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Pransky: What has been your favorite robot project and why? (Figure 1)
Weiss: Though I've given birth to a lot of robots in my lifetime, it was exceedingly cool to work on the shuttle when I was a college student. My summer job for '77 and '78 was coming up with concepts for small teleoperated manipulator systems at Spar Aerospace in Toronto so astronauts could work in shirt-sleeve environments instead of going out into the vacuum of space. I got to spec out and design machines for the NASA shuttle, which was not bad for a summer job (Figure 2).
One of the things I had to do was to figure out how many add, subtracts, multiplies and divides it would take to do the math, because the shuttle back then was flying on core memory (small donuts and wires that made memory that women in New York State knitted together for IBM ), and thus, the memory limitations on the shuttle were so huge that they had to determine the math requirements early on to decide whether there was enough memory space to run the arm. It was very cool stuff to work on.
Pransky: You've worked for many robotic companies, you cofounded your own and you've worked in academia. What position has been your favorite position, and why?
Weiss: While it's always fun to be the boss, there are really two things that get me up in the morning. One is getting to design a machine from the system level. The other one that gets me up is solving customer problems; applications of the machines. I spend a lot of my time on the road and have done so since my first real job out of college, which was at Unimation. I was the first applications engineer on the Puma robot; I would get to go on the road from factory to factory. I've been in factories that make transformers, potato chips, semiconductor chips, clothing and cars, and I tell all kinds of young people who are interested in manufacturing that you want to be an applications engineer (AE), because you will learn more about manufacturing in that job in less time than you will anywhere else.
At this point, my jobs at...