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The most reliable way to keep a field healthy is to hand the real research problems to people young enough to be unafraid of them. So I build the on-ramps, and I make them open.
An international competition I chair that puts open research problems in response robotics in front of high-school students. Now in its second decade, running at the RoboCup world championships.
→ Explore the RMRCOpen-source, 3D-printable robot designs so students, hackers, and makers can build a real rescue robot from scratch, then publish their own so the next person can go further.
I have been part of RoboCup since 2003 and a Trustee since 2021. The stated goal, a team of robots that can beat the human World Cup champions by 2050, sounds absurd, and that is the point. A grand challenge pulls a whole research community forward and gives students something worth failing at.
The same instinct runs through the standard test methods: turn a hard problem into a course you can score, and people will come to solve it.
Make the frontier buildable. Open designs, cheap parts, published results.
Teams from multiple countries, every year, building rescue robots small enough to hold.
The point of a robotic lion cub is that people who never thought robotics was for them walk over to look, and leave having accidentally learned something.
The mission is serious even when the framing is not: over-hyped AI with no evidence behind it collapses into another winter. The antidote is measurement.