by Yuta Yamabata
I have a dream that one day, as a mechanical engineer, I will design and manage the development of themed entertainment experiences that bring happiness to people worldwide. To achieve my dream, I have wanted to study abroad in the U.S. for two reasons.
One reason is to improve my skills and knowledge as an engineer. It is said that the United States has one of the most competitive academic environments, and many brilliant researchers and engineers are there. The other reason is to explore career opportunities there, because many of the most impactful themed entertainment companies are located in the United States.
To achieve this goal, I joined Associate Professor Joohyung Kim’s lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as a visiting scholar this fall.
Within his broad research interests in robotics, including humanoid robots, teleoperation, and dexterous hands, I have been particularly interested in his work because some of these topics are entertainment-focused and related to Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). He has experience working in the themed entertainment industry, and some of his current research is actually based on his work there. In particular, he is also an expert in motion retargeting, which is a technique to transfer human motion to robots, a research topic that I am interested in.
During my stay, I basically spent my time in the lab, working on my research on motion retargeting. Because my project was still in its very early phase, I needed to begin by reviewing previous literature. At the beginning, I reviewed work in this field, ranging from some of the professor’s earlier papers (Fig. 1) to the latest studies on motion retargeting. The professor suggested a promising starting direction, which helped me gain deeper insight into this field and think of a possible way to achieve my research goals. My dense three-month stay helped me build up a solid foundation for my research and contributed to giving my research a good start. Now I’m back in Japan, but I aim to continue working on it and make it academically meaningful.
Aside from working on my own research, I mainly interacted with Ph.D. students and a postdoc in the lab. I was especially impressed by their broad knowledge and curiosity about technology because I mainly interact with undergraduate and master’s students while I am in Tokyo. I realized that there are researchers who are like Superman, who seem to understand even the details that I would normally be tempted to give up on or compromise on. Overall, I found that they work very hard, and I realized that working hard is a minimum requirement. I hung out with them many times, sometimes even with the professor (Fig. 2-5). It was a really fun experience for me to discuss not only our personal lives but also rapidly changing trends in the field of AI and robotics, such as whether bipedal locomotion is truly necessary for robots in factories.
In particular, I found their dedication to creating videos especially impressive. Originally this was the professor’s philosophy, but it has been adopted by the students as well. Every member seems to put a huge amount of effort into how they can effectively showcase their work. Their videos on the YouTube channel actually contribute to drawing attention from many people all over the world. I was really lucky to be able to participate in their annual Halloween video because my visit happened at the right time. We leveraged our teleoperation framework and replicated one scene from the movie Hamilton using four robots with different morphologies. It was a truly tough project, but it was so satisfying to get it done (Fig. 6, 7). Please check out our video:
The biggest challenge during the stay was communication, which made me realize the importance of storytelling to assert my opinion. I began my stay just after my project had started, and in every
weekly meeting with the professor, I was required to summarize and organize my thoughts at the time and explain them to him in an appropriate order and with clear causation, so that he could follow my storyline and I could get effective feedback from him. My English was not good enough to convey the nuance of my work, which made the meetings even harder for me. Because I didn’t want to miss even a single word he said, I recorded all our conversations in the meetings so that I could check them later and focus on the discussion during the meetings. It was really tough for me to iteratively make research progress, wrap it up, discuss it, and keep it in a good direction. I don’t think I could have done it perfectly, but eventually this experience gave me confidence in storytelling to some extent. I feel that the ability to organize thoughts and build a story to tell based on a listener’s background and understanding is generally vital in many situations, including both industry and academia. I aim to work internationally in the future, so the fact that I was able to do this in English in a different country is even more valuable.
Aside from my activities in the lab, I participated in several events of the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) at UIUC. I enjoyed the activities, and I was truly lucky to be able to listen to talks from industry professionals.
Through my experience of studying abroad, I decided to keep the following in mind:
- Stay curious about technology and keep up with the cutting edge.
- Keep exploring better ways of communication, storytelling, and delivery.
The most memorable thing the professor said is a Chinese proverb: 尽人事以听天命, which means “Do your best and leave the rest to fate.” I assume that, considering his contributions in the field of humanoid robots, the way he has done his best so far has been extremely tough and based on a huge amount of effort that I cannot even imagine. His words made me feel that I still need to keep on
working hard and tackle the tasks ahead.
In the end, I truly appreciate the generous financial support from Friends of UTokyo. Without this help, my studying abroad would never have been feasible. I also appreciate the professor and lab members for their support in making my stay enjoyable and valuable.
[1] S. Choi and J. Kim, “Towards a Natural Motion Generator: a Pipeline to Control a Humanoid based on Motion Data,” 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Macau, China, 2019, pp. 4373-4380
