Editor’s note:

In celebration of International Women’s Day, we’re reposting our latest ‘25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About‘ list. Over the last four years, Robohub has featured 100 inspiring women leading future developments within robotics, with plenty more for the years to come!

Our next edition will be released on Ada Lovelace Day.

In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, we’ve compiled our fourth annual ‘25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About‘ list. That’s 100 women who have been featured to date. We’re showcasing women working in research, development, and commercialization of robotics. The role models are diverse, ranging from emeritus to early career stage. Even though the total number of women in robotics is still relatively small, we’re celebrating that women are leading the way within this field.

Role models are important. Countess Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer and an extraordinary mathematician, faced an uphill battle in the days when women were not encouraged to pursue a career in science. Fast forward 200 years, there are still not enough women in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM). One key reason is clear: a severe lack of visible female role models. Women in STEM need to be equally represented at conferences, keynotes, magazine covers, or stories about technology. Although this is starting to change, it’s not happening quick enough.

To address that challenge, Suw Charman-Anderson started Ada Lovelace Day in 2009 in response to the lack of visibility of women in STEM (not the lack of women). It’s an international day celebrating the achievements of women in STEM. Everyone is encouraged to add an event or a story to the Finding Ada site.

A recent study from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford found that visibility was the missing factor preventing women from moving into leadership positions within their organization. This has a cumulative effect on career progression and earnings. These findings support an earlier study with the Anita Borg Institute, who interviewed 1800 women in technology companies. According to the authors, women reported being less likely than male counterparts to be assigned to high visibility projects, which in turn, has a negative impact on their chances for future promotions.

We’d like to think that this annual list is opening eyes from within the robotics community, and beyond. One of our 2015 listees Spring Berman wrote to Robohub and said, “I’m so grateful for the mention in Robohub’s 25 women in robotics!  The president of ASU saw the article about it in our university news, and now he wants to visit our lab in mid-April to see our work. Hopefully we can get together a cool demo to show him!”

Without further ado, here are 25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order) for 2016. Enjoy!

Nora Ayanian Assistant Professor and Director of the ACT lab at USC Nora Ayanian’s research focuses on creating end-to-end solutions for multirobot coordination, to enable people to use teams of robots. Ayanian is the recipient of the 2016 Okawa Foundation Research Grant and is an MIT Technology Review TR25 Top Innovator.

Catherine Ball Founder & CEO, Remote Research Ranges / Managing Director, Elemental Strategy Catherine Ball won Telstra Queensland Business Woman of Year (2015) for her drone work. She is an environmental scientist, author and now the CEO of an Australian startup working with the application of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) across remote communities, schools, industry, and citizen scientists. Dr. Ball is leading the call for discussions around the ethics of spatial data, aka geo-ethics.

Margarita Chli SNF Assistant Professor at ETHZ, Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh Margarita Chli is an SNF Assistant Professor leading the Vision for Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Previously, she was a Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and before that, she was at the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) of ETH Zurich, where she held the post of Deputy Director, Senior Researcher and Lecturer. Her research interest is in Computer Vision for Robotics, focusing on real-time perception for micro-aerial vehicles. Over the years, she’s been involved in a number of European projects (AEROWORKS, SHERPA, myCopter,sFly).

Vivian Chu Graduate Research Assistant at Georgia Institute of Technology Vivian Chu is a Graduate Student Research Assistant at Georgia Institute of Technology, studying perception, AI and cognition, and interaction. Chu’s paper on “Using Robotic Exploratory Procedures to Learn the Meaning of Haptic Adjectives” was awarded the Best Cognitive Robotics Paper at ICRA 2013.

Mady Delvaux European Parliament MEP Mady Delvaux (S&D, LU) is a Member of the European Parliament. Alongside an extensive draft report on “Civil Law Rules on Robotics,” Delvaux proposes the creation of a legal framework for automation and ways to promote European industry.

Bernardine Dias Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University M. Bernardine Dias, Ph.D., served as a member of the faculty at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, primarily affiliated with the Field Robotics Center where Dias developed Trader Bots, a robotic task allocation system. Dias is currently founder and CEO of Diyunu Consulting, dedicated to bringing robotics to marginalized populations.

Sanja Dogramadzi Associate Professor / Reader in Robotics at UWE Bristol Sanja Dogramadzi develops medical and assistive robots at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Her research focuses on the multidisciplinary use of robotics technologies in healthcare settings. Dogramadzi has been awarded funding in the range of £2.4M since 2009, currently supervising/managing a team of 15 post-doctoral and doctoral researchers and junior lecturers. Her team won the Best Medical Robotics Paper Award at ICRA 2016.

