Rusty Kamori, and this is Beyond the Lines on ThinkTech Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou School Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my books, Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game, and it's about leadership, inspiration, and creating a superior culture of excellence. My special guest today is the president of finance insurance. He is Joy Barua, and today we are going beyond leadership. Hey Joy, welcome to Beyond the Lines. Hello Rusty, great to be here, and thanks for having me on the show and really enjoyed your books and looking forward to sharing the wisdom, what I learned and how it touched me, and yeah, I mean, it's just amazing to be here with you this morning. Joy, you have been very successful in every company that you've been with, but I want to first ask you if you can share a bit about your background. Sure, so I'm originally from Bangladesh, and when I was about nine years old in third grade, I was fortunate enough to get this scholarship to attend a British boarding school, and then high school in Japan, international school, and of course, after that came to Hawaii where I pursued my higher education concurrently while also dabbling in different sectors, whether it be a nonprofit where I worked in for about 15 years or so in that sector, and then of course, healthcare for about 10, little over 10 years, and public sector, and of course now I finance insurance. And so being all over the place, I also conferred, he was a lecturer for the MBA program at Hawaii Pacific University, and so that's me in a nutshell. I mean, as you can tell, I've been all over the place, then Hawaii's been home for nearly three decades. And so I think in many ways, I'm sort of multi-multi-multi-multidisciplinary, multi-sectoral, and multinational in some ways.  Wow, that's a great question. And it's great only because as I'm sort of thinking, there are many adversities, so to speak, that I came across, and they have all been sort of, the learning incubator, the elementary school of kind of learning how to embrace failure as a way to sort of get to success. And one in particular that comes to mind, when I was working in the non-profit sector back in the 90s, my first job, you know, it was very, you know, as you know, non-profits, we have to fund rates to further our mission, but also to grow as an organization. So one of the projects that we worked on at that time was the culinary business incubator, which took about $5 million to raise. Initially, we were very much discouraged by all the funders that we approached.  And so it took about five years, I wish it took lesser. And you know, both emotionally, as well as being a leader in my formative years, doing fundraising and trying to pitch the mission to socially conscious stakeholders was pretty difficult. And you have to keep in mind that when you have different stakeholders, you know, there were a lot of knows that it took us before we got to the yes. And so, you know, one of the things that resonated with me in your book is about, you know, the importance of being persistent as a leader you have to stand out. And so we kept that sort of front and center in many ways as I'm reflecting for us to get to success. So in terms of success, you know, we're able to create 120 business startups in about a year and a half that also created through this project, 250 jobs. Imagine the economic impact we created. But earlier on, it was very discouraging, if you will, every time, I mean, to get to one yes, we have to go through 20 no's, and to keep at it is what drove me. And I'll tell you that there were times I'll admit it was very discouraging where I at times thought that maybe we're not onto something great here. Maybe it's not possible. But at the end of the day, it wasn't so much the idea that didn't have merit. It was more about how we perceive the idea. And so it required a lot of persistence, re-engaging with the funders, asking them their no's and getting to that yes. And as you know, it was more of an art than a science. And so I'm really proud when I look back that is one particular project that really is a lesson that I look back at when I go through adversity right now to remind myself that, hey, it is a game of patience. It is a game of persistence. It is a game of standing out. And I'm glad that I went through it because I'm able to look back and say, hey, that's what it took for me to be where I am today. Well, definitely, when you overcome adversities, it makes you a better person. It makes you stronger. It makes you tougher, smarter. And Joy, I want to ask you if you can tell me about finance insurance. Sure. Finance insurance is an insurance agency. We are one of the largest and among the largest, if you will, and a growing agency at it. We've been around for almost 50 years now. We have about a little over 30 staff, also 30 agents. We operate statewide. And we offer a lot of choices by way of carrier choices, the insurance companies. A little over 100 of them that we offer. Our agents are who we value because they're the ones, they're essentially small businesses that are out there trying to sell insurance and also promoted in such a way that there is that element of choice. As you know, here in Hawaii, the cost of living is so high and everything is more expensive, relatively speaking than any other place in the US. And so we take that too hard to see how we can help people, ultimately the insurance to have choices so that they are able to afford insurance that is very much needed. In terms of our product offering, we offer personal lines product like your home, your car, your personal belongings and so forth, but also commercial insurance and specialty insurance. So we do all sorts of insurance from A through Z, if you will. And I'm proud of my team and our state-wide presence and for us to have grown tremendously just over the past year, year and a half or so to where we're able to recruit 10 agents and to perpetuate history in terms of what this agency is all about. As we like to say, we exist to provide options and to provide protection for people. It's assurance that you need when you realize that you're able to afford it as well in a way and via the choices that you have. So I'm really proud of my team and the work we do. Oh, for sure. And you guys, you've been making such a great impact in our Hawaii community. And Joy, I wanna ask you about Russell Lau. Russell Lau is the chairman of Finance Factor's Family of Companies. What do you admire most about Russell? You know, the difficult thing is to name one because there are so many points of admiration that I always sort of credit to him. If there was one that I would pick out or be selective about, and this is more personal for me, is he's very warm hearted, yet very intentional. And by that, what I mean is that he's authentic in his own unique way. He's always willing to hear and listen. And even though he realizes that this is a company that we've been in business for over 70 years and we did celebrate our 70th anniversary last year, he's very open to change and looking at ways, how do you sort of use the wisdom and the legacy of our past because we have had successes, many successes. And how do we intertwine that with the opportunities that we have that are before us? And so in that, he speaks with conviction and passion and he never shies away. And if I may poke a little fun here, I mean, Russell is a finance guy, but he knows how to bring fun to finance in such a way that I, for me personally, I find it very engaging and encouraging. So, and we do share jokes and throw a little punch here and there, all in the good spirit of, they're just a tribute to a great individual and a professional that I deeply admire. I completely agree with you, Joy. Russell is a great man. He's super fun, super smart. And Joy, I wanna ask you if you can share more about the finance factors family of companies because Russell's daughter, Jen, is the EVP and his son-in-law, Rob, is the president of finance factors. And if you can just share a bit more. Sure, absolutely. So as I mentioned, we've been around for 70 plus years, 71st year this year. We originally started as a, you know, the bank side was the first. And at that time we provided options, financing options for those that could not afford. And so whether it was financing pots and pans and things that people needed. And so the mainstream banking sector at that time, and you have to keep in mind in context, this is 70 years ago. There weren't a whole lot of options. So Russell's dad had this great vision along with a few other investors. You know, there was a convergence of vision around how do we, you know, make financing accessible to those that aren't able to access traditional needs. And so that's how the company came into being. Now, since then, obviously we grew with insurance and, you know, the real estate side. So right now where we are, we have finance factors that provides great savings and, you know, mortgage options and lending options. You know, and that is led by Rob Nelson, who's our president for finance factors. And then we have white phono real estate investment, which is led by, and the president of that is Greg Kawakami, great individual who I deeply admire because he brings so much wealth of knowledge from the real estate side and really enjoy listening to him and learning about opportunities. And then of course last but not the least are insurance agency, finance insurance. Jen Lau provides a nice buffer between us and Russell by way of looking at the overall enterprise vision and how does that translate into these three very different and yet inclusive industries, three major industries. So you have banking and finance, you have insurance and you have real estate. And so for Jen, the challenge is always being that she's being really great at it. How do you bring these three sectors in a way that it adds value to the enterprise? And so that is more than just dabbling in one particular sector and Jen definitely has that discipline. She also brings this sort of fun factor into the job and always challenges us to challenge ourselves as to what that next chapter might look like without necessarily painting that picture for us and allows us that opportunity to be able to sort of define ourselves and redefine it through how we perpetuate the mission into the next, into the next 70 years, if you will. And so Russell obviously is our chairman who we did deeply admire. He's always looking at ways to not only nurture Jen with this deep and rich wisdom that he has amassed over his many, many and more than half a century career, but also while being open-minded about how do we sort of function and dabble in these three very different and yet sort of inclusive sectors in a way that they add value to our finance enterprise or the family of companies. And yeah, so we really admire and love Russell just as much as we love Jen. And having the two of them is more of an asset than anything. Obviously, I'll be a little biased here by saying Jen is relatively younger, but that's true, we all know that. But Russell brings wisdom that is unparalleled. You can't buy that with money. And so I think we have the best of both worlds in the leadership in both Russell and Jen. Well, again, I completely agree with you. Jen is super smart, super nice, super brilliant.  And you guys have such a great system going there. And I wanna ask you, Joy, since you've become president of finance insurance, you have really created a culture of excellence among your staff and agents. Can you tell me about what your culture is like? Sure, first and foremost, I think food and fun go hand in hand. And they resonate with what Oye is all about. And I guess the third half would be family, food, fun and family, you know? It's easy to talk about building culture, but it's another thing to execute it. And it's even more challenging to enact it collectively. So let me share a little bit about that. I think to say that I did it would be incorrect. In many ways, I think the credit is owed to the staff, but it starts with the recognition and self-awareness and sort of understanding your place. And this is something that your book also touches on, right? You have to be able to demonstrate. You have to be able to show as a leader. So one of the first things I did was when I came in here, of course, you know, there's a lot to learn about insurance and it's always evolving and during the pandemic and not, I mean, even further compounded by, you know, as you know, the monthly wildfires and so forth. So to say that the industry is constantly changing within understatement, but one of the things that you cannot discount is the fact that people remain people. Who we are as white people, you know, the fact that we enjoy food, we collectively, you know, make fun part of work and it's not a side thing that you do after you're done with work. And so a couple of things I wanted to share is being able to capitalize on, you know, these three family food and fun, by way of what we do every day.  