Research is done through personality.
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On an snowy 5^th December, avid readers of the Science Magazine [Dongascience]  Jeong Woo Park ( Incheon Internation High Year 1), Doo Young (Seoul Yeong Shin female High Year 2), Yeong Il Hong (Gwang Ju Mun Seong high Year3) Set off to SNU to have a meeting with Professor Cho Gyu Jin, renowned for his Life-imitation robots which include the flea robot and the Venus flytrap Robot. The students asked questions ranging from his school life to this research contents garnering kind and honest responses from Prof. Cho.

Jeong Woo Park.
You seem to work a lot on fusing life with robots such as the fly and flea robots. What was your inspiration?

Honestly I never started off thinking “ I will do research on life imitating robots “. I arrived on the decision after my doctorate and post-doctorate through lots of experience. After my doctorate from MIT, I went off to a lab in Harvard working on fly robots. What was more interesting than the fly robot itself was the technologies within the robot. Conventional robots are made with motors gears and linkages. The flyrobot, however, uses new concepts my mimicking a fly. In this sense, the aim of the flea robot made in our bio-robotics lab was not to imitate a flea. Another professor in our faculty was doing research on jumping on water, which piqued my interest and hence I ended up focusing on the jumping mechanics of a flea. You can’t use motors and gears to make a lightweight robot that can float on water. Fleas use and entirely different concept. A muscle holds a leg bent in its joint, where another muscle pulls on the original muscle, generating an enormous torque in the opposite direction, thus straightening the leg. We used this concept in the robot, which allowed it to jump 30 times its height. That took 3 years.

Fields that require combination of ideas and theories are fun indeed, but are that much more difficult. Just mixing things around does not make something a combination. You have to apply something to an existing idea and feel which makes the synergy between the two. Even for me, I am far from simply copying the idea, but more towards realizing the potential of the theory in an engineering perspective, which allows me to combine these concepts.

Doo Young Kim
What was your favorite subject in during your school days? Was there a slump for you?

I liked physics, as with majority of the students in our faculty. And of those I particularly enjoyed mechanics. I felt more include towards physics due to a teacher who taught exceptionally. I did not really like the languages. So I came over to the Mathematics and Science field, where I later realized that you have to be very good in your languages. This field is more than just solving hard problems. Logic is extremely important as well, and that takes its roots from writing. In research, you have to formulate your own problems. That is the hard part. To make a decent problem, the logic has to be sound. You also have to write research papers. The slump I had was from my languages. During high school, my languages grades were not particularly fantastic. It was not a slump where I did nothing because I wasn’t able to study, but it was agonizing. So I took to the language workbooks, and solved whatever I had. It was not overcome in a short period of time. Just nothing but effort, effort and more effort.

My grades were great in my first year. Not so much in my second. My mentor in year 1 never expected much unlike my 2^nd year mentor you expected great things which was a bit of a burden. So I studied more, but that, for some reason, did not help.

Young Il Hong
What do you wish to see from students of today?

Innocence. I don’t know if it’s all the admissions protocols nowadays but students, all they want is specs. They get swept away in the atmosphere of “if I want to be accepted I have to have this”. If they like something, I’s rather them discount the benefits of trying it out and just try it through pure curiosity. Like I said, research is through personality. People tell me I get excited easily. When I see something I go,” wow that’s cool”. That is the important mindset. When I was in MIT, professors were doing weird research. Students were making moving beds. Then I told myself, “if not in school, then when?” To make a robot with a specific function if the job of a company. Research requires the freedom of doing what you want. With patience and perseverance, that will bring you the issues of tomorrow.

When I do interviews, students tell me they want to make a robot. That they want to send rockets to outer space. Having dreams is fine. But I feel that they have a fixed mindset on only doing things that are grandiose. I’m not making a flea robot because I wanted to since young. It’s the experiences I’ve had that led me here today. I’m sure the other professors will feel that same way. Experience more. It may sound like a joke but do new things, think out of the box. Do and think the unimaginable to get the new.