Anca Dragan Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley Anca Dragan runs the InterACT Lab at Berkeley, which focusses on algorithms for human-robot interaction. The lab works across different applications, from assistive robots, to manufacturing, to autonomous cars, and draws from optimal control, planning, estimation, learning, and cognitive science. Dragan also helped fund and servee on the steering committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, and is a co-PI of the Center for Human-Compatible AI.

Kimberley Hambuchen Human Robotic Systems Deputy Project Manager at NASA Johnson Space Center Kimberly Hambuchen is an expert in developing novel methods for remote supervision of space robots over intermediate time delays. She has proven the validity of these methods through multiple NASA analog field tests with robots, including the JSC Space Exploration Vehicles, Centaur platforms and Robonaut 2, the ATHLETE rovers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Ames Research Center K-10s. She was the User Interface Lead for JSC’s entry into the DARPA Robotics Challenge, using her expertise in remote supervision of robots to guide operator interface development for the DRC robot, Valkyrie. She currently oversees NASA JSC’s participation in the collaboration of the Robot Operations Portal (ROP), which seeks to provide non-expert, web-based interfaces for operating remote robots unavailable to the greater public.

Kaijen Hsiao CTO at Mayfield Robotics Kaijen Hsiao has been leading innovations in robotics, artificial intelligence, and hardware/software design and development for over 15 years. Hsiao has a history of working on robotics projects that turn into well-funded startup enterprises in the US & Europe. Some of her credits include designing components for agricultural robots, home security and companion robots, service robots, and assistive robots for people with disabilities. Kaijen has worked on high-profile projects at Willow Garage, MIT (CSAIL and Media Lab), Bosch, iRobot, and now Mayfield Robotics.

M.Ani Hsieh Associate Professor at Drexel University Ani Hsieh focuses on bridging the gap between geophysical fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics and control, and distributed multi-agent robotic systems. Hsieh currently works in the Scalable Autonomous System Laboratory at Drexel University. She is a 2011 ONR Summer Faculty Fellow, the recipient of a 2012 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, and the recipient of of 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.

Wendy Ju Executive Director and Associate Professor of Interaction Design at Center for Design Research at Stanford University and California College of the Arts Wendy Ju works in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces, highlighting the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding. Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.

Angelica Lim Making Pepper Sociable / Software Engineering Manager at SoftBank Robotics Angelica Lim builds artificial intelligence for robots to interact with humans in a smart, fun, way by combining neuroscience, machine learning, and developmental psychology to model emotion. She currently works as a Software Engineering Manager at SoftBank Robotics in Paris, France. Her previous creations include robots that play music in a human ensemble, speak and gesture with expression, and recognize emotion in movement.

Gudrun Litzenberger General Secretary and Director of Statistics at International Federation of Robotics Gudrun Litzenberger is on the Executive Board of the International Federation of Robotics, the global not-for-profit industry association for robotics formed in 1987. The purpose of IFR is to promote and strengthen the robotics industry worldwide, to protect its business interests, to cause public awareness about robotics technologies and to deal with other matters of relevance to its members. Litzenberger also oversees the collection and interpretation of market relevant data for world-wide surveys, studies, statistics and other data on the world-wide use of robotics.

Rosanna Myers Cofounder of Carbon Robotics Rosanna Myers is cofounder of Carbon Robotics, building Katia – a Kick-Ass Trainable Intelligent Arm. Myers is a self-taught software developer with a background in building innovative high tech startups. Carbon Robotics was recently named as one of the Top 50 “most influential public & private companies in the global robotics industry” by the Robotics Business Review.

Erin Rapacki Business Development at Pneubotics Erin Rapacki is a product storyteller with robotics experience across academia and industry, in both the Boston and Silicon Valley hotspots, with projects ranging from flexible logistics, supply chain, FDA approval, consumer products, military casualty extraction, assistive devices, robotic tele-presence, and warehousing. Rapacki finds ways to catalyze the robotics market by identifying unique value propositions for new robotic products, and by creating community and cooperation between companies and thought leaders.

Carol Reiley Co-founder / President at drive.ai Carol Reiley is the cofounder and President of drive.ai, an artificial intelligence self-driving car startup. Reiley is also a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University in robotics and computer vision, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow researching strategies for improving human and robotic interaction. Her previous works include underwater and industrial robotics at Santa Clara University, space satellites at Lockheed Martin, people detection at GE Research, and clinical development engineering as a consultant at Intuitive Surgical.

