Rastelli the Programmer

When he was still alive, I met the legendary hardware hacker Ur at a computer engineering conference in Hamburg. I never learned his real name, and I’m not sure he ever made it public; everyone called him by his IRC handle (this name apparently gave him some vexation, he joked, on systems that required usernames to have a three-character minimum). Ur had given a talk that evening on the state of GNUservo, an free and open-source library for controlling robotics motors. As the project’s original developer, the talk generated quite a bit of buzz; several on-and-off contributors from over the years gathered around him after the Q&A. These conversations dragged on into the late hours, so after midnight we migrated to an outdoor table at nearby pub with accommodating operating hours.

My interest in his work was barely that of a hobbyist, an amateur, if that. I felt surprised by the interest Ur showed in my own baleful experiments with the GNUservo library, coinciding with my awkward attempts at mobile sculpture, whose overall failure I felt embarrassed to belabor.

My interest in robotics (and the field’s programming libraries) was merely artistic. An undergraduate art project I had undertaken made use of several servomotors, or attempted to. As the project deadline loomed closer, I recognized that the short time I had remaining to complete the piece was inadequate to gain the understanding necessary to manipulate these robotics motors usefully. Hopeless, I scrapped my original plan of a servomotor-powered sculpture and simplified the piece into a much pared-down design without any electronic component. I got a C on this assignment. I remembered thinking with some irony that my grade was the same as the name of the programming language whose memory-pointer system had baffled me to frustration.

When I finished justifying my respect for his work with this tale, Ur shared with me the following story:

“When I was a PhD candidate at the University of Göttingen,” he began, “I had a classmate named Rastelli, a few years older than me. Rastelli had previously graduated from Clown College in Sarasota, USA, where he had developed a dazzling skill for juggling. He and his brother had graduated in the same class (they were born ten and a half months apart) and they had briefly made a name as a traveling act.

“An economic recession had put an end to their career as entertainers, and Rastelli the younger taught himself some technical skills to cover his post-bankruptcy expenses. The elder Rastelli had more difficulty moving on from the endeavor, in part because a congenital deformity unfairly kept many potential employers from considering his job applications. Employment discrimination still happens, but it was worse then. The elder brother was born with with achondroplasia, and interviewers calling him ‘dwarf’ to his face eventually dimmed his confidence.

“Rastelli the younger— I’ll just call him Rastelli the programmer— we shared an advisor at the University of Göttingen. Rastelli did not have a STEM undergraduate degree, but he successfully made a case that his technical duties in the private sector equipped him with the experience to flourish in a grad-level mechatronics program.

“Our advisor, Dr. Glaser, was hands-off to a fault. Her own administrative duties kept her so busy she barely had time for her own research, let alone mentoring her advisees. I almost never saw her. I think this is how Rastelli developed the habit of compulsively checking his email. Rastelli, I think, craved guidance in his new academic setting. He fired off question after question, endlessly checking his email client, hoping some response from her had arrived.

“Rastelli received approval to do a Master’s Thesis that would combine his knowledge of the performing arts with microcontroller programming. He built a robotic arm that could toss a ball into the air, track its velocity and position, and rotate itself into a different position to catch it. The fairly large apparatus stood on a wheeled platform, also connected to the motion calculator, which moved back and forth or left and right if the throw had gone too far in any direction.

“I never once saw his contraption move or even light up in our lab. I did hear him say that he needed Dr. Glaser to reschedule his performance, as the unresolved defects had put him far behind schedule. The week of the performance, Rastelli’s normally obsessive pace of email-checking had accelerated into desperation. The problem, apparently, was that Rastelli hadn’t really built anything.

“The night before the performance, Rastelli and his brother were together in the lab (visitors are restricted admittance). Major sections of his robot were spilled out on the ground in front of them. I judged that they were replacing the arm actuators with simple gear-and-lever puppetry. I pretended not to notice when I saw the elder Rastelli climb into the lower compartment made vacant by torn-out machine parts.