And one of the things I've learned is, you know, my team, they love to be spontaneous and they love the spontaneous fun. Of course, you know, when food is involved, I mean, you don't need spontaneity. Everyone is game, right? So we enjoy doing that. But at the deepest core though, what it does is, it helps my staff react to spontaneity and using their positive context to embed within themselves disability the self-recognition that they can do it. And when you are a team, things only come out better. If you have a failure, you suffer collectively, if you will, but you have folks to share it with and use that as a way to as a warm up person sense. And that's something I'm really proud of, my team.  I think Peter Drucker, you know, one of the management gurus said that, it's very true, right?  But it starts with you understanding that what exists, it's a good thing and taking a stock of the positive. You know, oftentimes you look at things on perfect, right? So imperfection sort of colors or view in such a negative way that you're starting with negativity and in some ways you're setting yourself up for failure because you're trying to be perfect. And as we all know, Russie, there is no such thing. You know, excellence is a state of mind and a state of practice. So how do you get there? And using culture as a mechanism to get there is a great way to self-celebrate while you're doing so with the group. And those are sort of some of the raw materials that contribute to the culture we have today. Well, Joy, you're so right about food, fun and family. That's perfect. And Joy, you guys opened up an office in Kauai. Well, what's the significance of really expanding to the outer island of Kauai? Great question. And, you know, I'm so excited to share about our new offices on Kauai. So historically, we've had physical footprint in all the major counties except for Kauai where we did work with a sub agent. And so what happened was, you know, as part of growing our agency, we were able to recruit for new agents. And so when we did that, we realized that, hey, you know, we would also need a place to put them. And so it was more than just finding an office, so to speak, just so that we could put our agents and they could do what they do. And so as we were exploring options while recruiting the agents, we realized that there was a place there where our finance factors branch is located that we were leasing or renting the space. And so, you know, just we have to make a business decision by looking at if we are doing what we have done in the past by investing in people, by investing in the community, by creating jobs and opportunities. And if that's sort of the lens we want to bring into this, then what are some other options than just finding a place? So long story short, after a lot of deliberation, research, analysis and all the, you know, doing the right homework, if you will, we ended up purchasing the fee and the property where we were formerly, you know, tenants, if you will. And so that provided a new home for not only our finance insurance, the new agents we recruited, but also an expanded venue with a lot more visibility to serve. The county of Kauai, through and continually served and through banking and financing options through our finance factors offices, but also to add the element of insurance offerings as we have done statewide. And so we did a great ground opening. We didn't realize that a lot of folks would show up as you know in the neighborhoods, particularly on Kauai, it's smaller and it was during the pandemic. And I'll tell you, I was just blown away. We had the business sector, the private sector, C-suite leaders, community leaders who were able to show up, but also elected officials and public sector folks that just came in to celebrate. And what was particularly humbling was when we did a groundbreaking was thank you for being here. We hear about options, but we seldom see that executed. So for you to make this bold move during the pandemic, just speaks volumes about the promise. You know, when you purchase a property, it's more than just renting a place. And that is a testament as to what we collectively and how we collectively think as sort of our finance factors or the finance, you know, family of companies. So that was our value proposition. And since then we've been growing in good ways and trying to bring value, the value proposition we have to Kauai and with Kauai now added, we are truly statewide with physical footprint on all counties, which also include Maui and the Big Island. So we're really excited about this bold move and so far it's going great. And we're being receptive to what's happening in our community, how the needs are changing, how things that happen in Honolulu or other neighbor islands impact Kauai and vice versa and being able to bring that and translate that by way of our product offerings and services to our agents and to the community we serve. Well, Joy, you know, you mentioned the grand opening. A lot of people came. I know why they came. They came because you are a lot of fun wherever you're at. It's always fun with Joy Barua. And Joy, you have both of my books and I wanna ask you what are some things that really stood out to you in it? Sure. I don't know if we have enough time to go over all the things because they were, I mean, every time I read something or there was a quote or validation of what we know but we didn't realize how it's so simple and yet impactful that we could go on and on. But if I were to just pick on a handful, I would say that first and foremost, it's about leaders standing out. And it's more than just, when you read it without reading into the context, one may be led to believe or prematurely conclude that, oh, it's about standing out because you're a leader and you have a title, and all of those things are important. They're sort of ascribed right over time.  Because a leader without followers, I mean, isn't a leader and building followers is more than just building a fan club, so to speak, in the traditional sense. And so, you have to be able to demonstrate to your team that you're able to do the tasks that you're asking them to do or at least be able to show sensitivity to the nuances, the complexities, the challenges that come with them. And being able to do just that as a starting point is a great way to demonstrate that you are committed more than just someone that is just kind of giving orders in their traditional sense. And then also be able to empower them to make choices.  I mean, I don't think any leader does it intentionally, but at times, we all have our blind spots, right? Maybe we are under pressure. Maybe we're under a time crunch or just sort of over consumed by the crises, right? We're not realizing that. And at those times, we may be impatient and not being as open-minded as we should be to being receptive to the ideas that are coming because you have to assign credibility to those who are actually doing it.  And I mean, you're the perfect example of a coach, if I may say that.   It's being able to do what's fundamentally core and being able to demonstrate it and contextualizing it. So along those lines, I mean, a coach ultimately isn't necessarily the one playing the sport, per se. You know, if I may use that metaphor. But you have to be able to show them that you're someone that is more than just yelling on the sidelines and cheering on and so forth. You are there for them, with them, because you see things from a perspective that they are not. And maybe they're in a certain, so in a work context, whether they're in a department, a certain unit, they have their respective sort of the confines of the job description. But while they're doing it, they get the big picture as to the role that a coach plays. And one of the most important roles a coach can play is to be able to reveal their own vulnerability by showing what they can and what they can. And that is very, very empowering. It can never be overstated because at the end of the day, a coach, a leader, they're also human. And being able to expose that human side, it's sort of giving people space to just warm up to you in a very accelerated fashion by just doing that. So I know that in a world where things are moving so rapidly, sometimes it's important to slow down and allow for that human interaction, that emotion, to take the place of building that rapport, that mutual exchange of credibility, and that can be very, very empowering. So really, I'm sorry, I did a bit of a double click, of a double click there. But for me, that was very enlightening because as I read on, it's unleashing your potential. How do you stand out? How do you go from great to excellent? I mean, it's a huge transition. And it's more of a mindset than sort of what you do to act because mind controls the body. Yes, as far as we all know, and it's how you think that shows up in your action. So for me, that was that if I were to pick one, that was very, very empowering and sort of differentiating and refreshing. No, I love hearing your insights there, Joy. And yeah, and you're right.  Can you tell me about how fun that was for your whole team? Sure. So as I mentioned before, food, fun, and family were all there, if you will. So one of the things I did was I told my team that, hey guys, this month is coming up, and it's being celebrated and celebrated in different ways in different places. And just by way of additional context, I've been part of the Asian Pacific Islander American Health Forum during my health care days in the national scene looking at how you need to advocate for issues, recognition, building sensitivity, equity, quality, all the good stuff that we need to be cognizant of. So to which I told myself, well, here in Hawaii, we sort of do what we do anyway, right? Because we are diverse, but there are certain things that we could build more sensitivity and understanding and awareness around. So long story short, what I did was we reached out to each and every culture, ethnicity, and sort of diversity aspects, if you will, among our staff and agents, and we said, hey guys, if we were to ask you to share something about your culture that nobody knows, or you would like people to know more of, what would that be? And we even gave them a little bit of money. Every person that came forward to dress up, to buy whatever food they wanted to share, and it doesn't have to be the generic. Maybe it's a home-cooked thing that sometimes culture is sort of, there are certain things that are not necessarily representation or a accurate representation of culture. So we wanted them to live up to the challenge of being able to share their culture. And so we had as an end result, we had folks that showed up. They even, some folks made flags, but they were, they took great pride in not only sharing, but also telling a story about, hey, this is a country we came from, but within that country, we have different subcultures, subgroups, and here is my cultural identity. And here's how I identify myself. And it helped for many of us, great stereotypes, gain a better, deeper understanding that we didn't have. And then understand that, it's one thing to watch experience culture via media or secondary experience. It's a whole different thing to get that first hand from a person who's representative of that. And so there was this spirit of ambassadorship. There's a spirit of sharing. There's a spirit of awareness building, all of that coming together, of course, doing it sort of local style, if you will, over food and fun and family. It was just amazing. For me in particular, just, I mean, I learned so many things that I didn't even know. And for me, that was very enriching. Well, Joy, I have to say that you are a great leader with fantastic character, and you always have positive energy. And I wanna really thank you for taking time to join me on the show today. No, thank you, Rusty. Rusty, thank you for having me. And wish you the best with the two books and more coming on the way, I hope. I mean, I'll tell you, I was inspired and I would recommend folks to check them out if they haven't already and learn about how it's different by taking simple concepts and sort of encouraging people to sort of activate this potential, the stamina they have and to be, to get to go from great to excellent. And I think just that alone, I hope if not anything will help people sort of read more and be inspired by what you've got to share. I also wanna thank you and Think Tech for hosting me. It was very humbling and quite an opportunity. And I wish you the best and thank you again for having me. Thank you, Joy. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit rustycomory.com and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that Joy and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.