Simone Schürle Research Fellow at Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, MIT Simone Schürle studies Micro- and Nanosystems Technologies with a focus on cancer research. In 2005 she completed a research stay at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in the field of Bio Mechanical Engineering. She gained further practical experience during internships in R&D and marketing in Nano Imprint Lithography at SUSS MicroTec in Munich, Germany. Schürle was awarded the ETH Zurich Medal for distinguished doctoral thesis in 2014 for her PhD work on the magnetic control of microrobots. She was then awared a fellowship to go to MIT working at the interface between robotics and nanomedicine. Schürle was recently awarded a Branco Weiss Fellowship to work on merging wireless control of magnetic nanosystems with the engineering potential of synthetic biology. She is also co-founder of the microrobotics company MagnebotiX.

Katia Sycara Research Professor, Director of Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at Carnegie Mellon University / University of Aberdeen Katia Sycara is a Research Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and holds the Sixth Century Chair (part time) in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen in the U.K. She is also the Director of the Laboratory for Agents Technology and Semantic Web Technologies at CMU, researching multi-agent systems. Prof. Sycara is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award. She is also the recipient of the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Wisconsin in 2005. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Greek National Center of Scientific Research “Demokritos” Information Technology Division.

Adriana Tapus Vice Provost / Professor at INTERFACES Graduate School, UPSay / ENSTA-ParisTech Adriana Tapus researches the personalization of assistive robots, with a focus on life-long learning and adaptive robot behaviors. Tapus develops different models of personalized interaction applied to health-related applications, cooperation and driving tasks. Tapus currently has a HEROES grant for “Haptic Emotional Robot Experiments with Sensitive Body” as well as a DGA Fellowship, and is active as an academic journal editor, conference program chair and general chair.

Stefanie Tellex Assistant Professor at Brown University Stefanie Tellex works on constructing robots that seamlessly use natural language to communicate with humans, by applying probabilistic methods, corpus-based training, and decision theory to develop interactive robotic systems that can understand and generate natural language. Tellex has published at SIGIR, HRI, RSS, AAAI, IROS, and ICMI, winning Best Student Paper at SIGIR and ICMI and was named one of IEEE Spectrum’s AI’s 10 to Watch. Stefanie won the Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award at Brown University and recently won a NASA Early Career Faculty Award for Human-Robot Collaboration on Complex tasks.

Patricia Vargas Associate Professor / Founding Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Heriot-Watt University, UK Patricia Vargas is the Founding Director of the Robotics Laboratory and Associate Professor/Reader in Computer Science and Robotics at the School of Mathematical and Computer Science (MACS) at the Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is particularly interested in: Human-Robot Interaction, Evolutionary Robotics, Swarm Robotics, Computational Neuroscience and Memory Modelling, Biologically-inspired algorithms in general, such as Artificial Neural Networks, Artificial Endocrine Systems, Artificial Immune Systems, and Learning Classifier Systems, and Data Mining and Machine Learning.

Hanna Wallach Senior Researcher / Assistant Professor / Cofounder at Microsoft Research / UMass Amherst / Women in Machine Learning Hanna Wallach develops machine learning methods for analyzing the structure, content, and dynamics of social processes. Her work is inherently interdisciplinary: she collaborates with political scientists, sociologists, and journalists to understand how organizations work by analyzing publicly available interaction data, such as email networks, document collections, press releases, meeting transcripts, and news articles. She also studies issues of fairness, accountability, and transparency as they relate to machine learning. Wallach’s research has had broad impact in machine learning, natural language processing, and computational social science. In 2014, she was named one of Glamour magazine’s “35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry”; in 2015, she was elected to the International Machine Learning Society’s Board of Trustees; and in 2016, she was named co-winner of the 2016 Borg Early Career Award. Hanna is committed to increasing diversity and has worked for over a decade to address the underrepresentation of women in computing. She co-founded the annual Women in Machine Learning Workshop, which is now in its eleventh year.

Lisa Winter Product Design Engineer at Mattel, Inc. A roboticist since childhood, Lisa Winter has 20 years experience designing and building robots. She was crowned the Robot Wars Middleweight World Champion and has been in many publications, including MAKE magazine. In 2012, Winter cofounded smart toy company Robot 11, building smart wearables and Bluetooth connected toys. She has been inventing and rapid prototyping connected devices since the beginning of the IoT movement. Winter is currently the Product Design Engineer at Mattel, developing a smart wearable baby monitor. At night she builds combat robots for ABC’s BattleBots, and dreams of ways to help animals and the environment.

Rosalie Wang Assistant Professor at Intelligent and Assistive Technology and Systems Lab, University of Toronto / Toronto Rehabilitative Institute Rosalie Wang’s focus is on developing and clinically evaluating intelligent systems for rehabilitation, and as clinical Occupational Therapist, she brings a unique approach to evaluating user-centered and context-relevant design for robotic assistive technologies.

