Ruzena Bajcsy is among the founders of the fashionable discipline of robotics. With an schooling in electrical engineering in Slovakia, adopted by a Ph.D. at Stanford, Bajcsy was the primary lady to hitch the engineering college on the College of Pennsylvania. She was the primary, she says, as a result of “in these days, good women didn’t fiddle with screwdrivers.” Bajcsy, now 91, spoke with IEEE Spectrumon the fortieth anniversary celebration of the IEEE Worldwide Convention on Robotics and Automation, in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Ruzena Bajcsy
Ruzena Bajcsy’s 50-plus years in robotics spanned time at Stanford, the College of Pennsylvania, the Nationwide Science Basis, and the College of California, Berkeley. Bajcsy retired in 2021.
What was the robotics discipline like on the time of the primary ICRA convention in 1984?
Ruzena Bajcsy: There was loads of enthusiasm at the moment—it was like a dream; we felt like we might do one thing dramatic. However that is typical, and if you transfer into a brand new space and also you begin to construct there, you discover that the issue is more durable than you thought.
What makes robotics exhausting?
Bajcsy: Robotics was maybe the primary topic which actually required an interdisciplinary strategy. At first of the twentieth century, there was physics and chemistry and arithmetic and biology and psychology, all with brick partitions between them. The physicists have been far more centered on measurement, and understanding how issues interacted with one another. Throughout the battle, there was a choose group of males who didn’t assume that mortal individuals might do that. They have been so filled with themselves. I don’t know in the event you noticed the Oppenheimer film, however I knew a few of these males—my husband was a type of physicists!
And the way are roboticists totally different?
Bajcsy: We’re engineers. For physicists, it’s the matter of discovery, achieved. We, then again, in an effort to perceive issues, we now have to construct them. It takes effort and time, and continuously we’re inhibited—after I began, there have been no digital cameras, so I needed to construct one. I constructed a number of different issues like that in my profession, not as a discovery, however as a necessity.
How can robotics be useful?
Bajcsy: As an aged individual, I take advantage of this cane. However after I’m with my youngsters, I maintain their arms and it helps tremendously. In an effort to preserve your steadiness, you’re taking all of the vectors of your torso and your legs so that you’re steady. You and I collectively can create a configuration of our legs and physique in order that the sum is steady.
One quite simple helpful system for an older individual could be to have a cane with a number of joints that may regulate relying on the way in which I transfer, to compensate for my motion. Persons are making progress on this space, as a result of many individuals live longer than earlier than. There are all types of different locations the place the expertise derived from robotics may also help like this.
What are you most pleased with?
Bajcsy: At this stage of my life, persons are asking, and I’m asking, what’s my legacy? And I inform you, my legacy is my college students. They labored exhausting, however they felt they have been appreciated, and there was a way of camaraderie and help for one another. I didn’t do it consciously, however I suppose it got here from my motherly instincts. And I’m nonetheless in touch with a lot of them—I fear about their youngsters, the standard grandma!
This text seems within the December 2024 problem as “5 Questions for Ruzena Bajcsy.”
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