steel-toed boots,Michael Vande Weghe told me. A tall, lanky man who was indeed wearingsteel-toed footwear, Vande Weghe has spent the last two years as one of theengineers building CHIMP for the National Robotics Engineering Center atCarnegie Mellon University. (CHIMP stands for C.M.U. Highly IntelligentMobile Platform.) The robot is one the best-known creations to emergefrom the center: Earlier this year it placed third in a competition sponsoredby the federal government to create an automaton able to perform severalhumanlike tasks, like cutting a precise hole in a wall with a hand-held



electric saw, climbing a small set of stairs and opening a door. Though itfinished behind teams from South Korea and Florida, CHIMP made robothistory by falling and then returning to its feet. Other robots fell overwithout getting back up.

I aged 10 years when that robot fell down, and I gained it back whenhe got up again, says Herman Herman, the director of the center, who hasworked there since its founding 20 years ago. The lab has come by itsstoried reputation by producing robot technology for clients like theAmerican military and heavy-machinery manufacturers like John Deereand Caterpillar. Today the place is crammed with projects like Crusher,an armor-plated military robot that can find its own way across craggy,wooded terrain, and a smaller wheeled robot designed to explore mines forthe company Anglo American. Plaques hanging along a wall commemoratesome of the hundreds of patents received over the years by the centers 100-person staff.

There was something missing from the lab today, though. In February,a group of some 40 employees including several longtime senior labmembers resigned. They had been lured away, en masse, by a newemployer: Uber.

The San Francisco firm, famous for its popular car-dispatch services, isgetting into the robotics business itself. In February, barely a mile away, itopened the Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, where the formeruniversity researchers are now developing technologies to help Uber extendits reach over the roads. These include producing better maps and saferguidance systems and most lucrative, even if theyre still years away,Ubers very own fleet of self-driving cars.

It was a startling raid of talent. By offering private-sector salariessubstantially higher than university equivalents (as well as a chance to earnequity in a fast-rising tech firm), Uber was able to acquire a hefty chunk ofthe centers brain trust, including some top experts in autonomous vehicles.In doing so, the company has placed a bet that self-driving robots are no



longer the stuff of scholarly visions but valuable intellectual property.

Carnegie Mellons experience is a familiar one in the world of high-techresearch. As a field matures, universities can wake up one day to findmoney flooding the premises; suddenly theyre in a talent war with deep-pocketed firms from Silicon Valley. The impacts are also intellectual. Whenresearchers leave for industry, their expertise winks off the map; theyusually cant publish what they discover or even talk about it over drinkswith former colleagues. In the long run, raids can generate symbioticrelationships; researchers who return to academia years later bring theirreal-world experience into the classroom and can draw on their network ofwealthy industry contacts to fund university research. But as CarnegieMellons roboticists are finding, reaching that end point can make for abumpy ride.

Theresauseful high-tech concept called the Technology ReadinessLevel that helps explain why Uber pounced when it did. NASA came upwith this scale to gauge the maturity of a given field of applied science. AtLevel 1, an area of scientific inquiry is so new that nobody understands itsbasic principles. At Level 9, the related technology is so mature its ready tobe used in commercial products. Basically, 1 is like Newton figuring outthe laws of gravity, and 9 is youve been launching rockets into space,constantly and reliably, says Jeff Legault, the director of strategic businessdevelopment at the National Robotics Engineering Center.

Todays early-stage inquiry so-called basic research, the Level 1work, where scientists are still puzzling over fundamental questions isfinanced almost exclusively by the federal government. Its too far out, toospeculative, to attract much investment; it isnt clear if anyone will makeany money on it. This wasnt always the case. Decades ago, corporationswere more willing to engage in Level 1, moonshot research. Bell Labssupported the work that led to the transistor when it was far from clear thatthere would be a market for it; Xerox supported research into thewindows style of computing years before the market existed for such aninterface. But in the last few decades, the vista of corporate R.&D. has



shrunk as markets and executives have focused more on short-term profit,says Marc Kastner, an M.I.T. physicist. The far-off research questions havebeen left to university labs, though they struggle, too: The percentage of thefederal budget devoted to basic research is about half of what it was in1968.

These days, private industry gets involved mostly when a field ofresearch has matured to the midpoint of the NASA scale. In the 90s andearly 00s this happened to machine learning, the science of gettingmachines to recognize patterns. It had long been an academic concern. Butonce online firms like Google began grappling with big data search-engine requests, social-network behavior, email the field becamesuddenly lucrative, and Silicon Valley started frantically hiring experts awayfrom Stanford.

