Saltology — Mark Micire

So today I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Mark Micire, ex CEO for a search and rescue, robotic startup, ex Program Manager at DARPA, ex Robotics Group Lead at NASA Ames and Technical Search Specialist at FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and now head of robotics at Woodside Energy. Or, as we like to call you - just mark. So I thought I'd kick us off with a bit of an icebreaker. I might be able to guess some of these, but I thought if you could tell us your favorite food, your favorite hobby and your favorite movie

All right, let's see. Favorite food, probably hamburger, cheeseburger specifically. As basic as that is it is definitely a go to for me. Favorite hobby, pretty hardcore into just computer nerding and geekery and stuff like that. Close Second would be automobiles, spent some time owning and driving some really fast cars, so that's that would be my other one

So I'm zero for three right now

What was the last one?

And your favorite movie

Oh wargames. Yeah, the movie set the course that was the trajectories setting movie of my life, not that I almost started a nuclear war, the computer part for sure

Hahaha yeah okay, so zero for three, I had you as a burrito, photography, and I took a wild guess that Space Odyssey X for the movie. So you've had a very interesting career as per my introduction now I probably know a lot about you already, but theres still probably a lot I don't know, but I thought we could take a bit of a trip down memory lane. Would you be able to tell us about the study you did straight after high school and what sort of led you to choose that study that you did

So out of high school I was very, very much into what we now call cyber. We didn't really call it cyber back then. It was... Security was the thing that the I.T. guys did when they weren't fixing servers. Like it wasn't really a career path, it's just this thing that sometimes you think you did. And to put it in time and it make me feel old, this is you're talking mid to late 90s. So cybersecurity was not a career path, but it was absolutely where I found joy was breaking things, specifically breaking computers and figuring out the way that things would fail and then finding ways to do interesting things with those failures. So when I went to university, through all of my undergraduate although I was in a school of engineering, I was in computer science and a lot of their stuff focused on a lot of the computer science core curriculum, but they actually had a bit of an I.T. bent to what they were doing. And I was also working full time job, I'll say on the side, it was more or less I was doing university and had a full time job doing I.T. stuff, and then I basically burned out on it. They say that the best way to ruin a hobby is to make it your job. And so by the time I hit my senior year at university, I didn't want to do anything related to security, computer science, anything like that. Computer science, maybe, but definitely I had the opportunity I needed, one elective course in my senior year and there was this robotics course, and I grew up playing with radio controlled cars and other things like that. And I think I naively thought to myself well robots are nothing but radio controlled cars with computers on them

That's what I was thinking

So right, so this should be easy like I should be able to go in and long story short, I ended up taking the robotics class, fell in love with it and completely abandoned the cyber security stuff with the promise to myself that I would go back three or four years later and see if that had healed. And so, you know, fast forward to today, that's pretty much while robotics is my day job on any given Saturday i'm just diving into and totally geeking out on doing cybersecurity and other type, computer science-y stuff

and you've given talks and stuff on operational security, and OT. So I found your dissertation title

I'm sorry

Hahah and for your master's study, and it's probably one of the more interesting sounding ones I've heard of, definitely much more interesting than than mine. So "the analysis of robot assisted search and rescue response to the World Trade Center disaster". Straight after that you then went into robotic startup for five years, would you be able to talk about what you did for your masters and how that sort of led to the robotics startup?

Yeah, so for the Masters, so I got very fortunate in that when the trade center disaster happened, the lab that I happened to be working in. So that's actually a good Segway. So took that robotics course, started working in the lab that for the professor that was teaching that elective course and basically ended up being kind of the lab manager there. So I was fixing all the robots as a master student, keeping all the stuff running for the the Ph.D. students and then part of the focus of the research of the lab was in search and rescue, and we really didn't know what we were doing at that point in the game. But there was some interest from the local fire department and we thought it was a domain that we might be able to play into just because putting robots in some of these like crazy hazardous situations just makes sense. And so myself and another grad student had started working with the local fire department and started getting some getting some certifications. So we had done like we've done trench rescue and a little bit hazmat and other things like that. And then September 11th happens. Our DARPA program manager, who is funding most of the work that we did in our lab, called us up and basically said, Look, all of the equipment you have, and if you've got any personnel that can support that equipment, I need you to load it up and get to New York. Like This is an all call. Wow. And so we were one of probably a half dozen different groups that were there. Now, strangely enough. And it was almost, I don't know. I'd say it's by accident, but we certainly didn't plan for this when it came time to actually go and deploy these robots. I was pretty much myself and my other student colleague and then a couple of other folks that were with one of the other teams that had any training whatsoever, even in safety as to how to operate on these kind of sites and stuff like that. And so very quickly, we kind of got pulled forward. And then the gift that I then had but didn't realize it at the time was I got to spend effectively the next .. well we were there for a total of 11 days. And during those 11 days, I was one of the operators of the equipment that we used on the pile 2. So that then became the thesis. So the theme for that thesis is we broke everything that we took up there. There wasn't a single piece of equipment that didn't ended up busted in some way. Yeah, each one of those breakages shows either a lack of engineering or imagination or just the equipment wasn't prepared for what we were putting it in

You didn't know what you're expected to use on potentially

Exactly and we were borrowing from other industries. So like the equipment, the most useful piece of equipment that we had at the trade center was actually a robot that was designed for pipe crawling and was designed for like industrial inspection applications that then we're now throwing into a rubble pile with dirt and mud and bodily fluids and other things. And so simple things like How do you decontaminate this robot wasn't something that was in the original spec, especially when you're dealing with biologics and other things like that. And so, yeah, I had that experience, and then the master's thesis became an analysis of all of the things that we broke with the idea that that would become these are all things that we would need to improve upon if you were to ever succeed in this fire rescue domain. Got done with my thesis and then realized it was actually a business opportunity there

And so that led to the startup

So graduated, was able to was fortunate to have a couple of really wonderful angel investors that were very supportive of me wanting to go forward and do this. They helped to bootstrap the company. We spent about a year and a half developing the product that was we actually did that as a partnership with the company that built the equipment that we used in New York in terms of manufacturing capabilities and other things like that. They just helped speed up everything that we were doing because they were already building equipment and had tooling and everything else. And then about two, I guess it was about two years later we had a piece of equipment that was ready to sell and we immediately sold about, I think, our first units out the door, there was about a half dozen of them that went out to the various groups, not the least of which was my former university

And this is the same thing that you brought in to the demo to us?