Miquel, with this morning's team, this was you all's first win at the beginning of the season. Now you've got them again. What stands out about this team? I know they've gone through some changes with some injuries. Yeah, it's going to play hard.   All of the starters had, I think, like eight plus rebounds. For you as a team and as a group, what has changed as you guys have, like, focused in on attacking the glass? Yeah, just rebounding, just a big emphasis on everybody. Personally, me as well, just rebounding better. And yeah, I think it just, it also helps with the defense when we're just dropping them sides red in and 1-5 every single time and having a mismatch down there with the big and keeping clacks low. But I think just the emphasis of just being a mindset of going in rebounds and just helping the team out. What does that say about the group when you guys have taken on a lot of teams who have a lot more size on you guys? Have you guys still been able to be able to focus in on that and have that advantage? Yeah, just a pride thing.  And I think we've just always been stepping up for that and continue to keep doing that. I know you've called them the best scorer on the team. I don't know how many minutes you'll have cam for, but potentially having him back, just what does that do for you guys? I mean, it's great just having another scorer like cam and even what he's been doing defensively, just playing hard and being in the right spots. But yeah, I mean, having another, one of our really good players out there definitely helps. With cam, is it, with him coming back now, seeing how many guys have scored, is it just another luxury, I guess, knowing that he had another potential 20-point scorer in the chamber, I guess, to kind of unleash? Yeah, for sure. I mean, he could score at all times. So it's good to have another guy out there, just put more pressure, you know, it just adds to the team and adds shows of depth that we have. What did you guys learn about yourself as a team during the time cam was up? Just learning. I think just learning everything we're doing. I think we're just getting better as a team, just figuring out what things defensively, offensively, just more, just trying to figure out what we got to do out there every day. Is there any like a, you guys played with cam Thomas, you know, so you guys got used to that. But now having to like guys have guys in and out of the rotation, is there any adjustment that you have to go through with now adding him back into the lineup? Um, all right, I think, I think mainly on guys just probably out there that's getting minutes prize. Me personally, it's not for me because I'm out there. I mean, it's great to have cam back for me, just like out there and knowing that he could score doing that. But I think it's more personal guys that's been out there just knowing that it's a league.  So I think it's more heavy on guys that's been out there that minutes might go down a little bit. Just shows what the depth we have. But yeah, I think it's personal for the guys that's been out. That's probably minutes go go down a little bit. You've known Doe as a shooter for a while. Obviously that series against the Mads, he did what he did. But to see him shoot this many threes with confidence now, is that just kind of fun to see what it's like playing with him instead of him beyond the other side of that? Yeah, I mean, I knew he always had it. I think it's probably just the trade and stuff was just tough. And obviously, nobody wants to miss when you come to a new team because I could bet you a lot of fans here definitely wasn't watching Dallas games like that. And so you just kind of assume like, oh, he's missing like he can't shoot. So it's just good. Just a confidence thing for him. Especially coming from going to a new team is always tough. You want to always play your best. But he's definitely just happy for him getting it going because I know what he can do and he's just staying with it. Do you and Cam kind of give him or does he give you a little bit of ribbing for that series when he has like a hot shooting game? Or do y'all bring that up much? No, it was just randomly come up randomly. I don't know when, but it was randomly come up with that whole thing.  No, because he had the surgery. So I mean, do you think just not having that and being completely healthy has been a big, big part in the way you shot the shirt? I mean, man, the only person you ask is him. You know, he will know how his hand and I think it was a shooting hand. So I mean, yeah, if his shoot had obviously that's a it's definitely not going to help with his hurt. But only only him knows if it's bother him more than anybody else. Michael, now that the N season tournament is behind us, but what was it like to kind of experience not knowing what you were going to do next week and then waking up to seeing where you would be playing with those two games? We haven't experienced that before. What was it like for you guys as a team? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's it was exciting. I think we all wanted to get to Vegas and yeah, it was just I kind of I think somebody told us that we probably go to Atlanta or something because I think Kam said that he didn't see Atlanta on the schedule just like in the regular schedule. So I think there is already talking about like if we don't make I think one of them games is going to be Atlanta. So yeah, it's just excitement leading up to it. But you know, I'm just I rather win those games and not make it in any other thing. I don't obviously I care about the in season, but I'll take one of those games and and if you don't make it as cool, at least at least we got them dubs. Speaking of these wins, you guys have now a three game win streak after kind of that that Atlanta game being such a emotional roller coaster, what has it meant for you guys to kind of like get back to some of your principles trying to get these wins now and and being able to get these wins, I guess. Yeah, just playing hard and just find a way. I think that's what it is just going out there playing our way still learning and getting better on what we want to do still long season, but going in the right direction and just keep trying to build.


