Tooth
From FIRSTwiki
This is the story of Tooth, a little robot that collects cups, as told by Dave Lavery at the 2004 Kick-off. It is a fairly lengthy story, so it is broken up into sections.
Contents |
Thank you all. I really do appreciate that. When I came in this morning somebody asked me if indeed I was going to be wearing my traditional Hawaiian shirt. Given it's six degrees below zero how in the world could I do this?
I work for NASA, we think in different terms. One of the things we do is understand everything is relative. Yeah, six degrees below zero isn't too bad.
I checked the weather report this morning. It's 75 degrees below zero on Mars. This isn't so bad.
One of the things I wanted to do this morning is talk a little bit about the impact that people can have in ways that typically you may not quite be able to predict. A lot of people, especially the 200 plus rookie teams this year is wondering what is going to happen with this? Will this be something that can make an impact? Can I as a student make changes as a result of this experience? Will it mean something? I have a favorite story.
Those of you who have been around a long time. Some of you may have heard it before. It bears retelling so I'll take a couple of minutes to do that.
Other one of my absolute favorites. Basically I want to go back several years. And back in the early 1990's.
[edit]Robbie
This is a photograph from 1990 out at the jet propulsion lab we were working on the Mars return project. We were work being on the device, a machine called Robbie. Receive feet tall, seven feet long. Had a big arm on the front. Full of computers, nuclear power force [in] back. The whole thing weighed about a ton.
We thought we'd fly it to Mars. It would cost about $5 billion to do. This is how we did robot planetary missions.
We had a lot of cameras, if it wanted to go from here to there it would take all the pictures, do all the computers on board and figure out here is the most upload path to get from here to here and execute the command and drive from there to there.
Now, using the computers of the day when it wanted to go from here to here, the computational requirements were such it sat and thought about that one meter move for about five hours.
[LAUGHTER]
But we thought that was the way you did it.
We were going to send this thing to Mars and live for several years and drive 100 kilometers. One step at a time. There has to be a better way but we couldn't figure out what it was.
[edit]Carl
About that time a young student had come and spent the summer with us. His name was Carl. He came in and said, "I want to help you guys. I want to do whatever I can. I want to be part of this project. I want to understand what it is you're doing. You guys are some of the best in the world. Can I be a part of what you're doing?"
And with a little bit of arrogance we'll admit, in mind sight. Some of the world's best said "You're a student. Sit in the corner and you can watch us and learn."
Carl, being rather head strong said "that's nice, but I really want to do something, please can I do something?" We said "sit over in the corner and watch. You'll learn."
He said "all right. If I can't actually help you do your stuff can I work on some of my stuff in the lab in parallel while you're doing your stuff?" We said "OK, that's all right."
[edit]Tooth
The end of the summer rolls around and Collin says "I'm about to go back to school and can I show you what I've been working on?"
Remember, here is Robbie, seven feet tall and $5 billion. Five hours, one step. You're getting the point here.
Collin said look what I built? Basically he showed us this little machine that he had built called Tooth.
Now, Tooth was not seven feet tall and one ton and $5 billion. It was the chassis of an RC car and $500 worth of parts and a circuit board he had put together.
All you did was turn it on, put it on the floor and it would start randomly driving around and keep on driving until eventually the bumper sensors on the front would hit something and it would hit something and close the pinchers and tried to grab what it hit.
If it could pick it up it would use the light sensors to look around for a beacon, drive over to the light bulb, open the pinchers, drop off whatever it was.
If you had a little bit of cups in the room and left it alone for long enough this thing all by itself would make little piles of cups next to the light bulb until it ran out of battery power.
A simple little machine.
The world's best robotists took a look at this and said "Robbie is 7 feet tall, $5 billion, five hours."
"Collin, how did you do that?"
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
[edit]It gets better
Wait, it gets better.
Seven years later, seven generations later in 1997, the—I have to get this right—the great great great great great granddaughter of Tooth lands on Mars, Mars Pathfinder Sojourner in 1997, was basically the result of what Collin taught us.
You want to know how you change from a mission going to cost $5 bill to $200 million?
It's still a lot of money but less than $5 billion.
It's less than the country spends on potato chips each year and less than it costs to make a major motion picture.
You can go to Mars because of the work this student taught us about.
Can one student have an effect? You better believe you can. Collin's work taught us something and one person taught us something. That's the effect one person can have. Does this continue on? Sure it does.
Basically seven years after Pathfinder, just last week, this system got to Mars, the great great great great great great great granddaughter of Tooth, two generations after Sojourner we landed on Mars again.
One of the things we did was make sure that on this machine 14 years later Collin's name, the name of the three mentors, went on board this spacecraft as a tribute to the work that they had done that we wanted to carry forward.
We thought it was that important to recognize that individuals really can make a difference. One student can make a difference. One engineer can make a difference. You may not be taking stuff to Mars.
You may be developing new system to make automobiles safer. Making a new system to purify water, making a new system to make aircraft more efficient and cost effective. One person can make a difference.
Give you a couple of names.
A couple of years ago a few of you met Lauren lions. She came to work for the summer working on some of the display panels that are used on the Mars rover mission. Mark, who worked with team 117 got hired by the jet propulsion lab and wrote the navigation software being used by the rovers.
You guys are taking this stuff forward and doing something with it.
One of the interesting ones that happened to me almost as a real surprise, Matt wall as, who is one of the lead flight directors on this mission turns out that he graduated from my high school a few years after me.
He was a classmate with the lead teacher on my team in high school.
He and David graduated together and so you see how these connections get made and carried forward and the choices you make early on really do make a difference later on. The people are important, the relationships you build are important, and they make a difference.
And I get to say that because of the work that people like Lauren and Matt and mark all made and the 660 other people that worked on the Mars exploration rover project, because of their work, not because of my work, I get to have fun, I get to take credit, and I get to wear this shirt.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
Any way, we do thank you all for the work you're doing. Let's get on with the rest of the game.