The one that I brought in here, that is that is the same generation is the one that we used at the trade center. Now, strangely enough, we actually do. So we actually just got a couple of the original six that my company sold back in 2004. Here, with the idea of repurposing those for doing inspection for Woodside

That's awesome

Yeah. And so it's it's pretty cool and those are actually those pieces of equipment because the company, because my company, we ended up not succeeding in penetrating that market and ended up closing it down. We like literally that equipment's not built anymore. And so it was really kind of a cool opportunity to grab something that I know is capable and that we might be able to use here

What would you say the biggest things you learned from the startup experience, you were there for five years. Then looking back on it likte, was there anything you would change or anything you'd have done differently?

I think so, especially coming fresh out of university, I think the priorities that we had were wrong, we actually thought it was more about the product and having a finished product that was ready to go. Now, frankly, with all of the we all today, it is so common for us to speak about MVP's 2 and just getting it out in front of the customer and testing that with the customer and pulling forward as fast as you can and allowing an incomplete product to go to market with the idea that that informs what you might do for your complete product. We were very, very naive in that regard

You tried to get a fully functional product?

Yep, and I joke that in terms of the successes that we have, it's half joke, half like legit. I could probably recreate now in about six months what it took us three years to do before. And that's just because you're, I mean, the idea that your MVPing as fast as you can. And the other thing I don't think I really appreciated was the cost of humans. So the most expensive part of any... Especially startup is going to be the bright minds and the great people that you inspire. But you got to remember that I was like, in my case as a CEO, every single one of their paychecks, like their livelihood, rests on your ability to succeed in creating whatever this thing is you're doing. I don't I I definitely went into a startup not appreciating the weight of that on me. But then also just ultimately what that comes down to cash flow and that ultimately comes down to either sales or investment. And so I think I might say I we the group of there were three of us that were kind of at the core of the start of the company. We naively thought that building the product was the most important part of any startup, and it is important, but it is not the most important, the most important. I would actually argue at this point is making sure that you've got cash phone and enough runway to get yourself to the point where you can build the product

So it's not about the product or about a smoke and mirrors hahah.. i'm joking

Yeah, its more about communicating a vision and making sure that you're chasing the right vision

With your with your customer base, your stakeholders

Exactly. Because at the end of the day, you build the most wonderful frickin product on the planet and no one wants it, then you're not cash flowing, which means you're going to be, you know, looking for another job pretty quickly

So the startup comes to an end. Talk to me. What's going through your mind when you were trying to decide what you wanted to do next? And then... I know what you did, but would you be able to sort of elaborate on what you then chose to do and move on to?

Yeah. So the funny part there was I had helped get all of my employees jobs elsewhere. We knew we knew we were running out of cash. Yeah, I mean, the next step that I did was I basically went to go get my Ph.D., and that was not planned. So I was actually liquidating all of the equipment that we had in our office. Everybody's gone. So everybody is is off starting new jobs and everything else. I'm literally there in the office, you know, tears streaming down my cheeks with, you know, sitting in the puddle of my field company. And I called up just a professor that I knew who had used our equipment in the past. And I said, I said, Hey, I'll make a hell of a deal today. You know, we've got this, this cool little crawler that I know you've used and you know, the legacy in terms of where it came from. I'll give it to you for and I think it was like, I'll give it to you for 50 percent what our normal list price would be. And she says, Well, let me, I need to go talk to the department chair. She says, I don't come out of my overhead budget and I need to make sure that equipment costs. I can do that or whatever. I'll call you back tomorrow and I was like, OK, and I didn't think another thing of it. You know, then probably sniffle a little, you know, went home and cried some more. And so came back the next day and she said, OK, she says, we'll take the robot, she says, but I'm going to want the ultimate warranty. And I was and I kind of looked to the phone and I'm like, What do you mean, the ultimate warranty? And she says, Well, I talked to the department chair and this is like, this is November. So she she's like, Why don't you come up? You can work in my lab. I'll I'll hire you on as a research assistant and with that research assistant position, you'll basically get a tuition waiver to go to your Ph.D.. Right. And so I quite literally just like looked around the office and was like, Well, I have nothing else going on. And I really did kind of jump into that opportunity with with no real clear understanding of whether I would actually finish my Ph.D.. It quite literally was I need to get out of this town. I need to get away from these robots. It was a pretty another kind of burnout kind of experience for me. And so the idea that I would go to Massachusetts, a place I literally never been before and work on whatever research. Was that I wanted to do under the auspices of the university, that actually sounded like a pretty good plan at that point. And so I wish it was more deliberate than that. I wish I could say that it was like. While the company failed and then I had a very clear picture as to what I wanted to contribute to the society in terms of, you know, technology through through the course of a Ph.D.. But that wasn't it at all. I just needed to get out of town. And a wonderful professor came in and said, Hey, I want you to come up and work and work in my lab

Maybe it was good karma for taking care of the rest of your team first. And then you held after the Ph.D. you had some sort of research positions, I know you did like an internship at NASA and you joined FEMA 3 over that time. And that sort of led up to in 2013, you joined DARPA, which defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for Department of Defense. And that was more in a project manager role. So I suppose you'd sort of transitioned back out of research back into sort of a managerial role. What made you decide that you wanted to go, you know, step away from the research for a bit and then go into sort of that project management space?