Alright, so I'm here with you Funnick and he's just given us a great insight into the marketplace So we've got the privilege now of being able to sit down and just ask him a couple questions How you got started in the property game? so I mean I got started because of Questions that I was asking myself about how to save and retain the money that I was making from from DJing and When I was checking out all the investment vehicles that were available to me property was the one where We would be able to invest in it and also like this capital growth on on your money So that's why I started focusing on property Private property a home for everyone


Now I have to say something about a speaker or a speaker is a Matthew Bargati and He's the founder of a company called super-releaser and what they do They are building space suit components robotic space suit components for NASA and They're researching and developing on a field called soft robotics So Matthew will not talk about soft robotics. So I'm not sure but I might give you this hint if you're close To him don't try hugging everything because this robot might crush you with it with its soft delicate hands a warm applause for Matthew I've got to clarify I'm a subcontractor on a NASA project I it NASA doesn't like it when you say I'm working for NASA unless you like are in their offices We just got to clarify that because people who like can laser you from space like so So Einstein was on a train and he turns to the passenger next to him and says does Boston stop at this train? So Why can't programmers tell the difference between Halloween and Christmas? Because 3-1 oct equals 2-5 deck Okay All right, so I'm I'm the founder and lead scientist at that's super-releaser Super-releaser is a soft robotics development company. Essentially. We we solve hard problems with soft robots soft robotics is a new field of robotics is pretty young only about 30 years old and the heart of it is Most problems that get solved with biology most problems that get solved in nature are done with compliant materials squishy stuff and Most problems that are solved in engineering are done with hard Things so hard languages hard actuators things that don't have much give things that don't have much compliance And it's essentially means that half of all potential solutions to problems in robotics have never even been considered And so that's what I'm excited about and I'm excited especially about applying it to human scale problems So I'm gonna be talking about some of what our work is the uses for soft robotics and how to build your arm Okay We're gonna start with a little brain teaser.  How would you bite things without a skull? So there are actually creatures out there that do this squids So squids have a beak that's very hard. It's a bird-like beak. It's actually it's really unusually bird-like It's an example of convergent evolution And they don't have a skull. They actually don't have any hard Understructure whatsoever and they can bite things. There are actually many orders of magnitude harder than they are in half They have a body that is about as firm as a tomato and yet they're able to bite through fish and The way that they do this is some through something called functional grading. So up the up the tip of the beak What's called the rostrum end? They have a very hard end the very hard proteins Hydrophobic proteins that don't have much water in them that blend out towards the wing end of the beak that blend out to softer and softer more Water-bearing proteins as the thing goes down into the squids head and that's met by firm muscle tissue that comes on to the wings And then it distributes the force up through the mantle So what ends up happening is you have this very hard tip here Without a fulcrum. It's actually balancing all of those forces of biting across the structure Using distance to balance that force and to get lots of clamping pressure on the end of that beak So what am I talking when I'm talking about applying this stuff to human scale problems? So I trust you can read I'm not gonna Individually talk about these points but just to say the cost of having cerebral palsy is very high and a lot of that is because Physical therapy with one-on-one with the therapist is very expensive and the orthotics the things that you use every day To try and get you more mobility have to be customized tailored to every individual person now that ends up being very expensive because specialists have to do this work so The reason why it's sort of a complex problem. That's not easily solved with a traditional exoskeleton is human beings don't really have a Hard like rigid ball bearing joint and say the elbow. We're not made of these hard linkages They're softer. These are actually two surfaces that are not quite Cylindrical riding over one another. It's not just a fulcrum and Everybody is different every person's a little bit. You know, they've got a little bit of different muscle tone They've got a little bit of you know different something. There are different diameters And so it's hard to make a one-size-fits-all robot in a traditional robotic sense But what's also the case is that? Customizing it for a person takes a particular expert someone who knows that particular robot very well to center its power So if you're trying to have an elbow actuator where there's a pancake motor right here and it's actuating your arm out It actually takes somebody to get that right there as close as they can to the pivot of your elbow So that if it can't come a little bit off of the joint Otherwise it stands the potential of hurting you it can actually do more damage than it's trying to fix So that's one thing that we've been working on at super-releaser is soft exoskeletons for therapeutics So can I get a volunteer? You yes, please come up What's your name Robin round of paws for Robin, please? Yes, so would you mind trying a unlicensed medical device Groovy This and arm could you please put your arm through here? Thank you so much All right, so the problem we're trying to solve in cerebral palsy is the point of your elbow on the point there Yeah Let's move it up a little bit. How's that feel? Groovy so I Wasn't able to take my my compressed air supplies through the airport for obvious reasons But I'll make do with a hand pump So the problem we're trying to solve in cerebral palsy is that you have essentially high muscle tone that you're stuck like this and What we're trying to do is give even pressure to get your arm back out So just tell me what you feel as you go through that So what's happening here is that we have these soft actuators that are distributing force over the arm You feeling a force? Hey Please give her a round of applause Thank you So the concept is one size fits all pneumatic exoskeletons And what I think is cool is that this compliant squishy squid-like way of thinking about mechanics Means that you can do things in these one size fits all ways But what you can also do is sort of compensate for the irregularities of individual human bodies so Other researchers are actually applying this to really interesting problems in like stroke rehabilitation giving people higher muscle tone able to like grip with more force recovering from strokes There's a place called other lab in San Francisco. That's literally making a squishy Ironman suit and What I think is really cool about it is that if you can encourage people to do daily tasks As someone has a physical disability like cerebral palsy in giving them a little bit of extra freedom Can mean huge Lifetime gains because being able to grip crutches being able to dress yourself Enables you to do a whole bunch of things that also motivate you to continue using your muscles to continue refining skills And so little changes to mobility can have a huge change in overall health So Other ways people are applying functional grading two problems are with like Explody soft robots that has a soft structure and a rigid structure So you can get things that are soft and rigid to do particular To solve particular problems and one way this is really applicable is in prosthetics So this is a scan of Hugh hair Hugh Hugh hair's legs So Hugh hair is a double below the knee amputee who works at MIT and he's been working on these projects where he takes scans and He 3d prints functionally graded structures That distribute the force of the impact from the prosthetic onto the residual limb Now the reason why you want to do this is people are made of mostly water People are made of mostly water and any impact does not get dissipated by some cushioning force There's not a cushioning spring inside of the body So when you have a residual limb you have an amputation you have a residual limb your doctor tries to do the best They can to make it susceptible to a prosthetic, but it doesn't mean it's infinitely powerful And so what happens is when you feel a shock say of walking upstairs from the prosthetic socket into the residual limb None of that force is dissipated by the socket to get it registered on to you It also means that waves of force coming up through the prosthetic sort of find all the tender vitals It's not a pleasant experience and what's difficult is that can cause the residual limb over time to break down so scar tissue isn't terribly strong and so it it has this feedback loop a Socket for the residual limb the interface between the prosthetic and you Has to be particularly shaped to you, but if it damages you you change shape And so what they're trying to do is create a system where it dissipates force the socket itself is strong enough to support the force from the prosthetic without Pushing all of that force on to the easily damaged area of the residual limb And so Hugh here is using functionally graded structures to do this 3d prints that have very high levels The white is very high levels of stiffness and the black are very low levels of stiffness so we can choose where the force is distributed so another Organism another mechanical system that does this kind of distributed force to solve problems very well our goat feet So goats don't spend a lot of time looking at their feet They're actually able to put their feet wherever they want say it's slidey rocks They put their feet where they want and they don't stare at them to figure out what they're doing if you ever see an Osama walk upstairs. It spends a lot of time looking down being like okay feet. What are you doing and? It's has to position the foot to land precisely on the step with the right angle or else It'll slide right off and that's because the system doesn't have compliance in it working with actuators and servos It's often difficult to have them embody compliance to be squishy And so it's hard to get them to deal with unknown situations and oftentimes you have to pause a robot in its tracks So it can look and assess its situation before moving on So here are goats also goats and here's a robot so What I'm when I'm trying to solve here is see you notice its feet are hard metal pads That's insane Because it can't possibly compensate for unknown situations if it's moving forward It has to land with its foot at the correct angle if you remember physics vector forces yada yada yada It has to land with its foot at the correct angle to compensate for the force of the forward motion on Whatever it's landing against it's a very difficult problem to solve purely computationally with hard actuators But it becomes simpler you can do it in a stupider way if you just arrange the matter to move in a certain way when there's force and Another organism that solves this very well is bugs so Flies have these things called seite on their feet. They're spatulated hairs What the fly will do is it'll drag its foot down a surface and it could be even be a really smooth surface like glass And it'll drag its foot and the itty-bitty hairs. Those are incredibly tiny That's a tiny fraction of the size of a human hair We'll actually find little cracks and microstructures inside of the surface And it just drags its foot down until the foot catches and it just has this algorithm that is like dragged down Foot n until it catches and then start that process again with n plus plus one And it just does that for all feet and then it does that again flies aren't known for being very smart and So the way we're trying to employ this in soft robotics