Researchers who leave for industry are paid better, certainly, and oftenget sizable research budgets. But the intellectual register of their workchanges. No more exploring hard, basic problems out of deep curiosity;they need to solve problems that will make their employers money. Whenthe computer scientist Andrew Moore left Carnegie Mellon to become a vicepresident of Google in 2006, his new job, he says, was to be as useful aspossible to someone trying to buy something which is to say, to helpGoogles algorithms learn that the search query my basement is smellyshould point to a selection of dehumidifiers.

At Carnegie Mellon, robotics scholars spent decades slowlyapproaching this moment. In 1979, the university founded its RoboticsInstitute to tackle the basic problems in the field, like how to interpretsensor data so a robot could see. But by the 80s, government agenciesand private firms struggling to create industrial and military robots wereasking Carnegie Mellons roboticists for help. To capitalize on this demand,the school established its National Robotics Engineering Center in 1995 andstaffed it with a few faculty members and a large complement of full-timeengineers, often young robotics graduates.



In effect, Carnegie Mellon used the NASA scale to carve up its roboticsresearch. The Robotics Institute would handle research from Levels 1 to 3or 4, while the center would take technology from there and move it to 7. IfJohn Deere approached the center for help with a self-driving tractor, forexample, the center would produce a prototype that could be mass-produced while publishing its research publicly.

Typically, Legault says, people who call us, theyve been lookingaround, and theres nobody else who can solve their problem.

Bythelate2000s, the field of wheeled robots was taking off.Google had started its effort to make self-driving cars, and in 2007roboticists at Carnegie Mellon won a military competition to produce a carthat could navigate city streets; automakers were developing systems tohelp drivers stay in their lanes. A sort of Silicon Valley of robotics began toemerge in Pittsburgh as investors funneled money to firms like 4Moms(which makes robotized strollers) and Aethon (robots that deliver suppliesin hospitals), heavily staffed by former Carnegie Mellon robotics experts.Today, nearly a third of the universitys faculty in the field are involved in astart-up on the side.

If youre well versed in the area of robotics right now and youre notworking on self-driving cars, youre either an idiot or you have more of apassion for something else, says Jerry Pratt, head of a robotics team inPensacola that worked on a humanoid robot that beat Carnegie MellonsCHIMP in this years contest. Its a multibillion- if not trillion-dollarindustry.

This precise epiphany was dawning on many at the National RoboticsEngineering Center. One was John Bares, who ran the lab from 1997 to2010. He had always loved the intellectual challenge of the work but feltfrustrated that his projects produced only prototypes for clients, who mightdo nothing with them. Wed do a fantastic job engineering, do an advancedprototype, so-called throw it over the fence and it would sit, he told me.Bares wanted to invent something and then sell it himself. I just had the



itch to do product, he says. In 2010, he left the center to found a start-up,Carnegie Robotics. Within a year, his team built a robot that could detectland mines, which the Army bought.

In 2014, Bares got an email from Uber that led to a meeting with itschief executive, Travis Kalanick. Kalanick said he planned to open a lab inPittsburgh and told Bares that Ubers mission was to increase the efficientuse of cars, which would have environmental benefits. Bares waspersuaded, and in January of this year he joined Uber. He knew that manyof his former colleagues at Carnegie Mellon shared his entrepreneurialimpulses.

Back at the lab, in fact, a group was already preparing to break away.One of Ubers recent hires from the National Robotics Engineering Centertold me that he and his 20-person team had long found their lab workrewarding, but that they had been stunned by the rush of money intorobotics in recent years: Google bought Nest, the Internet-connectedthermostat firm, for $3.2 billion; Makerbot, a start-up that createsinexpensive 3-D printers, was acquired by another company for $604million. We were just flabbergasted, he says, adding that his team couldhave invented those products in two weeks.

I have this big, well-tuned machine of a team, standing there lookingat me saying, Hey, man, when the hell are we going to do something big?he says. His response was: Im an entrepreneur at heart. Lets do it. Hevisited venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and lined up tens of millions ofdollars to fund a robotics start-up. By summer 2014, he informed theNational Robotics Engineering Center that he and his team meant to exit onJan. 1 this year.

Then Bares made his own offer: Join Ubers new lab, where, he said,their efforts would impact the world. The team would get bigger salaries,and Uber could produce their inventions quickly. The team leader agonizedover the choice; hed spent the last year dreaming of his own start-up. Buthe opted for Uber. They have the road map, and they have the fuel, he



told me. They just need some tech. Here they are with an actual market forwhat we do.

Thescaleof Ubers recruitment surprised nearly everyone I spoke to.I know of no place that was raided like that, says Julio Ottino, dean of theMcCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at NorthwesternUniversity. People at Carnegie Mellon did not want to talk about it; theydeclined even to confirm how many staff members had left. In anacademic institution, people do come and go, Herman says. The onlyunique thing here was the number is slightly larger. In a typical year, hesays, between five and 10 researchers leave for industry. I tell people,After you work here for a few years, you can get a job anywhere.