Do you have a story to tell about how visibility helped your robotics career? Would you like to nominate someone for next year’s list? Do you want to help organize Women in Robotics events or join the Women in Robotics network? We’d love to hear from you. You can ask for an invitation to the Women in Robotics network here. Know of any great women in robotics who should be on this list next year? Check the lists from our previous years (2013, 2014, and 2015), and feel free to leave your nominations in the comments section below, or email us at info [at] robohub.org.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2014)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2015)
• Five women robotics experts from Silicon Valley share their stories
• Steffi Paepcke on Robots, women and design: Opportunities abound

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

You might think that your job ad and hiring process is gender neutral and ‘may the best person win’. But years of studies have shown that it simply doesn’t work that way. With equal qualifications, women are still less likely to apply for the job and when they do, less likely to pass the subtle cultural fit requirements.

For the first time in history, women are now earning 50% of all degrees (in the US). But the bad news for robotics is that the Comp Sci and Engineering disciplines are still only attracting <20% of women. Seriously. It was actually better in the 1980s and we need to look at this in another post.

But the best universities have been proactive and are growing the numbers of women graduating in CompSci and Engineering, so you should be seeing a higher proportion of women job applicants. What does the gender ratio of resumes sent to your company look like?

I’m hearing a lot of robotics companies say that they’re having trouble getting women to apply. Well it isn’t rocket surgery but it does take some effort. Here are the best tactics.

Actions:

Is your workplace female friendly? What is the current ratio of women? Can you have women on your interviewing committee? Can you demonstrate why your company has a good culture for women. Is every image on your product/website/team male?

Even if you are starting from scratch, you can still sound female friendly. Ensure your hiring team is on board with this. Have you all considered how frequently unconscious bias happens and simple checks to balance it? (See some of the resources listed below.)

As Jessica Nordell wrote on Medium, “It’s why women are hired and promoted based on proof, while men are hired and promoted based on potential.”

Check your HR process. Is the ratio of women applying to equal to the ratio of women interviewing? Is the ratio of women interviewing equal to the ratio of women being employed? Sudden differences suggest a problem with your processes.

Check your tech interview style. Are you being needlessly combative or challenging? Invite people to show their work without time limits or trick questions. Make it friendly not competitive – unless you are interviewing for people to work in a hyper competitive workplace.

Check your job language. It’s easy to default to needlessly masculine language ie. using adjectives like ‘killer’ ‘rockstar’ ‘aggressive’. Textio is a service that analyzes the text and gives you suggestions for success. They started by evaluating crowdfund campaigns.

Invite women to apply. Explicitly invite applications from women and members of unrepresented groups.

Get word out to women. Increase the number of applications from women by submitting to communities, groups, boards for women.

Build a pipeline. Have regular women’s events, advisor days, office hours, breakfasts or network events. Mine the local colleges and universities. (Although the universities are getting tired of having the best and brightest hired away from research.)

Publicize success. Although it also speaks for itself. Some companies like Etsy, Facebook and Microsoft have significantly increased the number of women in their engineering teams.

ProTip. Mine the biosciences. There’s a lot of talent in adjacent fields.

Resources: (including lists of women engineer/coding groups/boards/communities)

Unconscious Bias
Suggestions and Lists
Language Feedback
Facebook’s Suite of Diversity Resources
Etsy Case Study
More Tips
Building a Pipeline

RoboJob Fair

We’re hosting a robotics job fair on May 11 in Silicon Valley.

Credit: ETH Zurich / Alessandro Della Bella

In 21 countries across the globe, hundreds of people are preparing for Cybathlon 2016, where cutting edge robotic assistive technologies will help people with disabilities to compete in a series of races. This summer the Cybathlon practice session took place at the Swiss Arena in Kloten so that the teams could test out the courses. Watch the trailer for the rehearsal games!

Cybathlon 2016 is organised by ETH Zurich and will showcase six disciplines:

• BCI Race Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) Bike Race
• Powered Arm Prosthesis Race
• Powered Leg Prosthesis Race
• Powered Exoskeleton Race
• Powered Wheelchair Race

The finals will take place on October 8, 2016.

Find out more at www.cybathlon.com

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Exoskeleton with haptic sensors helps paralysed man to kick off World Cup
• Novel robots for gait and arm rehabilitation: Interview with Robert Riener
• Control strategies for active lower extremity prosthetics and orthotics
• Registration now open for Cybathlon 2016
• Noonee: The chairless Chair

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

ICRA 2015 Organising Committee

Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer, and heralded symbolic logic by demonstrating future applications for the universal computing machine that Charles Babbage proposed. She was exceptional in her era for her mathematical brilliance, but though she imagined future applications for a multitude of technological innovations, women at that time were not encouraged to speak about or publish their work, so Lovelace’s genius was appended as ‘notes’ onto the work of others and not seen as a major contribution in its own right.