So being a program manager at DARPA, first of all, it's just honestly, it's such a privilege even to get the interview

And we might even it might be worth because I suppose like is extremely well known in the US, but potentially not many Australians might not know it. So you feel free to give a little 101 of what DARPA does

So the very brief version on DARPA. So its mission is to basically prevent and create surprise, strategic surprise. It was founded after Sputnik. So when the Russians launched Sputnik, the US, especially the US intelligence and engineering community, was very surprised by the Russians ability to leapfrog ahead of the U.S. in terms of satellite technology. So DARPA was created to make sure that the U.S. was never in that position again. And part of DARPA's charter is to be disruptive, to question assumptions and to play forward in a very kind of almost aggressive way with regards to its use of technology and other things like that. You know, earlier in the story, I'd mentioned that the person who called us to go up to the trade center was our DARPA program manager. I remember very early on just being enamored by what appeared to be just like these godlike positions in which people got to come up with very broad, sweeping ideas and then have millions of government dollars and they go execute on those ideas. And so that was and that a lot of that was set in naivete. I actually didn't realize how hard it was as a program manager to succeed, but to put a cap on the 101. So basically, DARPA is jokingly referred to as the mad scientists of the Pentagon. So all of the stuff that the normal defenses would not come up with themselves. That's what DARPA's supposed to be

It's like the very bleeding edge

And there's also a little bit of and making sure that we understand what our adversaries are doing also. So you you may be presented with a we don't understand what this is or what physics could they be leveraging to allow them to do the following thing that we observed and DARPA ends up being kind of a consultant to the rest of the Department of Defense a lot of times in those regards

And so what exactly was was your involvement within DARPA and what did you love about working at DARPA the most. And then if you're allowed to talk about it, potentially any of the most exciting projects that were under your program

So involvement, I mean, I came in as a program manager. Usually when you come in, you're coming in with some specific skill or some specific domain that they're looking for. I was coming in strangely enough with ground robotics experience, and I think that was where they were wanting to put most of my efforts initially. And then there was a big push regarding drones. So I was there kind of on the ground floor of drones, really and quadcopters and hexacopters really coming into their maturity. And so very quickly, I was kind of repositioned into working a lot of UAV and drone type programs. Which was cool. It was way outside of my comfort zone

Big drones we talking?

All the sizes, everything from tiny, little like ones that are smaller than commercial drones that we could buy today, you know, all the way up to like, you know, Predator and Global Hawk, like proper aircraft. So that was pretty exciting, and I had not especially worked in the larger aircraft domains before. And frankly, aside from working for NASA, I really aeronautics is in NASA's name. But I had not been formally trained in a lot of the aeronautics side of things or whatever. And so that's if there's anything you can say about DARPA it'll definitely push you way outside of your comfort zones, not only in terms of your ability to think big and to dramatically change things, but then to sometimes work outside of domains that you even feel confident in. And so, yeah, so we in terms of interesting programs that we ended up working, I mean, I'd say the one that was really inspiring was this program called fly as Fast Lightweight Autonomy, and that was basically quadcopters or drones basically maneuvering indoors in an outdoor wooded type, situations at ridiculous speeds 4

What kind of speeds?

So north of 20 meters per second? And where the whole idea with 20 meters per second is, you know, with these things moving through the world that quickly, by the time you hear it or even have an opportunity for like it to catch it out of the corner of your eye by the time you've turned and looked to see where the aircraft is, it's already gone in around the next corner. And so there was an element kind of stealth and just a very hyper hyper agility in terms of its ability to move through the environment. We had had at that point there was some really great work coming out of the universities like the MIT and Stanford and University of Pennsylvania or U-PEN rather that were really demonstrating agile and fast moving aircraft. And so we wanted to just push that as fast as we could and see where it would go. So we actually that program ended after I had already departed DARPA. You're only allowed to stay at DARPA, usually about four years and most program managers leave around year three. That's kind of where your street value kind of maximizes

And were you there for 5?

I was there for three and some change. And yeah, and so long story short, it's my understanding that they achieved a lot of those original goals that we had in FLA and let's just say that and I haven't looked recently, but about every time I checked back, YouTube's got some other really cool video of some drone doing something stupid fast. Yeah, and a lot of those videos actually came out of the DARPA program that I started. Yeah, it that's pretty rewarding

So the DARPA robotics challenge 5 that was going on whilst you were there was focused on disaster response robotics during 2013 to 2016. Was that a coincidence or did you play a part in in that? So just with your history with search and rescue and robotics

So I was there. So no, I won't say I actually won't take credit for any of that. Yeah, I did help a lot. So the robotics challenge, there was a program manager that was the primary one that was kind of he was the one that was the center of the DRC. I actually, though, not surprisingly, helped a lot. So at the very least, my role was running the expo. So while most of the videos and everything else is of the robots that are actually inside of the stadium doing their thing, there was an entire exposition that was there at the L.A. civic center area or whatever. And so we had this huge area that was outside. And so I was kind of his it was never officially this, but I was kind of his deputy program manager. Yeah. And so while he was doing all of the important robotics work that was inside, I was kind of running everything else that was out in the. We kind of joked everything that was out in the parking lot, which it was a really big parking lot. But all of the exposition stuff or whatever that was mine. What's interesting, though, to me is that a lot of the successes and a lot of the real advancements that we saw in the DRC not, to my surprise, were captured or were created by a lot of the same organizations and universities and other things that I had been working with in the in the urban search and rescue world for many, many years prior. So seeing especially for the Boston Dynamics Atlas platform, which that was really its first, although people knew about it, that was its first like real premier. Like, OK, now the public seeing it really doing something 6. Yeah. And then all of the rest of the CMUs and the Stanfords of the world getting out there and doing their thing. That was pretty rewarding

Were you surprised that most of the robots were all humanoid. Well, what do you think the reason for that was, I mean, like, we're seeing a lot more emphasis on legged robotics and stuff these days 7. But in that DARPA challenge, most of the contestants were all humanoid robots. What did you think that was?

