This engineer is on a single-minded quest to build robots that are soft

Atkeson’s house is littered with pictures and sculptures of fish and robots. So many robots. He and his wife Jessica, also a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon, create sculptures of robots in their spare time out of found items—trashcans, cogs, antennae; anything they can get their hands on that might make something look remotely robot-shaped—as if they did not spend enough time around robots at work.