About
R.Bot and Crow is a series of short educational comics about robotics and embodied AI. In particular, they’re comics exploring hard problems in those fields: what makes those problems hard, how to think about them, and what tools researchers and engineers use to solve them!
I started drawing these with the goal of making the ‘intuition’ behind the science and engineering of robotics more accessible. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have misconceptions about how exactly robots work, what problems in the field are ‘solved’ or not, and what exactly makes robotics interesting (and difficult) as a pursuit. I want more people to see what I see! How robotics draws on, recontextualizes, and integrates fascinating and useful ideas from a range of other fields from computer science, to cognition, to physics, and more. Especially as robotic and AI systems become more present in the daily lives of many, I want more people to know how robots solve problems, and how roboticists solve problems.
My goal in each comic is to walk you, the reader, through the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of a robotics problem in a way that doesn’t require any particular technical background – while staying grounded in the real mathematical and scientific ideas that bring us better and better solutions every day. I hope my comics help you understand robotics a little better, and (since robotics is as much the study of the world robots live in as it is the study of robots themselves) maybe give you some a new ways to think about the world around around you. Enjoy!
About the Author:
R. Skye Thompson (aka ‘cAPSLOCK’, in certain on- and offline circles) is a PhD candidate at Brown University studying learning for robotic manipulation, with a particular focus on learning skills that can generalize to new, unstructured environments. He also draws other comics (most easily seen at tailslide-comic.com). You can reach him at rory_thompson@brown.edu!