User:Muthas
From Maslab 2006
Seven Frames
At heart, I am an engineer. I enjoy creating little intricate mechanisms whose function is more than the sum of its parts.
I am a peaceful person, yet destruction follows me like a second shadow.
I study war so I can understand peace, and study peace so I can prepare for war.
Feeling a shock wave go past, hearing the echoes of an explosion - words cannot do these things justice.
Robotics is, simply, another attempt to understand our own impenetrable psyches in the manner most familiar to people today, namely machines.
Terrorism, even in its simplest incarnations, is a close relative to nuclear war in that no viable defense against it can exist.
Back when I was 4 I wanted to be an astronaut, but by then I'd learned that astronautics wasn't a big field anymore. The "glory days" of Apollo were dead and gone. Luckily, by then I'd learned of the Bomb and a new future dawned on me.
I've been building robots for going on 8 years now. Legged systems using biomimetic control algorithms, tracked machines for multirobot localization using Vector Field Histogram path-planning, and wheeled robots for basic rough terrain movement capabilities. I've gone from human control and telepresence to PICs, PCs, and GALs. It may seem like a far cry from either nuclear weapons or space travel, but today's defense systems need robotics to fill many gaps. When I am done here, I will work to close those gaps and help bring on this new age.
(Obviously, my formative years were heavily influenced by the stories of Los Alamos, Eniwetok, and Cape Canaveral. Equally obvious should be the sarcasm in my words as I wrote this piece, which sounds so much like an angsty Livejournal article from a suburban teenager even I can't help but laugh a bit.)