The fact that the contributions of women such as Lovelace have not been celebrated until recently gives us cause to remedy the situation. Now in its third year, our list of ‘25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About’ is both a shoutout and a call to look at what all these women in robotics have achieved! 

This has been a year of extremes for women in robotics. We celebrated the news of a phenomenal ICRA — one of the premier academic robotics events worldwide, and this year brought to us by an all-female organising committee. But we also despaired that IROS, equally esteemed in academic circles, featured not a single woman delivering a keynote, plenary, or participating in many of the key discussions, such as the futurist forum or the citizen forum. The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals 2015 were similarly lacking; of the 444 robot builders representing 24 robot entrants, only 23 builders were women (though some of the most successful teams at the DRC had female team members). Given how multidisciplinary the field is, and how many different skills are required, we need to celebrate women who are achieving greatness in robotics until we are seeing more parity.

This list showcases women in a wide range of roles and career stages, from the early stage entrepreneur/academic to those who are at their peak. We’ve also featured women working in a wide range of fields: women who are inspiring young Africans, trailblazing the field of surgical robotics, and helping us beautify ourselves using technology.

The honourees on our list of 25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About – 2015 have been chosen for the resilience, perseverance and sheer brilliance they had to demonstrate to get to the top of their particular tree. Whatever your field, we hope that you find a woman doing great things in robotics to inspire you!

Many thanks to Robohub’s contributors for all their great suggestions. Here are 25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order) for 2015:

Nancy Amato Professor at Texas A&M Nancy Amato is noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry and parallel computing, as well as her leadership in broadening participation in the industry. Her 1998 paper on probabilistic roadmap methods is one of the most important papers on this field. Among other awards, she was made an IEEE Fellow in 2010. She has been  a member of the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research since 2000. She was also the Program Chair at ICRA this year.

Spring Berman Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University Spring Berman is developing a system that would allow swarms of robotic machines to perform reliably in situations where there is little prior data about the environment they are operating in, and where GPS and radio communication are limited and unreliable. She is the recipient of the 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.

Kate Darling Research Specialist at MIT Media Lab Mistress of machines, robot ethics and intellectual property, Kate Darling is a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society and an Affiliate at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. She writes for Robohub and IEEE and is passionate about the near-term societal impact of robotic technology, rethinking copyright, and patent law.

Fei-Fei Li Director, Artificial Intelligence Lab and Vision Lab, Stanford University (SAIL) Fei-Fei Li is working to solve some of AI’s trickiest problems: image recognition, learning and language processing. Her work at SAIL has helped to create software capable of recognizing scenes in still photographs — and accurately describe them using natural language. It marks a significant step forward for AI research, and could lead to applications ranging from more intuitive image searches to robots able to make autonomous decisions in unfamiliar situations.

Propa Ghosh Medical Director of Robotic Surgical Services at Hunterdon Medical Center Propa Ghosh is the first female medical director of robotic surgery in the USA. She is an ambitious, forward-thinking physician with the ability to combine surgical expertise, compassionate 360 degree care, strong business acumen, and organizational skills to help develop and foster initiatives from the ground up. She is committed to excellence in medicine through the propagation of advanced surgical techniques, staying at the frontier of skill and knowledge.

Cecile Huet Project Officer at European Commission Cécile Huet is Deputy Head of the Robotics Unit at the European Commission and instrumental to the success of the new wave of robotics projects funded under the multi-billion dollar Horizon 2020 funding programme. Her focus is on robots that can help people and drive applications forward.

Ayorkor Korsah Assistant Computer Science Professor at Ashesi University College | Co-founder of the African Robotics Network Growing up in Nigeria and Ghana, Ayorko Korsah has been a technology evangelist for as long as she can remember. In the US, she discovered her love for computer science and ultimately gained a PhD in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University. Korsah co-founded the African Robotics Network (AFRON) in Ghana in April 2012. Ayorkor teaches robotics and computer science at Ashesi University College, and   coordinates the Ashesi Innovation Experience, a summer enrichment program that engages high school students in leadership, design, robotics and more.

Danica Kragic Professor, Computer Science, Vice Dean, School of Computer Science and Communication, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) Danica Kragic studies how robots interact with each other, how they sense things, and how they see and grasp objects. One of her goals is to build future systems that interact with humans and their surroundings in a natural way. A specialist in computer vision and robotics, Kragic coordinates several EU-projects in the area. She is director of the Center for Autonomous Systems and head of the Computer Vision and Active Perception Lab at KTH. She is also recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award. She is a member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Young Academy of Sweden.

