Life in the Robotics Lab

Let me tell it to you straight: Robocup in Fokuoka was a bloody disaster!
(By the way, the day I arrived in Japan, the Italian football team lost against Korea in the World Cup Championship…  Not the best way to start my journey  in Japan).
The RoboCup was indeed very cool: we were located in an indoor baseball stadium and there were several football fields with robots of any size (including the robot dog Aibo) playing football autonomously.

   That week I had very few opportunities to see Fukuoka, Japan. It is   an amazing and, at the same time, a very puzzling place to visit . I have been there recently for the second time  on business and I wonder if  I’ll ever have the opportunity to stay there just as a tourist.
Anyway, let’s talk about robots!
During the 4 days of the setup before the competition, me and the rest of my classmates tried very hard to make the robots move, but, even if we worked the days until late at night  there was no way we could make our “champions” stand up by themselves. We could not compete (but all of us expected that) the robots.  I remember I was sad and disappointed thinking about all the work that went into it, which was eventually a waste of time.
I clearly remember lying on a bench, looking at the ceiling and thinking: ”We are stupid! This is too bad. I don’t want to see a robot for the rest of my life!”
In that precise moment (it is true, I am not trying to make the story more interesting) I heard a voice coming from the speech at the closing ceremony: ”The next Robocup will take place in Padova, Italy".

I jumped at once and thought: “my God, Italy! I can have my revenge! I know what to do: I will come back to my university in Torino and I will create MY OWN Robocup team!”
One more time I ask  my readers: how many probabilities are there to have that EXACTLY the following year? Robocup  will happen  a few kilometers from the place I was about to spend my last academic year!
Few I guess, very few… but you can’t stop destiny once it has decided what to do with your life.

Tags: story

What my former teacher proposed was more or less this: Design from scratch two different humanoid robots (about 40 cm  wide and 60 cm of hiht), build them and make them perform some “football” actions, in less than 4 months.

All that, of course, without any previous knowledge of robotics.

And then... We would all fly to Fukuoka, Japan, to participate to Robocup in the newly launched "Humanoid League".
Completely crazy!! But there is nothing better than a crazy challenge (and a trip to Japan) to motivate young students, which had no idea of what is required to make a humanoid robot.
I was supposed to write the software to make the robots walk. I must confess that only later I realized how poor my efforts to accomplish this task were, and how much more was expected  of me…  Anyway, the hardware platform never was really able to walk…
Our teacher, Peter Nordin, told us that he was looking for some sponsors to pay for our trip to Japan, but he was having very little luck.
What happened next was not unexpected: people worked very hard until the very last day, but the small humanoids were unable to move.

The really unexpected thing  was that we ACTUALLY went to Japan,  despite the fact that the robots  were still unfinished. Until this day, no one knows where the money came from; most believe the professor paid for the journey of 20 students with his own money.... (Thanks Peter!).
Who would do such a thing? Very few people, I believe, . Consider, as well, that this was the ONLY year in which the students of the Complex Adaptive System (my Master) tried to participate to Robocup.
The probability  of something like that happening is very low, but this event did determined the rest of my story and my life.
We took the flight  to Japan at the end of June. It was also the end of my academic year in Sweden and I remember the precise moment in which I realized that a chapter of my life (the best one so far) was coming to a close and a new one was about to begin soon.
Wondering about my future, I was smiling to myself...

Tags: story

When I try to determine the beginning of the "domino effect" that changed my life, the first date that I can remember is August 2001. That summer, I packed my luggage and I took one of those flights that would eventually change my live.

This one was diected to Goteborg (Sweden).

The years before I had been studying at Polytechnic of Turin with little enthusiasm; but in 2001/2002 I was supposed to spend a whole academic year at Chalmers, Sweden (have you ever heard of the Erasmus Program ? ).

When I got off of the airplane I had a wonderful feeling of freedom and curiosity: what was going to happen? I was going to meet new people, speak a new language and see different places... I will not tell you about what was for sure the best year of my life, since it has little to do with robotics. What is relevant for this blog is that I joined the Master In Complex Adaptive Systems, an International Master Program related with dynamic systems, artificial intelligence and some robotics. For the first time in a long time I started to have fun studying engineering and I have got more and more motivated. I realized the importance of hard work when you want to achieve a result and that lesson was going to be very useful in the future.

One of the courses of the Master was dedicated to autonomous robots; of course it was VERY basic, but it was enough to wake up my forgotten love for robotics. And the best is yet to come: our professor proposed to all of his students (about 20 people) to build a couple of small humanoid robot in few months and to participate at ROBOCUP 2002, the World Championship of Robotic Soccer...

Tags: story

Memory is a bitch.
When you live a moment of your life that is very important, you think you will never forget it.
The emotions that vibrate in that very moment are so intense that it is hard to believe they will disappear "as teardrops in the rain".
I realized lately that I remember what happened to me, but sometimes the episodes of my life are like grayscale snapshots of the facts. The immediate emotions associated with the facts are gone. I hope that this blog will help me store my memories somewhere, before time takes them away.

I have always dreamt of being a scientist. Today this definition sound silly to me... I am just an engineer. But "scientist" is the word I was using when I was 7 years old and  used to spend my afternoon watching Japanese cartoons on TV.
When you are young, people ask you about the profession you want to hold when you growth up. Football player, fire fighter, astronaut, singer?
My answer was always the same: "a scientist that builds robots".
When you are a kid, the only idea of robots you have is humanoid robots. Well, 25 years later, this is what I do: I build robots.
Everything comes with a price... but I will talk about that in the future.
When I was a boy, adults used to tell me that robots exist only in science fiction and that what I really wanted to be is an engineer.
Ok, I thought I will be an engineer, but I will build robots.
When I landed at the University Politecnico di Torino, the only robots around were industrial manipulators which were building cars in a production line... kind of boring, isn’t it? What was I supposed to do then?
Something was about to change in 2001.

Tags: story

The truth is I started writing this story 2 years ago on another blog, but I have never told my readers (more or less 50 unique visitors per month) how the story ends. I apologize to them!

Before doing a CTRL-C/CTRL-V on the first “episode”, I want to share a doubt I have with you: Does anyone really cares about my story?

Have you ever thought we can live our lives only from the “inside”?

The only feelings we can feel “first hand” are our own, and the only life we can fully know and understand is our own, too. Whenever we listen to someone else, and it doesn’t matter how hard we try to be emphatic, his/her experience come through our own eyes. It is like seeing the colors of a painting wearing sunglasses (and don’t forget that every person in the world wear sunglasses of different color!).

For this reason, we often have the illusion that there is something special in what happens to us… our feelings are the only ones we can feel for real and this makes them special FOR US.

It might be that our existence is just an ordinary one, a mediocre concatenation of events, just as anyone else in the world experiences every day. If this is to be true, it might be that my story doesn’t even deserve to be the subject of this blog. But if this was true, many biographies would not exist, would they?

The decision is yours. The only thing I can do is share a piece of my memories with you, tell you, no more and no less, the whole truth.

Tags: story