Movie Magic Meets Practical Robotics for Netflix’s The Electric State

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

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 E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:27.8	slash UK slash AI for people. For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.
0:39.4	If you pay any attention to the world of robotics and spend any time watching science fiction,
0:45.4	you probably know that there's a big difference between what robots can do on screen
0:50.4	and what they're actually capable of in real life. Today's guest is someone who's working to bridge that gap.
0:57.6	Dennis Hong is a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at UCLA.
1:02.4	He's also the director of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, or Romella.
1:07.6	His robots range all the way from floating balloons with spindly legs to thick-thighed
1:13.6	humanoids that dominate on the soccer pitch. He recently sat down to talk to me about these
1:18.6	inventions and how he worked to build a custom robot for a new movie called The Electric State,
1:24.3	which is out today on Netflix. Here's that conversation. Thanks so much for
1:29.2	coming on to chat today. It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me. So I understand
1:33.9	that you just helped work on some robots related to electric state. And maybe based on some
1:42.3	interviews I've seen of you, that was kind of a full
1:44.5	circle moment because of what got you interested in robotics. So would you tell us more about that?
	...

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