Sertac Karaman: Robots That Fly and Robots That Drive | Lex Fridman Podcast #97

The following is a conversation with Sertac Karaman, a professor at MIT, co-founder of the autonomous vehicle company Optimus Ride, and is one of the top roboticists in the world, including robots that drive and robots that fly. To me personally, he has been a mentor, a colleague, and a friend. He's one of the smartest, most generous people I know, so it was a pleasure and honor to finally sit down with him for this recorded conversation. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter @LexFridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use the code LEXPODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to send and receive money digitally, let me mention a surprising fact about physical money: it costs 2.4 cents to produce a single penny. In fact, I think it costs $85 million annually to produce them. That's a crazy little fact about physical money. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use the code LEXPODCAST, you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Sertac Karaman. Since you have worked extensively on both, what is the more difficult task, autonomous flying or autonomous driving?

That's a good question. I think that autonomous flying, just kind of doing it for consumer drones and so on, the kinds of applications that we're looking at right now, is probably easier. And so I think that that's maybe one of the reasons why it took off, like literally a little earlier than the autonomous cars. But I think if we look ahead, I would think that, you know, the real benefits of autonomous flying, unleashing them in like transportation, logistics, and so on, I think it's a lot harder than autonomous driving. So I think my guess is that, you know, we've seen a few kinda machines fly here and there, but we really haven't yet seen any kind of, you know, machine like, like at massive scale, large scale being deployed and flown, and so on. And I think that's gonna be after we kind of resolve some of the large-scale deployments of autonomous driving.

So what's the hard part? What-what's your intuition behind why at scale when consumer-facing drones are tough?

So I think, in general, at scale, it's tough. Like for example, when you think about it, um, we have actually deployed a lot of robots in the, let's say, the past 50 years.