"I’m going to focus on what I think is the last part of your question because I could parcel that as two questions, you know, how did the study of humans affect what we did with robot? At about that time there was a lot of emphasis on industrial robotics and doing things fast and so the idea was if you want to go from point A to point B, you want to hit your arm as hard as possible, turn the motors maximally on, accelerate maximally, get up to your maximum velocity, do what’s called “coast,” move at a constant speed, and then when you’re close to your target you want to reverse the process and blast your arm with your motors in the opposite direction so you slow down as fast as possible and then you stop on a dime. Okay, the public image of robots at that time was that they move jerkily, like this and if you ask anybody to imitate a robot, you’ll see them do jerky movements and in fact I believe there’s even a robot dance called “Do the Robot” which is all about that. That had nothing to do with robots, it had everything to do with this choice of movement strategy. Humans could move like that but they don’t want to. They instead use this bell-shaped velocity profile, which means we move with a slow acceleration and in fact, let’s see, there’s something called position, you’re changing position, there’s something called velocity, which is how fast you’re going, there’s a derivative of velocity called acceleration, which is how fast you’re changing your acceleration, then there’s a derivative of acceleration. Guess what that’s called? It’s called “jerk,” okay, because when you change your acceleration rapidly you induce a lot of vibrations in the system and it makes it look like you have high jerk. What humans seem to do is whatever they’re doing in their head, they seem to be moving as if they’re minimizing the square of jerk.When you apply that to robots and get them to move in the same way, they look alive, they look like a human and they do not look jerky."