Speaker B grew up around aviation and wanted to design fast cars, but abandoned aerospace after realizing undergrad reduced aerodynamics to looking up NASA's 1970s airfoil data. That disillusionment led to robotics and control theory, where there's more room to actually solve problems.
Dad was— if he's taking you to the Boeing factory and stuff, I mean, I know he's in the aviation, but it must have been inclined that way a little bit.
Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to go that direction. I was like, I want to design stuff that goes fast. I'm a huge car nerd. Love old cars. And I thought that was the direction I wanted to go. It wasn't. It didn't take very long for that to— that illusion to be broken. Okay. Because as I actually got into the math of it in undergrad, I was like, it was very much like, well, you know, this guy came up with this equation and this woman came up with that equation. And now, but, you know, we'll teach We teach you all that theory, but in the end you're just going to go to the lookup table in the back of the textbook because that's been solved. You don't need to redo all that work like NASA did that in the '70s. So just go look up their airfoil designs.
They're categorized very well.
Yeah. And I was just like, man, where all the creativity has been, like, sucked out of this. Like, there's of course now like a resurgence, but that didn't, didn't feel like it was there for me. So I was so— I don't think I did this in a logical way. I just intuitively started pushing into like, well, where are the corners of this space that there is a lot of creativity? And robotics was the big one. And control theory was kind of the area of that that just like, for me, my math brain just like hooked onto that immediately. Like, how do you control these machines? And why is it so hard to get a robot that is, you know, more powerful in many ways than a human and more stronger and greater, whatever. But we just can't get these things to act naturalistically or interact with humans in an interesting way. That was like really grabbed my brain. So I joined a haptics lab actually.