Kavita Krishnaswamy Ph.D. Candidate at University of Maryland Baltimore County Born in Tamil Nadu, India, and raised in Columbia, MD, Kavita Krishnaswamy is both a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She has worked at the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center – Quality of Life – Technology Center (QoLT) at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh and IBM Business consulting services. As a professional researcher with a severe physical disability, Krishnaswamy is motivated by a powerful, innate force: achieving autonomy and independent daily living through the advancement of technology. She develops robotic systems to provide assistance and increase independence for people with disabilities, to support transferring, repositioning, and personal care, with a focus on accessible user interfaces.

Hanna Kurniawati Lecturer at University of Queensland Hanna Kurniawati’s research interests include robotics, motion planning, planning under uncertainty, computational geometry applications, machine learning, and randomized algorithm. Before joining UQ, she worked with Nicholas M. Patrikalakis as a Research Scientist at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. Recently she helped to create the Interactive-Ball (I-Ball) — a robotic soccer ball to improve social ball game participation for people with visual impairment that uses motion sensors, high-efficiency speakers and a small UQ-developed controller that can be programmed to suit the player.

Stéphanie Lacour Assistant professor at the School of Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Stéphanie Lacour’s has pioneered the development of semiconductor devices that can stretch and still retain their electronic properties. Her goal is the fabrication of artificial skin — human-sized integrated circuits that can conform to a robotic or human body and communicate directly with the nervous system. Her research interests lie at the intersection of engineering, materials science and biotechnology. Lacour holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Neuroprosthetic Technology at the School of Engineering at EPFL. A MIT TR35 winner in 2006, she also claims a University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society (UK), a European Research Council ERC Starting Grant, the 2011 Zonta award and the 2014 World Economic Forum Young Scientist award.

Cecilia Laschi Professor at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy Cecilia Laschi’s research interests are in the field of biorobotics and she is currently working on soft robotics, humanoid robotics and neurodevelopmental engineering. She has been, and currently is involved in many National and EU-funded projects, she was the coordinator of the ICT-FET OCTOPUS Integrating Project, leading to one of the first soft robots, and the European Coordination Action on Soft Robotics, RoboSoft. She is a member of the IEEE, of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, and of the Robotics & Automation Society, where she served as elected AdCom member, and is Co-Chair of the TC on Soft Robotics.

Hagar Marzouk Engineering student at Nile University Hagar Marzouk is leader of the “Walross” team in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and first female leader of a team in the Egyptian underwater competition, ROV, 2014. She took her team to first place in Minesweepers 2014, both at the national and international competitions.

Barbara Mazzolai Deputy Director at Center IIT Barbara Mazzolai is the recipient of the 2010 “Marisa Bellisario” Award for her scientific and management activities in the EU DustBot project for improving the urban hygiene and the quality of life of citizens. In 2013 she was also awarded the Medal of the Senate of the Italian Republic for her scientific activities in biomimetics and biorobotics. Her current scientific activity focuses on bio-inspired soft robotics. She has project managed many European projects, including PLANTOID, and is Associate Editor of Micro-Bio Robotics, Frontiers in Bionics and Biomimetics and a member of the Editorial Board of Soft Robotics and Applied Bionics and Biomechanics. She is also a member of the IEEE, the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and the Robotics and Automation Society.

AJung Moon PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. AJung Moon is a Vanier Scholar and studies human-robot interaction and robot ethics. Currently she is a visiting student at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She is a co-founder of the Open Roboethics initiative, an international roboethics think tank that investigates ways in which stakeholders of robotics technologies can work together to influence how robots should shape our future.

Yuki Nakagawa Founder and CEO at RT Corporation Fascinated by robots as a young child, Yuki Nakagawa has been involved in Japanese humanoid and home robotics for almost her entire career. Her life’s mission is to improve and enhance people’s quality of life through the use of robot technologies. Nakagawa’s company developed RIC90, which can wear an “animal suit” to achieve physical contact with people and can change forms. To date, RIC90 has hugged 3000 or more people and shared smiles all over the world. The company believes in the mantra: “No Physical Contact, No Service Robot” and wants to provide intelligence and sophisticated behaviour/motion animal-like robots that can work in close proximity to human beings.

Samantha Payne Co Founder at OpenBionics | Digital Marketer | Journalist Samantha Payne is co-Founder of Open Bionics, an award-winning startup developing low-cost effective and good looking bionic hands for amputees or those born without a hand. The company is now part of the Disney Accelerator, powered by Techstars. Payne, recently shortlisted for the ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ at the Women and Business awards, focuses on building Open Bionics’ public profile, business model, network, and raising rounds. Open Bionics has won multiple awards for innovation, most recently the prestigious James Dyson Award and the RBA50.