It wasn't mandated, but there was a strong I will say that especially that program manager was kind of leading and biasing the field a little bit in terms of the the the work and the themes that they were trying to explore. The general theme for that one was, you know, we have lots of areas and lots of facilities that are designed for humans. So you know that valve or that gauge to read or the ability to pull the hose or do the whatever, whatever that activity is, it's probably designed for a human to do it

It's the same problem we have at the moment on Woodside facilities

Exactly. Yeah. So the idea that you have a facility, whether that be a ship or a building that's collapsed or whatever, most of the apparatus that is there to to work with or to help remedy that situation is probably designed for humans. So there's a logic train here that says it would probably behoove you to have your robots take some type of human form so that it can take advantage of all of the things over there. So in the DRC, for instance, they required that the robot be able to drive a buggy. And that was because the idea, while you could from a ground up engineer, something that's got wheels can go kilometers downrange and then get out of itself, I guess. Or however, it was interfacing to the buggy and go do its thing. But chances are you're going to show up on site, you're going to have your robot and then you're going to have all of this equipment that was already there. And so the real challenge was, how do you use these things that are already there

And already designed for people

Well and maybe uniquely designed for that site. You got to remember this is also after Fukushima and some of the other disasters in which we knew like the idea that you have a robot that is prepared for nuclear, radiological, biological, chemical and that you can do that in fire. If you can do that full gamut with one piece of equipment that has everything that's needed, that that's a hell of an engineering task

Oh, for sure. But to me, that seems harder than saying like, Okay, we can design a robot specifically for nuclear and a robot specifically for fire. You know what I mean?

Yep or take the take the middle point there. And that's to say we're going to design something that would be human like in its ability to use all of the equipment that's already been specifically engineered for that environment. So all of the mitigation strategies that you would have, let's say, for nuclear, radiological, those are really bespoke and really freaking expensive things. So why not just design a robot that in fact may fail under those environments over longer periods of time because of radioactive effects and stuff like that? But you don't care. Right? Let the robot degrade. Let. It fell in place, but its ability to use the tools and the equipment that's on site, that becomes super valuable

So you then made your return to NASA AMES to take the role of robotics group lead for IRG, the Intelligent Robotics Group. Would you speak to your role here? And then I suppose what you loved about working in NASA AMES the most as well?

Yeah, I mean, I'll do the last, the last part of the question first. And that's to say the reason why you work at NASA is for the mission. So of all of all of the jobs I've ever had in my career, you know, figuring out how to help mankind do its thing in space. That's cool. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that'll get you up in the morning and make you want to run in and go do cool stuff. My job there, though, was more as the group lead. It was less engineering and more people wrangling. So I'd say that in terms of a lot of my leadership learnings and other things like that, I probably learned more during my tenure as the group lead at NASA

Does that mean you're probably still more technical at DARPA than than you were at NASA AMES then?

DARPA is different, I guess, to maybe compare and contrast NASA with DARPA, you're trying to change the direction of a technical field. So it is technical in that you have to have a deep understanding or very quickly be able to develop a deep understanding of the thing that you're doing, but DARPA itself like there are no labs or, you know, soldering irons or anything inside of the walls of DARPA. Your job and you are chartered to change, one of the mantras that they use is you don't need to solve the problem, you need to change the way in which the field is talking about the problem

You set the direction of the research

Yep. And so while it was technical, it was not about, you know, coding or creating hardware or anything else like that you were you were inspiring large groups of people to do that. At NASA though, while during my first tenure at NASA, that was very technical and that was this actually flying hardware that I had a hand in helping to build and create. So after doing DARPA, then going back to NASA during that second round, it was much more group management, group leadership and other things like that. So we, you know, for all of the, you know, at any given point, we were running a dozen different projects out of that group. And so it was how do you manage the people? How do you resources those projects? How do you make sure that in terms of, you know, time budgets, schedule and all the rest of that stuff that you're you're flying and kind of steering that ship correctly, that ended the kind of joke that I had coming out of that was I spent most of my career trying to figure out how to be a roboticist. And what I really feel like I should have done was gone and got a psychology degree. Because it ended up just more me handling and managing humans than I did with robotics

I feel like probably everyone could benefit from a psychology degree if you'e got the time. What was the most exciting projects that was going on whilst you were there or that you were part of?

At NASA I got to do a I got to see the full chain. We went from upgrading a piece of equipment called spheres that was already up on station. the International Space Station, MIT had flown back in the 2000s and MIT had flown some really cool hardware there, basically free flying robots. So these are things they look like very colorful little balls for lack of a better description. They're kind of hexagon in shape

Kind of like Astrobee?