The departures left Herman and Moore, who last year returned fromGoogle to Carnegie Mellon as dean of the computer science school,scrambling to find replacements. Theyve already hired a dozen newresearchers, from institutions like Columbia University. In the long run,though, Moore says, they have to develop their own young scientists,encouraging robotics grad students to apply to the center: Wereresponsible for building all these duplicates of all these luminaries inrobotics.

Many familiar with Carnegie Mellon say the raid had a silver living,because it signals that the university is a hot place to work. One of those isRichard Florida, the urban-studies scholar who argues for the economicrole of the creative class in a citys economy. Florida himself was a socialscientist at Carnegie Mellon for years, and his 2002 book, The Rise of theCreative Class, was inspired in part by his noticing, in the 90s, thatengineers there with a good high-tech idea had to leave for the East or WestCoast to find investors, and they rarely came back. Pittsburgh has alwaysbeen this caldron, but they couldnt get scale, Florida says. What Uberprovides is immediate scale. And funding: This month, the companyannounced a $5.5 million gift to Carnegie Mellon to support a new roboticschair and three fellowships.



A booming local industry gives but also, inevitably, takes. Stanfordgains luster from Silicon Valley, along with money for research. But thevalley lures away promising scholars; in recent years, several havedecamped to oversee online-course start-ups, for example, like SebastianThrun (who founded Udacity) and Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng (whocreated Coursera).

Nobody is happy about that, but those are decisions that the facultymake, and they make them for rational reasons, says Jennifer Widom, wholed Stanfords computer-science department from 2009 to 2014. Short-term faculty stints in industry can be a good thing, she points out, becausethose who return can share with students their hard-won practicalknowledge.

Thedeeperimpact of Ubers hiring may be how it affects what ideasroboticists will pursue. After all, 20 years ago, if you wanted to push thefrontiers of robotics, you had primarily abstract academic options toconsider. But now that the field is booming, a faculty member or gradstudent with an ambitious idea has to ask questions: Wheres the best placeto pursue my research at a university, or in the corporate R.&D. lab at aplace like Uber? What type of engineering work is so far out, so hard and sounsolved that it can only be done at a university?

Moore says there is still blue-sky work to be done in robotics. Oneexample is the problem of grasping. Sure, wheeled robots can steerthemselves through an Amazon shipping center pretty accurately; a self-driving car can trundle around San Francisco without running people over.But no robot can yet match the dexterity of a human hand. It cant fluidlyand confidently manipulate objects on a table like picking up a coffeemug (assuming it can first identify it). This is, Moore notes, a huge researchchallenge in the humanitarian and health fields, because such robots couldtransform the lives of people with mobility issues, including both theelderly and people with spinal-cord injuries.

Theres maybe about one million people in the United States who, if



they dropped their TV remote on the floor, just have to wait for a caregiverto come along and pick it up for them, Moore says. Grasping is a classicearly-stage technology, one that the Ubers of the world wont spend anytime developing because the payoffs are too far away. Moore says he alsowants this research done in a university setting so the results will bepublished openly and benefit the world at large.

But given the lucrative payouts that come when Silicon Valley decidesto invest in a field compared with the evaporating federal funds forbasic research will there even be academics who want to do early-stage,public-minded work?

Based on my conversations at Carnegie Mellon, there are many suchidealists left. One of them is Siddhartha Srinivasa, a leading expert onmanipulation in the Robotics Institute who works on adding intelligence torobot limbs. Right now, someone with a spinal-cord injury can get a robotto pick up a spoon and use it to eat a meal. But the arm is so laborious tocontrol that a single sip from a bowl takes fully 10 minutes. If Srinivasasucceeds, the arm will intuit a gesture (Feed me some soup) and completethe task on its own.

Srinivasa is 37, and after a decade at Carnegie Mellon is frequentlyapproached by firms the Googles and Ubers and others of the world but he has yet to abandon academia. He says he doesnt want to give up theintellectual freedom, the ability to do good for the world at large withoutworrying about profit. Still, he acknowledges industrys attractions. Its notjust money; its also validation. Investors and customers paying for yourwork is proof that it truly works.

Its like the Uber thing, right? he says. You can come up with ascheduling algorithm, but does it work when there are 50,000 people tryingto do this? How does it scale? Does it work when somebody comes andpours grease over your robot arm? Like, I dont know, and I want to know.Last year, Srinivasa created his own part-time start-up in part to try toanswer that question. The lab is still where ideas are born, but the market is



now where they are put to the test.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author ofSmarter Than You Think.

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Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department - The New York Times