this represents some of the work I actually got to participate in with a NASA researcher called named Aaron Parnas. He's not called Aaron Parnas He's named Aaron Parnas Where we're trying to do this thing where we can mass manufacture these guys that have a complex behavior that When you put them all together so the individual actuator is really easy to make or the individual Mechanisms easy to make it's easy to multiply them And so you can get interesting behaviors by multiplying that to have hundreds and hundreds of these all working in tandem So the way this works is there's a rigid structure here, you know bringing up the squids again There's a soft structure here, and then it has two mounting points so that you can essentially load the spring on it And what happens is this grips in when force is put pushing down, but as soon as it's unloaded it'll pop back up and The way that these are used is in big blocks What what Aaron's trying to do is he works at JPL to try and make NASA Exploratory robots to climb over rocks and Mars without having to ask NASA all the time. What am I supposed to do with my feet? Because it takes I think it's 14 minutes To relay that signal to earth and then time to get that back and that makes exploring very very time-consuming But and this I didn't flip this gif over. This is literally upside down And so what's happening here is you take all of these hooks and you have this incredibly simple procedure Which is take the paw move it over grip the paw until the paw has caught and then you're done So I'm going to show you how to make your own shot soft robots So these are not sex toys. They are soft robots So I do a lot of 3d printed soft robots. I publish them in the open source I have a lot of stuff on Thingiverse. You can look me up giant. I Thingiverse I am actually writing up a book for make on like every soft robot I can think of so it's all published in one place, you know yada yada by my book So it's not even out yet So It starts with you can actually use 3d printing I figured out how to watertight print with an FDM printer so I can use cheap prints to make things watertight So you can just make molds and what's cool about that is I can make generations of molds that all experiment with different ideas and make Them all at the same time and label them like experiment a b c d e and then cast them all evaluate them against each other and not waste Too much of my time because my time is precious. I can buy robots to do the printing so It's a mold that's sort of like two halves. I'm not tall enough. Anyway, so the mold is two halves and There's a core in the middle and the silicone is squishy enough that once it's cast And so this is a little gasket here that you'll see coming into play in the end when the mold is assembled in the silicone It's cast I can actually pull the core out of the silicone. So there's a structure on the inside of the silicone part there's a structure of a Void so I'm choosing where to put the not silicone and when that inflates it actually distorts the silicone in a certain way and So well happen here is here's the part that that gets mounted on remember There's there's only silicone and air there and then it makes this kind of complex gripper And so I'm going to try to again. Don't have my air supply here. So forgive me Forgive me for not being being macho enough to really manage this but all right gripper I do it do it do it.  They'll actually turn into spheres and you'll get nearsighted everybody in space wears glasses and So one thing that's really difficult is to make a space suit essentially what you're making is a soft human-shaped space ship and What's difficult about managing that is the softness is there so you can do stuff with your many points of articulation In space to do things like repair the Hubble and stuff But what's difficult is because there has to be air pressure You know you evolved at the bottom of gravity. Well, there's there's a giant air column above your head that reaches out into space That's all of this air pressing down on you And when you let all of that off everything in you essentially swells up your veins dilate and it sucks a lot literally so No, anyway What happens is your body doesn't work well in a vacuum and so what we've done in usual space suit design is to replace that atmospheric pressure That you would otherwise have in a gravity well with pneumatic pressure We have a big airtight suit and we inflate it to like seven pounds and that's that What's difficult is that becomes a giant air spring if you've ever like blown up a rubber glove You'll notice that it's springing so the suit springs back and for doing delicate labor with your hands It actually is really terrible people's fingernails literally do not delaminate from their nail beds and their gloves fill up with blood as They're working on the space shuttle as they used to work on the space shuttle Because the glove design actually causes you to essentially push against this spring constantly Now, how would you how would you solve that like you're currently the gloves sort of like this? So this is like you know, imagine glove is in a vacuum chamber and you're putting your hand inside of the Glove in the vacuum chamber so in the current glove we fill it with air so we just extend the regular atmosphere into the vacuum chamber if you put your bare hand into the vacuum chamber your hand would get all purple and swollen and There are other ways to solve this like you could have a perfectly cast like steel Hand void so there could be a steel block with a hand shaped hole in it You grease your hand up put it in the steel and when the vacuum chamber vacuums your hand wouldn't change shape at all And so you wouldn't experience the vacuum, but that's not very useful for like repairing spaceships Another way to think about it is there's pressure coming out So what if we put pressure coming in you can actually make really? Really small stretchy gloves and have somebody put their hand inside of the really small stretchy glove and then when you turn on the Vacuum the pressure in will equal the pressure out and that's called mechanical counter pressure And so that's what essentially we're doing is Here's the Gemini style glove So that's the big bag of air and here's the mechanical counter pressure glove The mechanical counter pressure glove is made of elastics They're actually biased to be a little bit small and that provides the exact same pressure in as space is pulling out Now the way you get your hand into these is we actually use some soft robotic elements to change the size of the glove So it's a little bigger when you put it on and then you shrink the glove with pneumatic pressure until it's sized to fit your hand and So the part that I'm specifically working on spending most of my time on is this is going to go into space Well if everything works So the idea is not to make a mechanical counter pressure suit in one go But do it incrementally and so we're putting it we're putting it on to the current NASA ISS suit Using an interface from the regular pressurized suit out to the glove that's actually open to vacuum So the the glove protects you from the vacuum pull of space, but it actually doesn't need a bunch of air around your hand So what's interesting is we have this pressurized suit and this depressurized glove and to transition between them What my lab super-releaser is spending the most of their time on is a gasket that takes you from the suit pressure To the zero glove pressure without cutting off any blood to your arm So it's a cool problem and a cool interface and a cool problem to solve And we're doing this with fancy 3d printed molding with magnetic cores and it's What I really like about it is the engineering is complicated, but the materials are so cheap So anyway, I I'm Matthew Borgatti. This is my company super-releaser Please get in touch with me if you want to solve problems hard problems with soft robots and I'd love to take any questions you have Okay, thank you very much Um So I think we will follow the usual Q&A pattern and while you are lining up behind the microphones We will start with the signal angel Hey, so I have two questions from one person and the first one is is there a hand prosthetic version of the Mars robot fly crew like law I'm sorry The Mars the claw explorer.  I've never seen one. I mean, it's totally doable though. Oh I did literally work on a project to do this I worked on a show called prototype this That's how I met Aaron Parnass is we literally made a spider-man suit that used these to a person Had ones on their hands. So I'm changing my story. So We made hands that a person could climb a wall with to give them spider-man powers So there it has existed at one point in the universe And the other question from the person was are shock absorbers for prosthetic legs available or is all the compliance at the attachment to the body So it's a it's kind of a complicated problem. So You might notice the recurve legs if you ever seen the running legs Like the carbon fiber spring legs that's runners in the Paralympics will use they they have integrated shock absorbers It's a compliant shock absorber But the difficult thing is you can imagine to absorb shock You need to move mechanically and so since the force is coming up you need to move down And so if you have just a spring so you can imagine like a piston leg You'd have a spring and every time you step to absorb the shock You'd end up having a very odd gate which might be acceptable might not be but it's not it's a suboptimal gate And so the way it's currently Attempted is by having silicone sleeves that get you between the the prosthetic sleeve which is usually hard carbon fiber and the residual limb is a silicone sleeve But the problem is it doesn't dampen any of the force And so the idea is to not absorb shock by like having the prosthetic go down But distribute the shock to the strongest possible places in the body to distribute it to the strongest places in the residual limb instead of Distributing it over the entire residual limb That I hope for portal like jumping of buildings to Boing another question or the mic? I wish I think we have no questions at the microphone Well, I answered everything then another Yeah, if nobody else So Another question from the IRC is as like designing silicon circuits is quite complicated due to the variability of process parameters How do you predict the elastic behavior of your robots e.g. Like for example by FEM simulation or do you just do trial and error? Yeah, so it It is sort of amenable to finite element analysis FEA But it is actually really processor intensive and you can do things that are like works like models So you can take meshes and you can distort the mesh in it and it's a very nonlinear system Where some distortion changes the wall thickness you can imagine an inflatable thing the walls get thinner And so that changes the dynamic of the system and you have to recalculate What ends up being difficult is having that be accurate to the world is tough And so you can have simulations that give you some predictive power But there isn't anything where it's a good design tool that also features simulation where it's accurate enough to really predict This is going to do that. I did it the the words on the computer match the world And so I I've designed successfully it what ends up happening is you use some of those tools And then I found it's best to have frameworks where you can iterate where it's simple to modify Because the the simulation will never be as informative as experimentation There are technical documentations the amount of stretchiness in the silicone and you can predict this to a degree But I found the best way is to iteratively prototype and lower the cost of making a new prototype by making it really quick and really cheap and that Ups the amount of prototyping you can do Thanks, and as a follow-up like how much does the material properties vary like the variation really high or So silicone is very consistent So I use our TV silicones room temperature vulcanizing you can get them their two-part silicones You mix them together and the the chemistry on them has advanced to a point at which you just 50-50 mix them and they cure And their properties are very They're very consistent Their variability is documented it's usually fairly low A