From January to April 2013, I spent time at Willow Garage doing an internship to improve robot navigation. More info can be seen in the video above and my blog post on the Willow Garage Blog.

Many thanks to Caroline Pantofaru, Dave Hershberger and everyone at Willow who made this a productive and enjoyable internship.

Press coverage: IEEE Spectrum

Star Wars Uncut is a crowd-sourced scene-by-scene recreation of the original Star Wars, done by random people on the internet 15 seconds at a time. You can watch the whole director’s cut online. The whole production even managed to win an Emmy.

When I saw this, two questions came to mind:

1. Are they doing the other movies as well?
2. Why weren’t there more real robots in it?

There’s an awful lot of guys in yellow t-shirts, printed masks and a whole lot of tin foil. And I figured, for the next round where they’re recreating The Empire Strikes Back, who better to play R2 and 3PO than Lewis and Harris, my lab’s two robots.

Anyway, here’s my scene, featuring Lewis the B21r as R2D2, Harris the PR2 as C-3PO, myself as Han Solo and my loving tolerating wife Elise as Chewbacca. Click to watch the video.

Be sure to login and click “Like This Scene” on the StarWarsUncut page in order to ensure my version of the scene makes the final cut.

David V. Lu. Relative comfort of people with acting robots by theatre and technology experience. In Tiny Transcations on Computer Science, 1, 2012.

[link] – [bibtex]

@article{lu2012tiny,
  author = {Lu, David V.},
  title = {Relative Comfort of People with Acting Robots by Theatre and Technology Experience},
  journal = {Tiny Transactions on Computer Science},
  year = {2012},
  volume = {1}
}

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