Life in the Robotics Lab

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.

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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