Angelika Peer Professor at Bristol Robotics Lab Angelika Peer’s research interests are in human-robot interaction (HRI) with special focus on telepresence and teleaction systems, brain and body computer interfaces, physical/haptic HRI and human motor control. Her research combines methods originating from control, robotics, mechatronics, computer science, neuroscience, and psychology. She has won numerous awards and is chair of the RAS Technical Committee on Telerobotics, a Member of the RAS Technical Committee on Haptics, Secretary of the Eurohaptics Society, and a member of the program committee of several international conferences in the fields of robotics, HRI and multimodal human-system interaction.

Louise Poubel Software Engineer at Open Source Robotics Foundation When Louise Poubel was a little girl, she had as much access to computers as her brother, but her father refused to give her a remote-control car even though he gave her brother one. Now she is convinced that we should “give the girls the toys” — it’s important to let kids know it’s ok for them to pursue anything they like. Poubel, who grew up in Brazil, got her engineering degree in Japan and masters degrees in Poland and France; she is a truly global citizen. She now works on the robotics simulator Gazebo, a graphical user interface (GUI), at the Open Source Robotics Foundation, with the aim of knocking down complexity and price — barriers that she believes stand between robots and people.

Wendy Roberts CEO at future Skies | CEO at Five Elements In 2001, Wendy Roberts founded Future Skies, which primarily develops software for the US Department of Defense. In 2012, she created Five Elements Robotics to help further US personal robotics design and manufacturing. The company’s Budgee, a friendly robot that follows you around and carries your stuff, won two Gold Stevie Awards in 2015: Technical Innovation of the Year at the American Business Awards, and New Product Award for Consumer Electronics. Roberts is currently CEO for both Future Skies and Five Elements Robotics. Five Elements is the only commercial US firm manufacturing personal service robots domestically. Based on her work with the military, Roberts has made it part of Five Elements’ mission to serve the disabled and the aging.

Noriko Takiguchi Journalist and author Noriko Takiguchi covers the business and technology of robotics for various newspapers and magazines in Japan, including Newsweek Japan, Diamond Online, Nikkei BP, Toyo Keizai, Newspicks, President magazine, Harvard Business Review Japanese version and AXIS. Her most recent book on the culture of Silicon Valley — Why is Garbage Not Sorted in Silicon Valley? (President,Inc., 2008) — is a collection of her weekly columns on the Nikkei BP website. She has also translated into Japanese books such as Bringing Design to Software and Engineer Imagines. Watch for her at robotics conferences and trade shows around the world.

Pree Walia CEO & Co-Founder at Preemadonna Entrepreneur, risk-taker, beauty junkie, and business school graduate, Pree Walia has combined a political career with leading teams at early stage hardware startups, most recently starting her own venture at the intersection of beauty and tech. Walia is co inventor of the Nailbot — a nail decorating robot that lets you paint custom designs on your fingernails — and winner of the 2015 Robot Launch international startup competition. She supports causes that empower women and young girls.

Jing Xiao Professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte Jing Xiao’s research spans robotics, haptics, and intelligent systems. She is Site Director of the US National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Robots and Sensors for Human Wellbeing. She has over 130 publications in major robotics conferences, journals and books, and holds one patent. She is an IEEE Fellow and has been elected twice as an AdCom Member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Yao Zhang Founder and CEO at Roboterra Yao Zhang’s company, Roboterra, makes tool kits that allow students to tap their imagination and creativity to design and build their own robots. Zhang earned her Ph.D. in Education Economics at Columbia University before working for McKinsey and Co. and the Soros Foundation. She has been working in the fields of education and technology for more than a decade, and won a “Best 10 Global Citizen Service Award” from the US State Department in recognition of her outstanding work in educational innovation.

ICRA 2015 Organising Committee – In 2015, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) — one of the world’s largest robotics conferences — had an organising committee made up entirely of women. In order to broaden the field, early career women who may be less well-known outside of their specialties were selected to serve alongside senior women on the 2015 committee. This showed that there are women experienced in every aspect of conference organisation that could be part of future committees. ICRA may well have set a precedent; leading annual Computer Vision event, CVPR, is planning to follow suit next year with a female only committee.