So this is the predecessor to Astrobee. That's what I'd say, the most rewarding thing was I got to watch the full chain of events from I was on the ground floor of us figuring out how to upgrade spheres, to do some of the existence proofs that we needed to determine that an Astrobee like thing made sense

Sorry if I ruined your punch line for that story haha

No, no, not at all. And so we so we flew like in that case, we flew the first smartphone that ever went to space, and we use that smartphone to interface to the sphere. And that's how we were doing all of our compute and kind of the command and control aspect of it. Yeah, awesome. Then after we flew that, that then allowed us to make a very convincing argument to NASA headquarters, basically saying we actually believe that free fliers could have an almost like a first class citizenship on the International Space Station during the first helping astronauts, because the idea that it's there as a personal flying personal assistant to the astronaut is the first use case. And then the second, there's actually three use cases. The second use case is the ability for the astronaut to use the Astrobee in a remote, controllable remote operations kind of mode. So they are in one module and they are using the Astrobee to do something and another module and then the final one, and it ended up being the one I think that NASA was most interested in by the time we were done was the idea that ground controllers so folks in mission control or even outside of Mission control would be able to kind of check out a Astrobee and to go fly. One of the toughest, strangely enough, one of the toughest things that the International Space Station deals with operationally is positioning and getting cameras where you need it so you can see the thing you need to look at. And so even just the idea of this being a free flying camera that can go around, that was kind of our MVP, one of our MVPs that we were working. And and I'll just say it was actually pretty wonderful to be there and especially to be working as the as the group lead when Astrobee actually was able to fly. And I watched those successes and kind of being the command center, when all of those like things happened and you're watching the astronauts celebrating the thing that you've spent the last five years of your life building

What year did they send it up? I remember I spoke to someone from the Astrobee team at a conference once. I can't remember, do remember what year they first sent it up?

I know probably... I'm going to guess in 2015, 2016 8

Yeah, it wasn't that was long ago was it

Yeah, I was fresh back from DARPA when that hardware was kind of in final assembly and so yeh it was around that time frame

Well, just over two years ago now you you made your way to almost as far away that you can go to Perth Australia to take over the robotics team here. Two questions. What made you decide to take the move? And and the second is, and what do you hope to achieve in your time here?

So I'd say the biggest reason for the move was realizing that so with with NASA focusing on getting mankind back on the Moon and figuring out how we can use robots and other things to achieve that. Basically, Jason Crusan who was good friend of mine who actually came here before I did so. He was here for about a year before, before I came

Next interview on Saltology potentially

He's a good one. He kind of had the epiphany, and it was an epiphany that I then, after thinking about it shared. Let's just say NASA, while externally is amazing, and the mission is just something that you can absolutely gobble up that I'll just say working for the U.S. government under the Trump administration was a little more difficult than I certainly was having an easy time bearing. But then also on top of all of that, I think there was this epiphany that we're frankly destroying the planet faster than we might be able to get off of it. Hmm. So if our ability to work on other planets or to be kind of a a species that can survive off this, you know, fragile little planet that we're on, that if you if you look at it and measure your career in you maximizing the impact that you can make to society or to the world or whatever. Jason had the epiphany, and then I later shared the epiphany that I could do more good for humanity by figuring out how to capture and us to be able to use new energy and Carbon Capture and other things like that. And so I very much with Woodside being so forward leaning in terms of its want to do New Energy and other things like that. It occurred to me that I could frankly have more impact trying to achieve that while and I guess the part that I was OK with was I knew that there was this amazing team that I had the pleasure of supporting as the group lead for, you know, the years that I was there. I knew that I could step aside and this amazing space robotics thing would continue. And so, yeah, so that was the flip over to to to the oil and gas side. The running joke is that, you know, we're trying to figure out how to make robots work in oil and gas, such that when new energy is ready for us, then it's just a matter of switching the domain. Right now, oil and gas is paying the bills. And with all of the initiatives that Woodside has in terms of its clean energy or whatever. I feel confident that we're going to get to a place in which robots are really contributing to the new energy side

That's the dream

It's the hope

So we just signed another Space Act Agreement between Woodside and NASA. What do you hope to achieve with this second round of collaboration?

So the new Space Act Agreement is a real specific in that it's going to explore humanoid robots. So it's a little bit kind of in the DRC DARPA Robotics Challenge kind of vein I'll just say after now being in and experiencing oil and gas and the kinds of work that we do and the kinds of environments that we're working in. I didn't I did not used to be someone who supported the robot needs to be in a human form. I actually used to be on the other side of the coin, as evidenced by, like Astrobee, Astrobee actually is flying in the face of...

Just the head, forget the body

Well exactly there was definitely initiatives at NASA that were doing the same thing where it was like astronauts have human shaped tools or tools that are shaped for humans to use. And so robots should have that. And we were on the other side of that engineering coin. That was to say, Well, now actually, you should optimize the shape of your robot for the application. Don't be constrained to what evolution has provided us in terms of, you know, bodily form. We can, you know, go someplace else with this. And so I'm on the other side of the coin now. And that's to say, our ability to work with NASA plays well into the ability for these robots to like, let's say, be on offshore assets and other things like that. So that's so that's the NASA arrangement. We're going to be hopefully getting a working on Valkyrie 9

Yeah, pretty awesome

Which actually that robot its premiere was the DARPA Robotics Challenge also. Yeah. And so for me, it's a bit of a homecoming and the robot and what will hopefully be maybe future versions of robots like that are ones that have kind of been in my life for a while, and I'm excited to get Woodside involved in and starting to scratch the itch. That is the idea that we have a humanoid robot that is like on one of our offshore assets working in a environment that was designed for humans that actually seems really natural for us to go down that route

That'll be pretty epic. Let me know when that PoC 3 is happening. Your whole life you've worked on robotics where the cost of failures is high stakes. So whether that's search and rescue or in space, you know, the fire department or now on oil and gas processing plants where you have, you know, lots of potential ignition sources and that could make huge explosions. What advancement or advancements in the robotics field do you think will create the next big step change for these capabilities? So something that hasn't sort of happened yet or is maybe on the periphery like, what do you think it will take like for for robotics in those fields to sort of take that next leap?