Some of it requires a little bit of process control where if you're very diligent about it You need to make sure that there are no bubbles in the casting and that your casting is dimensionally accurate They're all these mold making tricks and techniques They're sort of like Adam Savage model making tricks and techniques of like you got to tip it to the side to make sure the Bubbles get out in this direction and stuff, but it's very consistent Okay, then we have actual people we had microphones and not that the people on the internet aren't actual people They're not right, but but these people are around here and Since we have a lot of time you have left where we can have more questions. We can have more questions from the internet, but first Oh a few questions from the microphones. Yes Mention before and that the resources are really cheap. Where do you get your resources? I don't know in comparison to what I don't have any Funds funds to research with where do I get my materials? How do you deal with getting a specific shore and do you work with shore? I don't know what your material specifications are and have you mixed different? Components together. Well, how would you advise we do this at home? Okay, so to break down Where do I get my materials? How much do they cost? Do I combine silicones and sort of what shore what like range of durometers am I looking at sure? I'm sorry, I have done a lot of research and I haven't found any answers. So I'm asking you Conductive silicones. Have you found any do you have any solutions? So Conductive silicones there if you look at dielectric elastomers, and it's spelled D I E like die electric elastomers Dielectric elastomers there is some documentation on them They there tend to only be conductive in very high voltage ranges like plus minus 500 and up but They do exist I I tend to discount them because it's sort of not my it's not my field There are some people who are working in software robotics who use shape changing elastomers for that that use an electric shape change effect The materials I'm using I you have an FDM printer. I use an ultimaker to I use whatever cheap PLA I can find on eBay I Use Sainsmart a lot the silicone that I use is smooth on I will use smooth on dragon skin 10 and Ecoflex double o50 They are about a hundred dollars a gallon But it is much it they are much cheaper than the technical silicones you'll find for medical research And medical implants those end up being a hundred dollars a pint the the adhesives I use there's a Adhesive sil poxy that smooth on makes you can also use epoxy silicone cocks that you find from Home Depot and stuff like that the shores that I'm using range from double o50 to Shore a 40 I'm usually around the shore a 10 region you can thin silicones out with silicone oil and you can also buy thinning agents from silicone manufacturers and Ecoflex is miscible with dragon skin because they're both platinum cure silicones that use the same Filling agent and so I mix them oftentimes at a 50-50 ratio to titrate the durometer Smooth skin doesn't have any European distributors. Do you have any solutions? Oh Amazon import tour for physical objects, I Don't have a solution for for exporting. Um, I Would call them up and ask nicely Thanks All right, so we saw you using that hand pump to close that yes hands claw thing Yeah, so I'm just imagining that on a on a human being for example, how much air pressure what you need to actually make it responsive hand prosthetic and Like how much air pressure would you need for tasks like lifting a jug of milk like it like a gallon of milk For example, and would it be feasible to install all the hardware? You would need to generate that pressure on a human being on earth and yeah post a space relevant questions So my devices tend to articulate from about 10 to 20 psi I use compressed carbon dioxide canisters which act have about the power density of a lithium polymer battery So if you look at grams per joule, they have about the same power density So I tend to use them especially because the torque is instantaneous They come if you've ever reinflated a bike tire, so it's those emergency bike tire reinflators Or if you're San Franciscans and like doing whippets, it's those things and I I Think the systems that I've made to compress them into like human scale usable things You can't take compressed gases on planes whatever But I think that the the power density is appropriate for articulating objects in this domain People have worked in them other lab has worked in that Getting lots and lots of force out of things like if you want to pick up a jug of milk with just Compliant mechanisms like you're starring only silicone That's a more difficult problem because you have to stiffen the silicone to the point at which it can like Resist the weight of the gallon of milk But a way to get around that problem is to put spines inside of things So the way nature has done that is when things need to have a lot of torque they'll actually Put spines in things and the spines will help keep distortion like linear distortion from being a Detriment from the total amount of force that you have in the system and so they are you know snakes do that snakes solve that problem with spines, but You sort of have to choose your battles. It's not a perfect solution for all problems It's a good solution for compliance interfaces But you have to sort of choose your battles and I look to nature to do this to figure out what mechanisms are appropriate Thank you. Okay. I heard we have more questions from the internet from nice people from the internet So if they could all from a fridge, you never know We have one question here How do universal Jamming grippers compared to articulated grippers. This is quite special.  They're very they're very bad at that You have more questions for us. Yes, I have a question as we have still quite some time I guess it will take a bit So how does one build small lightweight sources of banana prunett pneumatic or hydraulic pressure Got it. Yes, really small Yeah, so that's a problem. I'm actually trying to work So you there are ways of getting small amount of pneumatic pressure with piezos So what you can do is you can have a closed volume and goodbye computer anyway So you can use piezos that have essentially have two check valves and the piezo is pushing into this airtight container and it'll push a little pressure out of the check valve out of check valve One and pull a little pressure from check valve two and they can articulate very fast and it'll generate Pneumatic pressure the disadvantage is it's usually not that much and you have essentially a spring system in there Where if the pressure the back pressure is more than the pneumatic that sorry than the piezo can overcome Then you get it peeks out at pressure And so that's a way of getting really really tiny pneumatic volume or pneumatic stuff going on It's essentially you imagine taking a piezo speaker and then putting a couple of check valves in a thing You can have it like a printed enclosure for it And that would be a really tiny way the other ways that it's usually done is you have a diaphragm valve diaphragm pumps the small cheap ones that you can get from China are these diaphragm pumps that just use a rubber diaphragm and they push pistons that are actually all on a pivot and So they'll go around and the diaphragm will push in and out and check valves will cause the pressure to continuously go out And so that's the way that's done Hydraulics small hydraulics are not super my field I don't know that terribly well my solution for that has actually been to use pneumatics To displace hydraulics to sort of like you could imagine bubbling air up into a soda bottle And then having a straw with the hydraulic end going down But that's how I handle hydraulics Okay, I have just realized how long you've been standing there. So the microphone, please and why didn't get anyone human chair or something? If you let robots roam a forest then they break something after like five minutes and they will destroy themselves pretty soon So could soft robotics also be a solution to this problem? I think that it is so the the you know to like wrap it up like To wrap up that that question in sort of a bow Boston Dynamics makes this really expensive Robot called big dog and I'm I'm not here to like Boston Dynamics Because like who am I to talk I make I make these like I'm not super sophisticated But one of the disadvantages is it's a it's a complicated robot with lots of things to go wrong and One thing that can be very difficult and having it operate for an extended length of time is that it has to make all of its guesses exactly correctly to not like topple over and it's supposed to like keep soldiers from dying and going into dangerous situations instead of a soldier but There are I have had reports from people anonymous sources That people have literally died trying to rescue the robot because it was on their heads if the million dollar robot exploded and Yeah, so the solution I think that's appropriate for it is to choose your battles where you put Actuation where I think there can be a lot of passive systems that actuate that like have a little bit of a bias Like your foot is an example of this where your foot is doing a lot of passive compensating for like what the Dynamics of the like the walking downstairs or walking across rubble Your foot is compensating for a lot of that just by being soft and you bias it in small waves with the tendons and muscles that are in it And so that that's my belief is that you choose where you've got springiness and compliance And then you match that to where you've got your power for like locomoting and for you know hauling stuff Is that sufficiently answered does that feel pretty good? Thank you Okay, oh we have another internet. Are you a signal angel? Because we can't answer questions that are not asked on the microphone because we need to have them on tape But we have the signal angel and she has another one for us. I have another follow-up question Yeah, we still have some time So if you would need to trade off panoramatics Versus Hydraulics, I'm not possible. I'm not an expert hydraulics. Yeah. Yes. So which would you use or what was the use case for each of those got it so Hydraulics are really good for things like mining So you have like a drill that's being turned by a hydraulic system And it has instantaneous torque and you can get a whole lot of force and there are relatively low line losses because of friction that That's a really good use case for hydraulics when you need instant torque and you don't want springiness you can design springiness into hydraulics, but since water is incompressible a Piston that's being driven like a hydraulic actuator is exactly where you put it So you actually have to like to compress water water is technically compressible But it's like on the order of like point 101% but you actually have to sort of to squeeze the hydraulic cylinder and get any spring out of it You actually have to like it ends up distorting the metal around it or blowing the gaskets so that Works interestingly when you talk about compliant systems because you usually don't need as much like this isn't going anywhere when dealing with Compliant systems, but there are situations in which you want really instantaneous torque and things like that for like You know being able to really quickly Change the pressure inside of a system where you're like someone has spastic motion in your their arms You're trying to exactly deaden it by returning pressure that exactly equals the opposite of that waveform And so it's an interesting use case, but it's difficult to implement I Use pneumatics partially because I can be like wasteful with it where I can have things that are leaky And it's just like I'm I just have a monitor on how much pressure is in the system And I don't have to worry about how much I'm putting in as long as it loops back to here's how much system pressure Here's the state of the system It doesn't matter where the dial goes as long as it stays at that state It's fine, and so it's easy for me to have slightly sloppier systems that I can sort of Fudge around with and create quick prototypes on and don't have to hunt down leaks And that's why I use pneumatics because that that is a nightmare in hydraulics like hunting down