9781422284872

Robots don’t really eat ice cream, of course, but Dr. Hong’s robot-building team is working on ways to make robots more and more like people.

This mission is just one of many challenges Dennis Hong faces. He is a robot scientist born in California and raised in Seoul, South Korea. When Hong was six years old, he saw the movie Star Wars . He was amazed by the robots. In Perspective , a journal published by the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering, Hong said, “I still cannot forget the mind-blowing sensation when I first watched the movie Star Wars . I was fascinated by R2-D2 and C-3PO. Since then, I decided to become a robot scientist and never changed my mind…It might sound crazy, but that movie completely changed my life.” When Hong was a child, he spent a lot of time building things— and breaking them! With his brother and sister he made firecrackers

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