I'm going to answer the question, probably not the way you want. I actually don't know, at least in my experience, that leaps are the way that solutions like that are created. I actually think it's really slow, almost painful, just diligence. You know, as I look like now we have robots today that do especially like an industrial inspection and other things like that in EX rated environments, which is to say, environments in which things may explode. It took decades before we were able to inch forward in terms of those kinds of technologies. NASA's another one, although although it is pretty frickin grandiose when the when the rocket launches off the pad and the thing goes to the station and and the robot does whatever it's going to do the path of getting to that success, everybody remembers that like crashing through the finish line and it all being awesome. What they don't usually see is the half decade prior of just slow and gradual grinding to get yourself there

So yeah, well, I guess understanding it won't be an instantaneous leap, but if there's like a problem that you could look at, and be like you know what? Once that solved, like I think things will take off. You know, what I mean? I'm going to try and corner you into this

So it's a good question. And frankly, it was. So the real trick here is, if you know the answer to this question, you should probably just go get it done. I mean, I know so one of the biggest, one of the largest barriers that I see and it's been a theme throughout my career and it was a theme that we were definitely trying to figure out, like with the fast lightweight autonomy program that I was talking about before. I'll say as a as a roboticists and as somebody who's like works on and has has worked on making robots do things you always feel like you're starved for information or starved for a representation of the world that allows you to do decision making or allows the system to adaptively decide what it's going to do next

Which is like huge in the machine learning space right now in terms of like being able to you know, go from image feeds and actually create like a latent variable space that is easy to create actions from

Yep. And so what does that knowledge representation look like with the sensors that are feeding that? Yeah. If you're leveraging neural nets or machine learning or whatever, what does the back end of the learning process look like?

It's something we do really well as in humans do really well

Yeah, because we had to, we had to learn to adapt well. So we've had millions of years worth of evolution that has allowed us to converge on what for us ends up being a pretty decent existence in which we have to be smart. We have to sense things. We have to keep the tigers from eating us and the plains of Africa. We managed to do all of those things fairly well. I would argue that like right now for robotics, we're still not very good at having a robot survive. You know, like in that case, being eaten like the evolution in the if it dies, it doesn't get to procreate. That ends up being a really great focusing or limiting function in terms of what the positive outcomes are that you're seeking. With robotics we don't have that. We don't have the privilege of just eating every robot that doesn't do what we want it to do. Now that's where machine learning and neural nets and everything else try to leverage on the software side. To me, it's whats kind of interesting, though, is like, I still feel like the systems that we're building are still starved for the really rich information that we get through our eyes and through our smells and through all of the senses that we have as humans. The roboticists in me still wants to like shake my fist at the cloud and go, we need better sensors, I now, you know, with too much gray in my beard realize that's not the answer but I think that our ability to not only have really great sensors and then really great ways of capturing that into like knowledge representation that allows us to process that thing intelligently and adaptively. That would be the next big step if we could just achieve that in one swoop. Yeah, that would actually be a really, really great improvement to the systems we're building

Well, I remember there was a I think it was out in NEURIPS a few years ago as Pieter Abbeel, who's the one of the best in the world at robot learning 10. He basically proclaimed to the whole research community that the robotics hardware has been good enough for a while now. The limiting factor is software and in particular as we were talking about, knowledge representation

I think the pendulum swings. I would say, like right now, if so, for those researchers that, let's say, 10 years ago were struggling to have a bipedal robot walk across the room, the hardware and the software, that's the control software for that has caught up. Now what hasn't caught up is, OK, that robot just walked across the room. What's it deciding to do next? The higher level goal and the kind of the deliberative-ness in which humans walk around the world and find things to go or do and solve. That's the part that we don't have in robotics right now. So even in the last decade, we're dramatically further than I think those previous robotics folks would have imagined that we would actually just have a commercially available. The idea that you commercially can just go buy a spot is mind blowing to roboticists like me that grew up in the late 90s, early 2000s, in which it was a wheel platform that looked like a garbage can like, you know, had three wheels. And we were lucky if we could get across the lab and not, you know, strike anybody or a piece of furniture

Yeah, the first time I flew over that just to walk into the room and see just like a hundred of them just in a line, in a production line was pretty epic. So we're kind of moving into the fun questions now. So actually, maybe this one is not that fun but the next ones are fun I promise. As someone who did a Ph.D. and sort of worked extensively in research. But then it's also sort of worked as a project manager and a group lead. How do you find the balance between building your leadership skills while also staying sharp and up to date technically?

I'll just say I aggressively fight to keep my technical edge sharp

n like in your hobbies, and in your spare time?

Yeah. So that's it. Earlier I joked about, you know, on any given Saturday

It wasn't a joke haha

Yeah, now what's interesting, maybe, is that I have to separate my work... I sometimes do but for the most part, I am not doing robotics on the weekends

But still in adjacent fields?

Yeah, so for me, the sword that I'm trying to sharpen in terms of my technical skills, like today is more on the security, what now we term cybersecurity or info, security type things. And that's where my interests are drawing me to go. And I do like study hard in terms of trying to make sure that I can get very deep into that technical area. Yeah, because that actually it brings me joy to learn those new things

I think that's so important in terms of like forcing yourself to learn something your not interested in versus if you actually like it, if that's what's drawing you at the moment, then don't fight. Just go for it

It's there's a mantra that I've always had, and that's just, you know, if there's any, if there's anything that's led me to anything that might be confused with at least successes or otherwise in terms of my career, it's that my dad used to always say, just chase your smile. And so after having a couple of positively reinforcing moments in my life in which I was able to bootstrap that behavior pattern, that's a lot of what I would say, that would be a general theme. So, yeah

If you could talk to a younger version of yourself starting your career today, what would you tell yourself?

Haha oh soo much

Haha this is this is where it gets fun

Yeah. You know, there's a I would name a couple of ex-girlfriends just walk away from that. Yeah, that's going to be really distracting for my career progression standpoint

Not worth it?

