Rbot and Crow Comic Website

Hello! My name is Skye Thompson (in some circles, ‘cAPSLOCK’). I’m currently a PhD student studying robotics and learning at Brown University, and I draw R.bot and Crow!

These are a series of short educational comics about robotics and embodied AI. In particular, they’re comics about exploring hard problems, what makes them hard, how to think about those problems, and what tools we can use to solve them. I started drawing these to  try and make the ‘intuition’ behind the science and engineering of robotics more accessible. They aim to walk you, the reader, through the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of a problem without requiring a particular technical background, while staying grounded in the actual techniques of the field they point to. I hope they help you understand robotics a little better, and maybe give some a new ways to think about the world around around you (since robotics is as much the study of the world robots live in as it is the study of robots themselves).

This comic is about path planning – how robots plan a path from start to finish in a world full of obstacles and wrong turns. In complex environments, the search for a path forward would never be finished without shortcuts or abstractions. But what abstractions are useful to get you where you need to go? What dangers lurk in an unstructured world? And what happens if a naive robot sacrifices accuracy for efficiency? Or vice-versa? Our protagonists find out as they try to make their way through the winding woods.