Malik taps a few more keys, and with a percussive clang, the arm curves to the right and deposits the roll several feet from where it had been sitting. With Nick Jones, associate professor of engineering, he designed mechanical devices that have many moving joints, and he wrote his master's thesis on the dynamics of a satellite with an extendable arm. Chirikjian then went to CalTech for his doctorate, where he worked with Joel Burdick, studying robots that have many joints, and from there came back to Hopkins, where he is currently one of the university's youngest faculty members. So young, in fact, that his graduate students could easily be older than he is. They sparked my imagination.
Science imitating art and art imitating science are familiar to robotics.
Rossum builds artificial people for use as servants, the Czech word for servitude being robota. Rossum's robots eventually turn on their masters and kill people. Since Capek, robots have populated movies and films, usually as anthropomorphic structures that walk and talk, and often perform human feats better than people can. But movies and science fiction novels can raise false hopes, says Burdick, Chirikjian's doctoral advisor. In reality, the technology just isn't there, and it won't be for a long time, says Burdick.