Not worth it or worth it, but just understand the baggage that you're going to carry moving forward. So a lot of us, I guess the biggest thing and it was certainly for me and it's something that I see in a lot of like the folks that I try to mentor and that I see working in our labs, in the different spheres that I work in. And that's that a lot of my energy there was a lot of I remember there being just a lot of anxiety with regards to what do I do next

Yeah, that's always right. Like, I feel I have that

But I wish I could go back and like if I could take the experience that I have now. And what at least right now, like, I don't worry, I have a lot less anxiety with regards to what I'm going to go do next. Yeah. And again, I've had some wonderful and fortunate positive reinforcement data points that have allowed me to of hit this place. But that's to say, you know, you're you're not going to have like, I wish I could go back and tell myself, you're not going to have a problem finding employment if you keep with the passion and the drive and the interest that you have in the things that you're doing now. Stop worrying about whether you're going to be able to pay rent or have food. Yeah. And truth be told, there were moments in which that was actually a pretty decent concern, especially when we were doing the startup. Yeah, it was like, I literally don't have a paycheck this month and I have no sales in the pipeline and I might not be able to have a roof over my head next month. And the trick there is there's a little bit of luck, but there's just a lot of being prepared into keeping yourself moving forward. I wish I could have. I wish I could go back in time and just instill a little bit more of that in me

Yeah, it's going to be fine just say as it's going to be fine

It's going to be fine. And even when it's even when it's really, really, really bad, you're going to work yourself out of that. That's not what I wouldn't go back in time is go back and say, don't worry about it. It'll be easy, like you're going to work your ass off. But the idea that you're going to die cold and alone and, you know, in a in a horrible place

Worry about the right things. Just worry about chasing that passion

And worry about the things you can control and really, you, your passions, what you're like wanting to do in life, and frankly, the things that bring you joy again, it has been a fortunate walk. It's like I've found that if I concentrate on those things that are almost always lead me to the right place

If you could think back to sort of one pivotal moment in your life or a turning point or key decision that you made that impacted your life the most, hopefully positively. Is the one that comes to mind?

It's kind of a series, it's funny, though, as you said that though the one and I think it was maybe an epiphany of perspective is what the professor was giving me when I was doing my masters, on the World Trade Center. There was a lot of kind of decision making and other things that I needed to work out, and that experience wasn't ending up where I needed it to be in terms of concluding that work such that I could go forth and do other things. And that professor kind of sat me down and he said, Mark, he's like, Look, it's look on the inside of the cover page. This thesis, it says, for the partial fulfillment of the degree requirements. That's it. This is not your life's work. And at that point in my career, I and I remember almost being, like, almost adamantly disagreeable with him to say, No, this is my life's work. This is what I'm here to do. This everything. I'm literally saving people in rubble piles. How dare you say that this is not my life's work? What he was giving me was a glimpse of perspective and that even if you can't have something, be what if that moment you believe is your life's work? Yeah, but he was right. And that I would then later go on to do a startup and to go to NASA. NASA has very little to do with what I was doing for the other thing there with the World Trade Center stuff or whatever. And so it is, I would say, that's probably what I think I earned, maybe there in terms of his bestowing upon me, that knowledge was just the idea that in any given moment, no matter how good or bad or otherwise you are doing in your career, that's just that moment of time. Yeah. And what you're doing and the thing that you're stressing out about is probably just a partial fulfillment of whatever it is that you're actually going to do in your career

Yeah, it's just one chapter of the total book

And what's amazing for me is that he said that almost like he was trying to be helpful. But he said that with a wisdom that I knew he had earned that understanding and I hadn't. And so now I can look back and what's interesting is that Professor is now, you know, I don't think we've actually spoken much since

You could send a message and say you were right

Seriously, I should. It's funny how you have those people that pass through your orbit to provide you with a wonderful gravitational field that changes your direction. Yeah. And then you get to to get to benefit from that

What would be the thing that excites you most about the future of technology and humanity and and you can go as far forward and as crazy as you want to. As in, you could say like, you know, self-driving cars in the next five years or whatever it might be, or when we put a colony on Mars. What is it about the relationship between technology and humanity in the future that that would get you the most riled up?

This will sound like I'm being hyperbolic when I say it, but I actually truly believe that technology is the only way we're going to get ourselves out of the crisis that we have right now. It's weird to say I'm excited about solving the fact that we're about to destroy the rock we live on. But I actually think that it will be when we get on the other side of solving those problems, and I do believe we're going to solve those problems with technology. I don't believe it lies in policy. I don't believe it lies in like the idea that we globalize the way that let's, let's say, the western world's lived today. If that globalises, then we destroy this entire planet. The only thing I think that breaks a lot of those cycles is our ability to leverage technology to lessen those effects. And so whether that be autonomous cars or robots or carbon capture or, you know, finding ways of doing more efficient hydrogen production, all of that to me, is lumped into the same technology advancement for us as a species. And that's what I'm excited about. Otherwise, the alternative is pretty frickin dystopian, and I really, at least in my little humble opinion, I think it's technology that actually saves us from that

Is there a specific piece of tech that once that arrives and you know, it is fully functional that you think that's pretty cool

With a lot of that, and of course, you know, we're doing a lot of this work here, if we are able to sequester carbon, that's huge. That actually takes so much weight at that point. We can actually use heavy fuels, fossil fuels, hydrogen, wind, whatever. And it doesn't actually matter because we're able to remove the carbon, which is, you know, one of the biggest catalysts for us having issues now. So if that existed, I mean, that's huge that that is such an enabler on so many different levels. The effects of that I don't know that you could even really measure them well, that would just be a game changer for us

If you could assemble the best, most skilled and talented team in the world, resources weren't an issue. What problem would you solve?