“Rastelli planned to fake his way through this performance. He had been unable to get hold of Dr. Glaser and talk with her about the challenges he faced in his code, and throughout his machine as a whole. But the date had been set. Rastelli had asked for the performance to be cancelled, and he was either inept at finding the right person to announce the cancellation, or he was unwilling to take the time to step back and find an actual solution. So instead, the Rastellis were reviving the old brother act they had practiced so long before computer science had entered the equation. His brother would sit inside the machine husk, acting as the robot, operating the arms manually.

“You might know this story, but two centuries ago, a clever inventor implemented a similar idea. He toured Europe with a machine constructed to respond to any chess move with a victorious countermove against even the most advanced masters. A wooden simulacrum sat before a chessboard, which rested on a spacious table. Well-placed mirrors created an illusion of transparent, empty space under his table. In truth, a hunchback sat inside the space, a man who was both a skilled chess player and a deft puppeteer; that man controlled the puppet's hand with strings. Rastelli’s apparatus, in this tradition, concealed the tiny man inside with wires and cables in the front and steel casings on the sides.

“The Dean’s secretary had taped paper signs around the school of engineering, advertising the one-night robotics exhibition so clearly that on this evening a motley crowd filled the Audimax auditorium. I saw a curator from the nearby Grenzlandmuseum, whom I knew to be a prominent university donor. The provost and his wife sat in the front-row. Students from undergraduates to postdocs filled the seats, as well as alumni with their children. As the lights dimmed, I saw Dr. Glaser enter via one of the wings. I stood up, thinking to at least warn her of what was about to take place, but an usher told me I would not be allowed back if I left my row. So I returned to my seat and sat back down.

“When the velvet curtains drew back, no one introduced Rastelli. He walked to the center of the stage muttering mumbo-jumbo that the capabilities of this machine were less important than the expectations they would set for future technology. He produced a game controller and began fiddling with the joysticks. The ‘robot’ emerged from backstage, jauntily, not like a motorized contraption, but like a man pushing a free set of wheels.

“Rastelli the programmer tapped a button on his controller, and the arm of the robot flew forward, grasping a red ball. It tossed the ball upwards, letting go at the top of its swing. The ball flew halfway to the vaulted ceiling. The metal arm grasped the sphere as it fell: a perfectly timed catch.

“The audience gasped, though I could not immediately tell why. Had they discerned Rastelli’s secret? I couldn’t identify any tell-tale body parts poking out, but my seat was near the back, and my view had a poor angle.

“The robot lifted a second arm, and began juggling a blue ball in time with the red one. The movements were not remotely jerky, but smooth and graceful. The metal box acted so lifelike, its maneuvers gave the appearance of a personality all their own. With Rastelli the programmer still standing in the center of the hall, the contraption slid around the stage (I could not be the only one who thought he heard footsteps?), still juggling the two balls high in the air. Rastelli the programmer produced a third ball, this one yellow, from his pocket. He tossed the ball to the robot who caught it in his left arm and tossed it in the air again, in time to catch the falling red ball and throw it back up. Now a green ball appeared, from where I did not see, and entered the cycle on the robot’s right with the blue ball. There was a pink and purple ball now as well, and the robot danced around the stage keeping each of these balls in perfect synchrony.

“The robot kept six balls in the air at once, then eight, all while moving swiftly from stage left to stage right and back again. At the conclusion to the performance, the robot plucked each ball out of the air and set each one down with flawless agility. How spectacular!

“Afterwards (there was no encore), I pushed my way backstage to find Rastelli the programmer. He sat on a dusty stage prop, hunched over his laptop in a corner. I could see a look of distress dragging his face down.

“He looked up from the glow of his screen, and before I could ask any question, he said to me ‘I have just received the worst news.’

“‘And what is that?’ I asked.

“‘My brother, my only brother, was admitted to the emergency room this morning after falling down a flight of stairs. The hospital only emailed to tell me while I was out there on stage. His leg has broken in multiple places.’

“So you see,” Ur added after a pause, “our craft— engineering— was not born yesterday. We too have our chronicles, or, at any rate, our legends.”