leaks and stuff And I don't want to be covered in hydraulic fluid every day Okay, I'm took first you in the back. I think because you have been raising your hand for so long Okay, you said and your your company is a NASA subcontractor And I think you said that you were using or that those those gloves that you made will be used on ISS and space suits if if everything works if everything works, so Obviously you believe in your product and yes sold it very believable to me But my question is and does NASA expect this to be the future of space suits or are they just paying you to test around? Noodle about that'd be great. That'd be great job What'd you do I messed about Did it work? No, that's fine So they're they're investing in this because they want to solve problems in space suits and they think mechanical counter pressure is one of the ways to do it Compliant materials like play techs made the first functioning space suit that ever went into space, you know Not Northrop Grumman not bowing play techs international latex incorporated and it was professional bra seamstresses that designed and built the Gemini space suit so The science like the down and great nitty-gritty science on soft materials has always been Difficult to evoke in physical stuff But like having a gist of it understanding the materials from working with them and applying to them to practical problems has sort of been the thrust of most space suit technology and so NASA is like well you guys you work with this soft stuff Can we do a new thing that hasn't been done before with space suits and If it works it could improve a lot of things and solve a lot of problems But what's difficult in in brand-new systems is you're like looking at your ideals and then you find out how it fails like the externalities of it and so we're exploring a lot of interesting things to try and solve these top-level problems and the designs are Evoking these sort of mid-level problems and we're sort of hacking towards idealizing all of it But the performance we see on the gloves like the dexterity in vacuum chamber tests and the amount of pressure that you see like the Even pressure across the hand without like causing fingernail delamination is really promising right now And so it's encouraging NASA and it's encouraging us to keep pushing with it Yeah, you you on the microphone We try to build some soft rob robotics in our maker space in Milan and it's very difficult So I think that without having a design model to actually design the things yeah before to Build it. It's very hard. Yeah So what do you think about the design process of soft robotics? Yeah on Unfortunately, there's no there's no way I can give you like a data dump It's it's almost like if if you had to still copy see programming out of books Like if if it was very hard to like if the internet didn't exist and you still had to copy see off of books You'd have thousands and thousands of people being like why doesn't my program work? I've read the entire book and it's like well You had a trailing slash here or something like there isn't a good guide to give you an intuitive knowledge of it without Playing with it a bunch because there's no real good well-spring of people who are jumping in to answer your questions Like there's not a soft robotics forum. Well, there is on my website But I actually have if you go to superreleaser.com slash forum. I Actually do have a software box and I will answer your questions but The difficulty is there isn't a level of knowledge up there to solve sort of meta problems of like What's a good way to think about this? What are successful models of soft robots and so like getting a base understanding to know why this doesn't work and know What a successful software robot tends to be designed like and good design processes are thin on the ground And I think that makes it a really huge ramp. You have to really get up the ramp Of the learning curve really quick to be able to produce results to keep going And I'm trying to solve that by publishing open source robots, you know Make working designs and be honest with about the design process and then publish, you know What works and here's what to look out for But before that's thicker on the ground and before people are available to just answer questions from people getting into it There's almost no way you can do a data dump to somebody be like just just read this book And then you will know exactly what's wrong with it because it Like many design problems. It takes having a detailed knowledge of the system in place Okay, I think we have one or two more questions from the signal angel again I use these working well, and we have still a lot of time left. So All your questions Yeah, people have been really fun and they also want to thank you for the talk as it was really cool And yeah one sees that you really have fun with these research So the one thing people are still interested in Can you expand a bit on the one million dollar robot being saved by the soldiers? Because that was really quick ah Sort of so I Don't want to I don't want to talk too far out of my depth because you know, I'm not in the military I have friends, but I don't want to just be like here's how it is everybody so In some ways and this applies to all the equipment that you use if you're like an Electrician like and you're servicing something you're responsible for it. Even if someone Directly working with you might say well that that exploded, but it definitely wasn't your fault up the chain it's your fault and So when you introduce expensive equipment that people are nominally responsible for if it fails You have to ask you have to find some way to justify for them Why they're allowed to let it go and so when some when there are some systems that in star incredibly complicated and incredibly expensive equipment Like a robot that's supposed to do certain kinds of field work If it gets lost on your watch You are nominally responsible and therefore have to take some of the heat for it And so I think in certain situations when robots aren't a hundred percent reliable It ends up with people having to take responsibility for like saving the robot Which is antithetical to their initial purpose and so my theory is if you can get robots less Expensive if you can change the manufacturing principles of robotics Which is sort of one angle that I'm trying to go with with soft robotics is that it lowers that Expense value so raises that like disposable robot. Just it can blow up. That's okay. We can get another value changes sort of that equation But they are not like why liable for them or like have to pay if it breaks I don't think soldiers are individually reliable Responsible for I don't honestly. I'm the last person you should ask about how the the billing system works in the United States military Okay, thank you the words Okay, oh we have more questions. Yeah, you start popping up at the last seconds of the quest Question and answering from the signal angels every time. I think you might have found out how not to stand all the time The microphones again, yeah, I have a question about Going into production. Do you have any example of a project that reached mass production? mass market production of a soft robotics project so The best example is actually nerf So Nerf uses a ton of soft compliant mechanisms to generate pneumatic pressure and to say choose Which dart gets shot in in guns? They actually use a lot of soft compliant systems where it's like, okay So you squeeze this and it conditionally will inflate that and that will go out to this particular rocket Yeah, nerf gun and and compliance systems are everywhere Like sales are compliant system. They conditionally stiffen based off of conditions So like based off of the wind and their direction They will stiffen because the the fibers have high tensile strength and you can actually choose the shape of the sail Based off of how you trim it and that changes that changes how much of a wing It is and various other properties that allow it to go faster or slower and to be able to like Finally tune like as you go over waves. That's one of the points of having a Nerd talk anyway, it's one of the points of having a Line on the edge of a Viking sail So if you ever see illustrations of Viking ships, there is a line going out to the edge of a square sail And you might be asking yourself why the hell would you do that? Why wouldn't you just let the square sail be the square sail? And it's actually because the way Viking ships are designed. They are not Self-riding they are actually very tippy and so when you go over waves the boat flexes a little bit and You need to change the shape of the sail and what direction it is taking the wind as it goes over waves by Changing how aerodynamic the sail is or else you flip over and the reason I know this is because there was a book Published from an anthropologist who studied Viking craft made an exact copy of one and kept flipping himself over because he Forgot to have somebody trimming the sail Okay One more question on the one more all right one more. I don't know we have still Five minutes left. So if you are if there is he has more questions of course first of all him Hello, so you have soft actuators. Do you also have soft sensors? Oh Soft sensors so that that's a thing that I'm working on as a background project So there are lots of ways to use micro fluidics as sensors to have like a thing filled with a hydraulic fluid In a tiny little channel and a piece of silicone and read the pressure out the other end, you know with a little You know a micro sensing device One of the difficult things about soft sensors is it's difficult to Compensate for the flex of the system when calculating how much forces on it because you can picture if you made a flat Sensor array and you wanted to detect how much pressure a person say you have a person was with a amputation Residual limb is inside of a socket you're trying to measure where the pressure is you have a flat sheet of sensors And you stuff that into the socket and the person stands on it the sensor Array is actually going to be detecting a lot of forces because of the particular order in which it bent Not directly because of the amount of pressure that it's experiencing so one thing that is really difficult in sensor design is coming up with things that the orientation like the Way the sensor is accidentally stuck to the side of the Cup in which you're trying to measure the force or whatever that is It's difficult to compensate for that to make sure you're getting something accurate And so one of the ways that people do that is by embedding stretch sensors in soft robots And so they have like a linear measurement of how much stretch has been done With the molding that I do this is sort of an example of it with the molding that I do I can choose where to put individual electronic components inside of a soft thing and so this is a ring that has a Trinket pro inside of it and a couple of RGB LEDs and those are In a specific spot in the silicone because they have a little rider board that actually slots into the silicone and locks in Mechanically and so you can you can if you choose your battles where with where you put your sensors You can have them integrate with soft systems, but it it ends up being a confounding problem But one that a lot of people working in prosthetics and in spacesuits are working on and doing cool stuff it Okay, so the question is signal angel. All right. We have more for us. Yeah, sure people Time to get creative So the last question from the IRC is Do you and can you build pneumatic computers like state machines? With this yeah with the stuff or do you always have to use a computer like? Interface. Yeah, that's actually a question. I'm really interested in because the idea of doing pneumatic state machines of having like something biased where you can have a series actuator where it's like this thing will only inflate under these conditions and so you have like This is the way octopus arms work octopus is really cool. You end up taking a lot of soft robotic stuff from sea creatures So when octopuses are panicked and trying to move all of their legs at once They actually don't have enough processing to really do all legs flowing at the same time And so if you see an octopus like pick up and run it will actually limit the zone of solutions