The art of grasping: Ken Goldberg featured in Berkeley Engineer magazine

UC Berkeley industrial engineering and operations research professor Ken Goldberg appears on the cover of the summer edition of Berkeley Engineer magazine in a feature exploring the evolving future of robotics, artificial intelligence and human creativity. Drawing on decades of pioneering research, Goldberg reflects on how advances in robotics will depend not only on AI, but also on what he calls ‘good old-fashioned engineering.’

The cover story traces Goldberg’s career from creating the Telegarden — widely regarded as the internet’s first interactive robot — to co-founding Ambi Robotics, whose AI-powered systems have sorted more than 100 million packages for logistics companies worldwide. Along the way, the article highlights Goldberg’s long-standing belief that innovation flourishes at the intersection of engineering and art.

Dozens of impeccably styled art aficionados packed themselves into the di Rosa Museum in San Francisco to reflect on trees, time and technology. A crowd gathered around a lean, bespectacled artist who stood beside a large photograph depicting an industrial robot arm emerging from a large planter lush with greenery. The presenting artist was Ken Goldberg, a roboticist and UC Berkeley’s William S. Floyd Distinguished Professor of Engineering. He explained that the photo depicted the Telegarden, the first interactive robot on the internet.

The Telegarden expanded on a concept Goldberg pioneered in 1994, when he first trained a webcam on a robotic arm and streamed it online. He later tasked the robot with tending a small garden of living plants and allowed website visitors to control the robot by directing where it should plant and water seedlings. In 1995, converting commands from a two-dimensional web interface into something that could be parsed by a robotic arm operating in three dimensions was a major challenge. It was also one of the first marriages of art and engineering on the nascent internet.

“Everybody expects instant gratification on the internet,” Goldberg told his audience. “But nature doesn’t work that way.”

Though the Telegarden debuted more than 30 years ago, its invitation to question expectations may be more salient than ever. Artificial intelligence (AI) evangelists say we are at the threshold of an era of endless leisure as AI agents and robots render white-collar work obsolete. Perhaps they’re right, but Goldberg is skeptical. While he doesn’t believe all-purpose robots will replace human labor anytime soon, his research shows that robotic competence in a variety of controlled tasks is well within reach, but only if we stop expecting robots to evolve just like text-based AI. Goldberg’s research has already proven itself via a commercial package-sorting robot that he helped design, which has successfully sorted over 100 million packages. He believes that the next leap in robotics capability will be the result of anchoring advances in AI training atop a foundation of what he calls “good old-fashioned engineering.”

Read the full Berkeley Engineer cover story on Ken Goldberg and the future of robotics and AI:

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Article written by Alan Toth at UC Berkeley Engineering