Michael O'Donoghue Quotes

If you want a robot to maneuver aggressively, it has to be small. As you scale things down, the 'moment of inertia' - the resistance to angular motion - drops dramatically.

Every 'Star Wars' film was about pushing what was possible in terms of effects, puppets, matte paintings, stop motion and, now, digitally.

Robots already perform many functions, from making cars to defusing bombs - or, more menacingly, firing missiles. Children and adults play with toy robots, while vacuum-cleaning robots are sucking up dirt in a growing number of homes and - as evidenced by YouTube videos - entertaining cats.

You know, I love stop-motion. I've done almost all the styles of animation: I was a 2D animator. I've done cutout animation. I did a CG short a few years ago, 'Moongirl,' for young kids. Stop-motion is what I keep coming back to, because it has a primal nature. It can never be perfect.

What stop-motion does best is present real objects magically brought to life in a very imperfect situation; the hand of the artist is there, the electricity of someone touching, massaging and torturing themselves to get life out of an inanimate object.

I think living things can recognize the movement of other living things, and all the best animators in the world can't quite capture that something.

That's the thing with animated films - I often feel that puppets get the better parts compared to us normal actresses.

Building robot versions of people is very expensive.

My father had a Super 8 camera when I was a kid and sometimes he would use it. I did some animation with it. I did a lot of flipbooks.

What is he? He's a puppeteer and he's got a lot of inspiration all around him, and the fact that they can manipulate the expressions now with ease compared to what it used to be.

I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.

In all animation, if it's done quickly, you'll know it. And if you're very slow and careful with it, it's going to look a little more beautiful. It's just compressing time into seconds.

Robots have gotten steadily more capable, but humans' expectations that robots should have minds keeps biting robot developers.

And Roger was crazy with his robots and everything.

I ultimately got into robotics because for me, it was the best way to study intelligence.

Back in the days of Apollo, sending humans to the moon was the only viable way to get the scientific data we wanted. But now, with our computer and robotics technology, there's very little an astronaut can do on Mars that a well-designed rover can't.

There are an endless number of things to discover about robotics. A lot of it is just too fantastic for people to believe.

There are no movie references that I can think of in 'Robopocalypse.' However, there are tons of personal references. For example, the IP address that Lurker tracks actually goes back to the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I studied robotics.

Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds.

We live in a world where all the parts of a robot are very cheap, yet we don't have a lot of robots. And the thing that has been missing has been good enough Artifical Intelligence.

Robots are very tricky to design and expensive, whereas humans are cheaply manufactured. Humans can handle things with greater manual dexterity than most robots I've known.

At the end of the day, the truth is that if - when - robots prevail, so many vocations will actually become close to impossible. Save for the profession of making robots, that is.

I'm a big fan of cel animation, I'm a big fan of computer animation, and, most of all, I'm a big fan of stop-motion animation.

To be a part of Laika's universe is an opportunity not to be passed up.

When you start to automate, you start to do the self-driving thing, you make it much more efficient. When these cars go into self-driving, you start to become a robotics company.