Stanford’s Robotics Legacy (2019)

I’m surprised nothing about the DARPA challenges is on this page. Seems like a pretty big oversight. Those events were huge for Stanford.

I think Stanford has nurtured a great computer science department, but it's a bit odd to read some organization proclaiming the wonder of their legacy. It's not exactly unbiased. For instance, we don't really get much about the role of others who were probably even more important than the university like DARPA or some of the many corporations that funded research.

The reality is that Palo Alto is a tough place to run a university. No one can afford to live near by except those with startup money riches. The head of the undergraduate CS program was famous for saying he couldn't hire anyone. And this was true because all of the houses within a 30 minute drive in normal traffic were 3,4,5 million dollars or more.

Many of the professors who are there bought into the real estate before the boom. This is why you can study databases with someone who was teaching before MySQL and PostgreSQL were created. Stanford likes to hire married professors because they only need to pay enough for them to afford one house.

I could go on. It's a nice department that can piggyback on much of the excitement in the Valley. But letting them define their legacy isn't much different from asking, say, Donald Trump what happened on January 6th. There's more to the story.

Thanks for posting, this is chock full of links to more info about robots I haven’t read about.

And it’s in a pretty convenient format, I’d like to see the same for other schools.

When making autonomous helicopters the "project went so well, that the researchers decided there was no further work left to do on that topic."