The new Stanford Robotics Center, which will be developing machines for future use in medicine, the arts, ocean and space exploration and your own home, recently opened its doors for the first time.
Oussama Khatib is the director of the Stanford Robotics Center . He said when he first discovered robotics, he fell in love with it.
“We built this machine that can be diving very deep, but at the same time interacting with human divers,” said Khatib as he gestured to the underwater robot OceanOneK. Stanford’s humanoid diving robot is the only one like it in the world.
Khatib said they designed the robotics center to bring expert researchers in several different fields together to solve challenges using robots.
“In the medical bay, we try to study how robots can help with medicine, and we take interesting approaches,” said Stanford Robotics Center Executive Director Steve Cousins. “Can we take tiny robots and avoid having to put a catheter all the way through your body? Instead, can we have the robot swim its way through? This is a little futuristic. People think of movies we’ve seen as a kid.”