Page 24 - Sensing, Intelligence, Motion : How Robots and Humans Move in an Unstructured World

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When pieces of a large multiyear project start falling into place, a sign that it
functions right is that the pieces “know by themselves” what to do and when to
do it. A product of one section logically invites and defines the other; theory calls
for the experiment to confirm its correctness; experiments beg for turning theory
into useful products. The project then operates as a leisurely human walk: As
the right foot is thrown forward, the left foot knows it should stay behind on the
ground, the body bends slightly forward as if ready to fall, the left arm moves
forward, and the right arm heads back—all at once, seemingly effortlessly, and
then they switch, one-two, one-two, a pleasure to watch, so hard to emulate,
one-two, one-two.
A piece of science or new technology cannot be like this, not that perfect,
simply because there is always more unknown and yet undiscovered than known
and understood. But the feeling is similar: All of a sudden, things fall into place.
This picture fully applies to this book. While the knowledge that it treats will
be always incomplete, a moment came when individual smaller projects started
looking as parts of a tightly coordinated organism.
This would not be possible without my graduate students. Much of today’s
science is produced this way. It is the graduate students’ sleepless nights, enthu-
siasm, and unwavering commitment to science that help cover the skeleton of
ideas with flesh and blood of details of design and proofs and tests and computer
simulations. They help turn the skeleton’s jerky squeakiness into smooth and
coordinated and pleasing to the professional eye elegant whole.
“What if” is rarely a reliable game. There is no way of knowing what this book
would look like if I had different students, not those I was privileged to have. I do
think that some pieces would have been quite different, because the personalities
and prior background of my students invariably left a strong trace on my choice
of projects for them and hence the joint papers that became the foundation of
this book. I am grateful to them for sharing with me the joy of doing science.
With all those different personalities, there was also something in common that
emerged in them as the work progressed–perhaps the desire for dry precision,
for doing things right. In thanking them for sharing with me our life in the lab
and discussions in seminars and at the blackboard, I am mentioning here only
those whose work was pivotal for this book: Kang Sun, Timothy Skewis, Edward
Cheung, Susan Hert, Andrei Shkel, Fei Liu, Dugan Um. Other students helped
as well, but their main work centered on topics that are beyond our subject here.

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