Dennis Hong, a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, discovered a love of robots at an early age while watching the “droid” characters in Star Wars. As director of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at U.C.L.A., Hong has worked on functional humanoid robots for tasks such as firefighting and disaster relief. Then the Russo brothers came calling. To promote their new Netflix movie The Electric State, film directors Anthony and Joseph Russo wanted to move beyond CGI and create a version of the lead robot, Cosmo, for events. Hong joins host Rachel Feltman to discuss the challenges of blending practical robotics with a Hollywood vision.

You can watch The Electric State on Netflix.

Recommended reading:

Scientists Are Putting ChatGPT Brains Inside Robot Bodies. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? 

Spiderlike Mars Robot Might One Day Crawl through Unexplored Volcanic Caves 

A Brief History of Automatons That Were Actually People 

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Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Our show is edited by Alex Sugiura with fact-checking by Shayna Posses, Emily Makowski and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

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