Uber-geek [James McLurkin] was in Austin recently demoing his robot swarm. He’s on tour with EDA Tech Forum. [McLurkin] has multiple degrees from the MIT AI lab and worked at iRobot for a couple of years. Lately, he has been working on distributed robot computing: robot swarms.
[McLurkin] was an entertaining speaker and had an interesting view of robotics. He is optimistic that robot parts will become more modular, so it will be easier to build them, and more importantly, faster to design them.
Some quotes:
- “There’s more sensors in a cockroach’s butt than any robot”
- “12 engineer years to design, 45 minutes to build”
- “If it can break your ankle, it’s a real [rc] car.”
