Generales

By: Yenifer Aristizábal Grajales-Journalist

Gabriel Gómez Betancur, a systems engineer from Universidad de Antioquia, has worked on the development of humanoid robots and artificial intelligence in Switzerland and United States laboratories. At Alma Mater, we talked to him and asked him why robotics.

This systems engineer has worked on artificial intelligence and humanoid robots in laboratories in Switzerland and the United States. Photo courtesy: Gabriel Gómez Betancur.

When Gabriel Gómez Betancur arrived at Universidad de Antioquia to study systems engineering in 1989, he was 17 years old. He was not far from being the boy who dreamed of robotics thanks to the manga and anime series Mazinger Z, created by the Japanese screenwriter Gō Nagai, in which a giant robot was manned by the main character.

Little did he know that, 20 years later, he would be developing humanoid robots in some of the world's best laboratories. Gabriel earned his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and worked in the laboratory run by Rolf Pfeifer, a renowned professor of computer science and artificial intelligence. He spent eight years there and created the area devoted to humanoid robots, which was his passion at the time.

Back then, "We had a robotic hand to replace the hand of an amputee. We read the signals from the muscles for 20 seconds and built a neural network that could read those signals", he recalled.

Subsequently, this engineer met and worked with one of the modern fathers of world robotics, the Australian Rodney Brooks. Brooks was then director (now professor emeritus) of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Gabriel earned his postdoctoral degree.

For seven years, at Professor Brooks' laboratory, they tried to develop a robot that could pick up objects autonomously, but they had not succeeded. They invited this engineer to do it in four months. "The robot only had one camera. It didn't know how far away the object was, and it didn't have touch sensors either, so it didn't know whether it was touching the object. It was quite complicated, but I had always wanted to study with Brooks, so I said yes".

After five months, during which he slept little and worked against the clock, Gabriel studied what experts call “poking”. It has to do with the way babies learn to interact with objects. They look at an object, reach out and, eventually, their hand pushes the object. "That's how they interact with the world and learn what objects do. I took those experiments they did with children and tried to do the same with the robot, and it worked".

He worked in the MIT laboratory for two years. Currently, he works for an artificial intelligence company in the United States. The company’s confidentiality agreements do not allow Gabriel to say much, but he is working on the first operating system based on artificial intelligence. 

Gabriel presented his experience in robotics during the Cátedra Expoingeniería (Expoingeniería Lecture), which focused on artificial intelligence, robot programming and computational intelligence, held last October by the Systems Engineering Department of Universidad de Antioquia.

One of Gabriel’s first creations was a robotic hand to replace the hand of an amputee. The prosthesis read signals from a neural network. 

"When I got the scholarship from the Swiss government, it changed my perspective on things. I dedicated myself only to studying and working in robotics. When you are young, you can’t picture how far you can go. You pay more attention to the here and now."

Robots in the Service of Humans 

Part of the interest this systems engineer developed in robotics is that it has allowed him to investigate things that seemed to have a philosophical basis. "What is an object? A robot has a different perspective from you, and having it manipulate objects is fascinating. It allows you to investigate learning or the robot’s interaction with a person and understand things about human intelligence".

For this Universidad de Antioquia graduate, robots are far from "taking over the world". Humans will always be more intelligent and will be able to turn robots off if they do not do as humans wish. On the other hand, robots could help sick and elderly people who require assistance.

"Time passes for all of us, and the hardest part for someone is when they are not able to fend for themselves", said Gabriel. For him, robots can help those who can’t do everything themselves to live with dignity.

"In countries like Colombia, there is always a family member who is taking care of you. In other more developed countries, this is not the case. If you talk to someone who is taking care of a sick person, they will probably tell you how difficult and exacting it is. It is extremely exhausting, so it would be great if a robot could do it. Robotics could be key in helping people to stay at home and not have to go to a nursing home to be cared for", he concluded.