It's trying to find by creating straight sections in its legs And so it'll actually create joints so it can physically run and the the way it's just it has a distributed Neuronal system so octopus individual limbs actually have their own processing centers and so you'll notice there they have a distributed brain and So one thing that's really cool is that you can actually look at with electrodes You can look at what is happening in an octopuses limb as it's gripping something and it's actually that you'll have these relay centers where It grips something with the end of the limb and it'll be controlled by this functional relay center And there'll be a signal sort of coming down and coming back from like the their arm will have a relay center like the brain in a brontosaurus butt and There will be like little nodes up and what will happen is the nearest node will start the flex and If another node gets hit like as it's wrapping something up if the next node gets hit It'll continue wrapping, but if the next node doesn't get hit It's gripping a small thing and it can discontinue the wrapping motion And so what it's doing is it's sort of sending a signal back and forth and asking where do I need to stop the wrapping? wicka wicka so To try and simplify the problem space And so I think that would be really cool to do in soft robotics to have these passive systems Where you don't need a lot of signaling going on to just have PASIC pneumatic like That there's pneumatic logic inside of it I think I've created a solution for that that involves like this two-part molding The difficult thing to do with pneumatic logic in soft stuff is you have to create check valves and Check valves are really hard to create without a spring and when you cast something you don't cast it in a spring orientation It's hard to preload and so it's very difficult like if you imagine a heart valve You know the heart valve opens up. It's a it's essentially a heart valve that looks like shy loot it's got like three actuating pieces and They're actually all bigger than the whole and so they fall back towards each other to create a checked valve where pressure can't come back on the heart It's very difficult to do that in casting because they open up like you cast them in the opening orientation There's nothing that springs back to cause them to close But I think that I have created a solution for that with some complicated two-part molding to create things that Get biased by another part that gets put in but that's sort of like interesting theoretical soft robotics that currently doesn't pay the bills so Okay, again, thank you very much for your interest We are


I'm going to demonstrate how chocolate is made as hot chocolate from Bogota, the capital of Colombia. Here we have anoyeta. It's a staple in any Colombian kitchen. I have a molinillo, a merge of tools from indigenous cultures and Spanish. There's corona and there's salt. This one in particular has 50% of sugar and it comes in the radio packages like this and then there's I'm going to use this one that I already have open because we do hot chocolate here all the time. It's chocolate salt with sugar which is the traditional type and it has cloves and cinnamon. So this is how the pieces look like. The shiny stuff is the sugar. You can see the porous stuff from the mixing. So this is cocoa mixed with sugar and I think they put an emulsifier made of soy with it. All right so we're going to turn on the stove. So hot chocolate measurements for every stick of chocolate use one cup of water. The traditional like the first original hot chocolate or chocolate mixtures were made with water. It was later in Europe that they decided to use milk. I grew up with half milk, half water so that's how I'm going to do it. So let's see about math. Two sticks means two cups. So I'm going to put a cup of water in. Yeah the pot gets hot very quickly and one cup of milk. My stove is not a stove that I can control the heat very well in. So I'm going to see if I can lower it a little bit for a little bit but just make sure that it's very important that the milk doesn't get too hot too quickly or that while you're heating up either water or milk does not get to the boiling point. While that is heating up I'll talk about things that we eat with this in Bogota. I just made arepas and if you don't know what arepas are maybe next year for Viva I'll do the program about arepas. You know corn and there's cheese inside. Chocolates and tafareño always French style bread especially in the mountains there's bakeries everywhere. A lot of corner stores have their own bakery so there's always fresh bread and one thing that we do too is use what we call calados which is a I can only describe it as a thick pita because you can't find them here I get the pita bread he says and then I have a secret ingredient that I won't show until we're done here. So you can see it's steaming I wait until it's steaming like that to put the sticks of chocolate. Let's see here we go that's always fun and then with our trusty mullinillo I go in I hope you can see that already the chocolate is melting with the heat and dissolving when you start seeing the chocolate color it smells so delicious okay so right on there in the mullinillo you have these grooves and stuff to do this there's a song that's what they mean if you've ever heard that song so in Bogota Bogota is 8,500 feet overseas level so even though we're in the equator where by the equator it's not hot is like late tajo in the spring it rains all the time it's sunny it's like if you're not spring but colder thinner air and there's areas where it's so so cold so so cold that a couple of hot chocolate oh my god it's like perfect so one of the secrets of good chocolate hot chocolate is the frothiness they say that with hot chocolate it's frothiness well I used 2% lactic milk and one glass of water and one glass of milk so it's not going to be that frothy but if you want it frothy you can always use whole milk and just whole milk and for those who don't drink milk you can use almond milk that one so far has been my favorite I try soy milk not my favorite I try rice milk but you can barely find rice milk these days um I haven't tried oat milk so and I wonder if oat milk would be good with this you can always experiment okay I think it's about to get too too hot so I'm going to turn it off one of the reasons you use an ojeta an ojeta is because you're doing this so it splatters that's why you eat it has this groove right here oh my god it's about to boil I'm going to clear it off but I'm moving it from the heat um so I'm going to let it cool a little bit you don't want to drink your hot chocolate super hot because it'll totally burn your tongue I'm going to use my recuerdo de Bogota mug for Colombia and hot chocolate do you know what this is? guess it's people guess it's it's cheese we put cheese in the hot chocolate what yes we put cheese in hot chocolate uh this particular one is going to be mozzarella for me that's what we're using this house um in Colombia I would use doble crema which is a it's literally double cream it's it looks like mozzarella but it's super rich and you'll see why I put cheese okay four little squares actually I want more cheese I'm gonna put that bit and I'm gonna pour one thing that happens if you let it cool is that it creates a film on the top especially if you use um whole meal so one of the things that I do is I play around with the spoon you are supposed to use a spoon when you drink hot chocolate because you want to enjoy it right so oh it's so hot I don't really look like no sir for you to see the cheese is melting so delicious on that note I think I'm gonna stop now because I'm gonna have my hot chocolate with arepas fan francés or french bread a baguette thanks for me and here bread in cello calados because we can't find them here and have my hot chocolate with my kids I hope you have enjoyed this hello my name is francés escobedo I'm a librarian and branch manager of the excelsior branch today I'm gonna show you how to make Mexican hot chocolate it's pretty easy I have a couple great helpers my wife Edith hello and my mother so let me show the ingredients it's pretty easy so you can get either chocolate abuelita or chocolate ibarra there's always discussions among Mexican families as to which one's best but we'll find out we'll can try them both at least we will hear and my mom brought some chocolate from my hometown in Mexico cojones sacatecas and I'm gonna actually add a little bit of these to the batch of hot chocolate I'll be making just because it's a little sweeter and I like it a little sweet you will need four cups of milk one uh one tablet of chocolate uh chocolate abuelita does not have cinnamon as an ingredient uh chocolate Ibarra is I'm gonna use chocolate abuelita so I brought uh extra cinnamon so I can add a little bit to it today we're going to be using a clay pot a Mexican clay pot and for these you actually have to use a gas stove otherwise it will not work on electric so that's why I'm visiting my parents and my sister because they have a gas stove hi so I'm about just to pour the last cup of milk that we need the fourth one you're going to have the fire at low low to medium but low otherwise that the milk is going to get stuck or you know against the pot so we're now we're going to add uh one stick of cinnamon we're going to add the chocolate abuelita one whole what do you call this unit tablet one whole tablet I'm going to break it uh it might be a little easier to dissolve and as I said if you like it a little sweeter you can add some brown sugar regular sugar and in this case I'm going to add two little blocks of chocolate which is pretty sweet I'm going to cover it however uh remember that we're going to have to keep stirring until until it's ready so it doesn't have it stuck to the plate so I'll see you when it's boiling hello everyone so now as you can see our chocolate is um it's boiling so it's ready so let me see I want to show you sorry call the movement see the consistency is nice and brown and so now what I want to do is I'm going to use these these which is called a molinillo to cool it down and also make it frothy so I'm going to pause this for a second and I'll show you all right so this is the molinillo this is what I'm going to use to cool it down and make it frothy basically you insert this in the chocolate and you start can you see peak over oh you see how it's getting for frothy already all righty as you can see it's getting frothy already so I'm going to make it a little frothier and then serve it so I'll show you when it's time to serve it hi so we're done with our chocolate now comes the best part which is tasty so I'm going to be serving these to my parents they're going to be my testers I would recommend to enjoy your hot chocolate can you get closer to the bread with Mexican bread we have all kinds I don't know all the names of all of them but we have conchas, ojo de hue, mantecadas, cortadillos, yoyos, cochinitos or cochinitos, we have polvorones, among others, ¿qué más falta? I think well those are some you can go and ask at your Mexican bakery and they'll tell you the names all right so here we go it's tasty and sweet all right and then I'm going to show you some of the decorations we have Mexican cheese mixed Mexican tamarind candy the one in another Mexican candy my mom got some nice fresh honey these is queen's cheese and this is guava cheese from Mexico these are from Mexico's calabaza which is pumpkin and we have this naga which I don't know what it is in English luce de leche, cocada which is coconut, mechonas and sometimes when you have a view when somebody passes away and they have a view they actually in Mexico they offer fun and hot chocolate and sometimes you want to spike it with some mezcal mezcal or with some tequila just FYI we have a nice decoration of the lottería one of the most popular in older games in Mexico it's like a board game we have guitars we have a yoyo anyway we tried to make it look as authentic as we can it is it tastes good obviously we're going to try it right now so thank you to my dad he joined us to have some hot chocolate thank you to my mom thank you to my wife should you have any questions please feel free to ask me because we're going to be doing this live so I hope you enjoyed it thank you