I would... And this is going to sound like a loaded answer, but I would actually go after new energy and carbon capture, which is exactly what we're doing here. What I'm eager to do is to get us a little bit further ahead in that exploration so that we actually know like so a lot of the work that we're doing right now is very, from an R&D 4 sense, it's very it's still like somewhere between R&D. We know the kinds of things that we need to build to help with energy and to help, you know, basically with carbon capture and other things like that, we don't necessarily know how to scale it. The idea that as we start the needle starts moving much, much more toward the D, which is to say, OK, we know what to do, and now we just need to do it at scale. I would love to assemble that team and literally figure out how to see how to save the planet and save our ability to have energy in it

So if you could take a one way trip to Mars, would you do it?

For sure

And what would you tell Faith?

She would .. so

Hahah

She's been surprisingly supportive of all of my crazy adventures. And so while we, I'm sure we would have the teary eyed, you know, Armageddon moment where you know, it's, you know, I need I need to get on the rocket, babe. You know

But you would do it

Yeah, for sure

If you had to have done something other than robotics, what would you have done?

Either I would have stayed in I.T., I had lots of friends that stayed the course on I.T and I'll admit I'm a little jealous of them now. And that's to say, you know, with by no contribution I made to the field. It became a proper field like you can now and in fact, cybersecurity experts are some of the best paid professionals on the planet. And what's funny is a lot of the problems I'm going to say this is if we like knew all the answers, but there was many of us that could see the world that we now live in in terms of there being monetization strategies that make cyber criminals very aggressive in their techniques and the idea of nation state level hacking efforts and other stuff like that. There was a lot of us that we're seeing that back in the 90s and early 2000s, I tapped out because I was burned out. And so it's one of those where there's a whole cohort of my friends that have that have stayed in that. And I can now say with a little bit of a grin on my face being, you know, fully entrenched in robotics or whatever. I think I would have been pretty good if I would have stayed in that career path. The other, the other career path that I probably there's a parallel universe in which Mark is just driving an 18 wheeler, just a truck across probably the U.S. and that's one of those things where I don't so I don't have any problem, just kind of sitting in my own head and working out problems and other things. And I've always loved especially open road driving. And so it's weird to say, you know, I either would be wanting to sit on the bleeding edge of cyber response or just sitting behind the wheel of an 18 wheeler

So it's funny because the path you picked is probably going to be the field that makes driving the truck on the long road redundant right?

Hahah thats right, So it's my evil plan. Yeah, if I can't be a trucker, nobody will

Yeah hahah. If you retire today or let's say tomorrow, what aspect of your career would you be most proud of?

It's funny, I think because space stuff was so ingrained in my childhood, so growing up in South Florida, where I can remember, like literally being single digit years old and us going out onto the roof of the school to watch the shuttle launch. You know, in South Florida, you can do that. And that seemed at the time, working for or being just in the orbit of NASA just seems so just impossible. Like just who who is able to do that. And so I'm proud of the ability to have gone and done that. But again, just the accidental nature of like my ability to have contributed the World Trade Center and to have contributed in multiple disasters in which we were trying to inch forward on robots being able to contribute to search and rescue whatever that was... So strangely enough, I consider that more of an uphill battle and more of a struggle than what it took for me to work in and to be successful at NASA. It's hard when you're trying to make markets that don't exist in a market that doesn't necessarily want what you're building. Yeah, that's a little different from NASA, which was desperately trying to find technology to allow us to succeed in the things that we were doing. It's a different mode of operation

So if you could interview anyone in the same way that I just interviewed you, who would be?

Oh that's a good question. Probably so, one of my mentors. And he was the original program manager, and he's somebody that I know very, very well. But I find that every time I sit down and have a beer with him or whatever, I find some other story that I had no idea even existed. His name is John Blitch. I realize I should be answering like Gandhi or Elon Musk or, you know, somebody who would show up on Joe Rogan next week. And in fact, I would love to you know, maybe have the opportunity to do an interview like this with some of my mentors because at least in two cases of really, really great mentors I've had. What I found with both of them is for whatever depth it is you think you know about that person, there's more down below it. And what I find is that the deeper you go, sometimes the more profound the lessons are and the better the capture

Might see might see him on Micirology

Hahah I will aspire to these heights

Absolute last question if you could only recommend one book to someone for the rest of your life, what would it be?

One book. I can tell you my favorite

Could be a favorite but if you could only recommend that, you know, that one book to people

Oh, I should have a better answer for this than I think I'm about to do

You can take your time

So one of my favorites is it's a book called The Art of Racing in the Rain, don't watch the movie its horrible. But the book is the world from the perspective of a golden retriever. And of course, it also it's also based around he is that he is the pet dog of a race car driver. He was going through a whole bunch of turmoil in his life and other things like that. And one seeing the world through the eyes of a dog. The author does an amazing job of taking you along for that journey. Yeah, I've joked, you know how they have different personality types and you're able to like attach personality types to dog types or whatever. Actually, in everyone I've ever done, I've always come out as the golden retriever. So it's not by accident that I think for me, that book resonated with me so strongly. It's not a complex book, and I don't know if its one that you walk out of the end of that book going wow I have accumulated the following three life lessons that will leave me well. But it's one that I would say that. So the two that I pick up the most often I've reread the art of racing in the rain god, probably four or five times. The other one is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Don't know it

OK, so snow crash is now, well where it's relevant today is the term meta-verse comes from snow crash. And while I will admit so, Neal Stephenson is an interesting science fiction author, at that stage in his career, he was notorious for not finishing books well, the books would kind of run off a cliff, but snow crash, if I have an evening in which I just want to be inspired, I will pick up snow crash and read the first two chapters. And it is like this obnoxious, over-the-top Michael Bay style trailer of what the future might look like. And it is riveting. So, those would be my two

Mark, thank you so much. Yeah, it's been good

Been my pleasure

And 'll be sending you the the finished product soon

Cool looking forward to it

Thank you

Dr. Mark Micire — Head of Robotics, Woodside Energy

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