Blogs

There is such an artificial intelligence expert, just not like ordinary people, he thinks that creatingrobotNot making money is “playing a hooligan”. He once received $5.5 million in research funding from Uber with “empty gloves and white wolf”.

There is such an artificial intelligence expert who is not like an ordinary person. He thinks that making Robots without making money is a “hooligan”. He once received a research fund of 5.5 million US dollars from Uber with “empty gloves and white wolf”.

This great god is Herman Herman (Herman Herman). Unlike most artificial intelligence experts, Herman’s specialty is to commercialize robots. When other people’s robots are still being tested and debugged in the laboratory, The robots he invented have been used in almost all fields such as agriculture, commerce, defense and government.

Oh, right! Herman is actually the head of the Robotics Research Center (NREC) at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Robotics, the world’s largest robotics research base.

As one of the main contractors of NASA’s aerospace scientific research missions, NREC has participated in the U.S. lunar exploration walking robot project; it has cooperated with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Boeing to develop an unmanned ground combat vehicle (UGCV). You can I think so – in the United States, it is right to find NREC to build a robot.

But with over a hundred researchers at NREC, what’s so special about Herman…

Herman (actually a real person is darker than this)

Although Herman does not have a handsome face, he has understood the truth of “the ugly person should read more” since he was a child…

Undergraduate was admitted to the University of Illinois, one of the three giants of public universities in the United States (the other two schools are the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan). The graduate student is not a problem, but in the past few years, he has become obsessed with robots, and even fantasizes about building robots by himself from time to time.

But the ideal is very rich, and the reality is as thin as a firearm. Based on what I have learned in computer science, let alone inventing a robot, I can’t even understand many technical documents.

So he found a new life goal – to get a doctorate degree in robotics.

At that time, Carnegie Mellon University was almost the only university in the United States that offered a doctorate degree in robotics, and the school also set up a robotics college for this purpose, which specialized in training robotics experts for academia and industry.

Then, Herman was admitted to the school he had loved for a long time without any suspense.

Happiness comes too suddenly.

In 1995, with the support of the US government and enterprises, the Robotics Institute established another research center (now NREC). This research center is different from the laboratories of other universities. It actually serves the US government and enterprises, so basically every project must be commercialized.

Soon, robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University joined NREC one after another, and Herman, who was still a “rookie” at the time, also became one of the first NREC members.

Although the qualifications are not as good as other researchers, this young man has never been partial to subjects, and almost all professional disciplines such as robot system design, sensor design, image processing, systems engineering and so on are full marks.

And Herman quickly used his expertise in sensors, publishing related papers one after another, such as the underground detection radar robot published in 1997.

In addition to this, he is involved in the vast majority of the research center’s projects. (Of course, what Herman studies is not an ordinary robot)

This four-limbed robot called “Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform” (CHIMP) is one of his most proud works.

CHIMP is on a mission

Although CHIMP looks bulky (185kg), it is actually an “unbeatable little strong”. There are two rapidly rotating laser scanning eyes on its head that can monitor the surrounding environment. It can imitate human movements and automatically stand up when it is pushed down (similar to Boston Dynamics Atlas).

The second from the right in the second row is Herman

Don’t underestimate such a robot, it is not a job that everyone can do to make the robot stand up after it falls. Here’s what Herman put it: “I spent ten years making a robot that would fall over, and then I spent another ten years making it stand up.”

For example, this can be detonatedmechanicalhand:

And this learning bot platform for DAPRA:

Together with a series of already applied in agriculture andindustryA robot in the field, Herman instantly became the best commercialized researcher at NREC.

Next, NREC, like other academic AI teams, embarked on the old road of “school-enterprise cooperation”.

In 2015, Uber poached more than 40 researchers from NREC with high salary, including former NREC director Anthony Stentz, and Herman was appointed to take over the position in danger.

Herman can’t be poached with a high salary. After he took the position of NREC, he did not “kneel and lick” Uber; on the contrary, he was still brooding about the large loss of personnel in the research center, and he expanded the team while he was recruiting. , while demanding compensation from Uber.

Sure enough, it received $5.5 million in research funding from Uber last September.

However, when there was no progress in cooperation with Uber, Herman abandoned this unreliable partner and took over a new job with his team of more than 100 people.

In February of this year, NREC and four heavyweight partners launched new research collaborations that have generated $11 million in revenue, as follows:

The first is a $4 million partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense Test Resource Management Center (TRMC), for which NREC primarily developsautomationtesting services;

The second is a $4.2 million partnership with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop technologies that enable vehicles to adapt to various racetracks;

The third is a $1 million partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and Texas A&M University to develop a Robotic vehicle that can monitor plants in agricultural centers;

The last is a $2.4 million partnership with Sikorsky Aircraft to develop an automated system that will allow planes to fly safely.

Tsk tsk…I am afraid that there is no second person in the artificial intelligence academia who has both technology and business acumen like Herman!