Vijay Kumar — One of the world's top roboticists, professor and Dean of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, former director of the GRASP lab, known for multi-robot systems, swarms, and micro aerial vehicles.
The gist
Vijay Kumar traces his journey from building a 7,000-pound hexapod in graduate school to pioneering small agile quadrotors that cooperate in 3D formations. He explains how advances in computing and cheap IMUs (driven by car airbags) around 2007-2009 made onboard sensing and agile flight possible. The conversation covers true autonomy without GPS, communications, or human pilots, the role of learning versus model-based control, and why perception has advanced faster than learned action. Kumar argues autonomous flight is in some ways easier than driving, but flying cars face a fundamental battery energy and power density barrier. He closes on human-robot collaboration, weaponization risks of swarms, and advice for young engineers to embrace math, breadth, and the liberal arts.
Big reveals
- Cheap IMUs for drones were enabled by airbag regulations requiring an accelerometer in every car, which drove down the price-to-performance ratio.
- True autonomy means navigating with no pilots, no communications, no base station, no GPS position, and no a priori map of the environment.
- On the action side of autonomy Kumar knows of no fielded systems that actually learn correct behavior end-to-end; only perception learning has truly succeeded.
- Going from 90% to 99% to 99.9% perception accuracy requires data growing along what Kumar believes is an exponential curve.
- In 2014 two percent of US electricity consumption went to data farms, making AI an energy-processing problem, not just an information one.
- Autonomous flight can use a guaranteed-safe trajectory (up, across, down) that has no easy equivalent for ground-bound self-driving cars.
- Lifting a small UAV vertically costs roughly 200 watts per kilo, while the entire human brain runs on under 80 watts.
Things worth remembering
- Kumar's first robot was a roughly 7,000-pound hexapod with 18 hydraulic motors, each controlled by its own computer plus a 19th coordinating computer.
- The clock speeds on those 1980s control computers were about half a megahertz.
- The team demonstrated small UAVs forming and deforming 3D patterns in midair back in 2011, which was a major accomplishment then and standard now.
- An ant with one of its six legs removed keeps moving fine and may not even realize it lost a leg, illustrating individual robustness.
- The four-motor quadrotor configuration has at least a hundred-year history and was not invented by Kumar's lab.
- Rotor blades flap and bend rather than staying rigid, and ground effect plus ceiling suction and wall effects create microclimates that disturb UAVs.
- Kumar works with a nonprofit, Weave Robotics, delivering drugs and retrieving test samples in the Peruvian Amazon where rivers are the only highways.
- We can achieve level-five autonomy in a parking lot but not on the streets of Naples or Mumbai.
- Kumar may be the only TED speaker to show a math equation, after the curator told him he couldn't show math.