VBS.TV Blog

LEAFLABS ARE MIT'S FINEST FUCK-UPS

July 20, 2009
by NADJA OERTELT

Motherboard

I first met Jon Williams in 2003 at a party in a graffiti-spattered dorm at MIT. We shared a family-size jug of OJ and vodka and he whispered in my ear that he was from Oklahoma. After trying to pull a move that should have led me to punch him in the face, I instead christened him “Goddamn Okie,” a name which has stuck to this day.

After a stint as a professional poker player and periods of time in various unnamable and possibly horrifying occupations, Okie Williams became fixated on robotics and all things electronic. His backstory is chaotic, but no different than that of countless MIT students who are essentially too smart for their own good: We take too long graduating, too long partying, too long experimenting with different ways of killing/maiming/stimulating/boring ourselves. It’s a great five to ten years of insanity before we finally emerge scarred and glorious as pseudo-menchildren/womenkids. I say “we,” but Okie is the epitome of this MIT phenomenon.

Leaflabs is the company started by Okie and AJ Meyers, and a few other MIT grads. I’d link you to their website here, but it is offline, as it has been for at least the past two months [Update: looks like they just got it back up. Try this link and see if it doesn’t work for you]. Leaflabs is a Mad Max-style robotics company—their kitchen is their lab and office, strewn with electronics, cigarettes, rotting food, and a big model plane. They’ve been working on a controller that will autonomously fly a model plane, which is fun but the project’s end goal is finding a way to compress the complex, expensive computing needed for advanced robotics onto a small modular board that any snot-nosed kid could use in his garage. They’ve basically taken a socialist approach to powerful autonomous computing, with the ultimate aim being to bring the advances of the robotics industry within reach of the little guy, though in this case that’s less a reference to the lumpen prole than the kids currently experimenting with batteries, wire, stolen matches, and circuitry while everyone else is playing kickball—the young nerds of tomorrow.