Helping robots avoid collisions

George Konidaris still remembers his disheartening introduction to robotics. "When you're a young student and you want to program a robot, the first thing that hits you is this immense disappointment at how much you can't do with that robot," he says. Most new roboticists want to program their robots to solve interesting, complex tasks -- but it turns out that just moving them through space without colliding with objects is more difficult than it sounds. Fortunately, Konidaris is hopeful that future roboticists will have a more exciting start in the field. That's because roughly four years ago, he co-founded Realtime Robotics, a startup that's solving the "motion planning problem" for robots.