Then and now

The celebration wouldn’t be complete if we did not share some of the recent achievements by women from our 2013 and 2014 honour rolls:

• Cynthia Breazeal has since launched Jibo with a massively successful crowdfunding campaign
• Helen Greiner has launched and successfully crowdfunded the LVL 1 Drone and keynoted at ICRA 2015
• Radhika Nagpal was named in 2014 among Nature’s 10 (scientists and engineers who made a difference).
• Lynn Parker chaired ICRA 2015 and was appointed as Division Director for the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the National Science Foundation (since January 2015).
• Melonee Wise launched Fetch Robotics
• Ekaterina Bereziy’s ExoAtlet started clinical trials.
• Ayanna Howard  launched Zyrobotics and was a finalist in Robot Launch

Know of any great women in robotics who should be on this list next year? Check the lists from our previous years (2013 and 2014), and feel free to leave your nominations in the comments section below, or email us at info [at] robohub.org.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2014)
• Five women robotics experts from Silicon Valley share their stories
• Steffi Paepcke on Robots, women and design: Opportunities abound

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

If you’ve been following the twittersphere you’ve heard the story of Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old boy who was arrested after the digital clock he built to impress his highschool teachers was mistaken for a bomb. There has since been a large public outcry and outpouring of support for Mohamed, whose story prompted invitations by US President Obama to visit the White House, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to visit Facebooks’ headquarters, as well as invitations from MIT and NASA. This is a great story of the science community rallying behind one unjustly accused boy, but what of the many young students from outside the ‘mainstream’ population whose creativity and proclivity for science flies under the radar, or worse, who never bother to study STEM subjects in the first place?

Public rallies of support may promote good feelings, but they do not necessarily effect change. Take the movie Spare Parts, for example. The movie was based on the true story of a group of illegal immigrants from Mexico who built an underwater robot for a NASA-sponsored robotics competition, and against all odds won. “When the movie ends in 2004, their future is bright,” said a NTY op-ed titled The Cruel Waste of America’s Tech Talent by Joshua Davis, author of the book on which the movie was based. “Unfortunately, that’s not how the story really ends.”

Davis goes on to describe the fate of the boys on the winning team: “After the event, lower ranked contestants went on to rewarding jobs at tech companies and research institutes. Meanwhile, the Carl Hayden students struggled to afford tuition for college.”

The STEM fields in general, and robotics in particular, have a miserable record for diversity. Despite commendable efforts to change that — including initiatives like AFRON‘s ultra-affordable educational robot challenge, TechBridgeWorld, and ICRA’s historic all-female organizing committee in 2015 — tangible evidence of progress is difficult to find. One need only attend a conference or trade show to see that diversity in robotics is severely lacking.

Source: Scientific American. Diversity in Science: Where are all the Data?

There are many reasons why this matters, and to name them all here only gets us caught in the hamster wheel of justification. Can’t we get past that? Put simply:

Diversity matters because the future genius behind the next big development in robotics might just have been belittled out of the field by an insensitive elementary school math teacher, or frustrated out of a career in robotics by the proverbial glass ceiling. There is just too much intellectual capital at stake — and too many research problems to solve — to ignore the issue.

How can we broaden participation in the field? 

First, data matters — because without it we have nothing to measure our progress against. True, there are studies on diversity in STEM (such as this NSF report) but there is little information out there about how many women, minorities and people with disabilities participate specifically in robotics education and employment. Meanwhile, though evidence suggests that while diversity in the broadly defined sciences is slowly improving, it may in fact be reversing in fields like engineering and computer science (e.g. the number of computer science degrees in engineering dropped by 12% between 1991 and 2013). What is responsible for this downward trend? How does this map onto the field of robotics? Finer grained tracking of participation in the field at the government and institutional level would set a baseline against which to measure progress, and could help shape educational policies to encourage more people of differing backgrounds to enter, and stay in, the field. (If you are looking for evidence, however, a great start can be found in this post by Andra Keay.)

Mentorship — It’s difficult to overestimate the value of mentorship, and its effects are catalytic when it happens at a variety of levels: at the student/peer group level, with ones’ parents and school teachers/professors, and reaching up to the highest levels in academia and business. How many young people were inspired to pursue a career in robotics when Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed Peas gets onstage at a FIRST competition to rally the students? How many young women were encouraged by seeing the women of ICRA’s 2015 organizing committee at the tops of their careers?

Collaboration — Consider the huge range of application areas that robotics is trying to address, and the fact that many of these applications are either specifically designed for or highly relevant to the very communities that are underrepresented in robotics: exoskeletons and robotic prosthetics for the disabled, robots for removing landmines in war torn countries, or drones that monitor drought conditions in subsaharan Africa or deforestation in the Amazon, to name a few.

Does it not make sense to develop technology solutions in conjunction with these communities? In the words of Bernadine Dias, founder of TechBridgeWorld, the key is “changing technology to fit communities rather than forcing communities to change to fit technology.” This is how innovative initiatives like Cybathlon – a competitive sporting event that teams disabled athletes with teams of roboticists to develop advanced assistive devices — take root. And they are all the more powerful when the end-users themselves are directly involved in the research, such as the work being done by Kavita Krishnaswamy in collaboration with Tim Oates on robotic assistive devices for people with severe disabilities.

Funding — Bernadine Dias said that the biggest lesson she has learned working with developing and disadvantaged communities is “how incredibly resourceful people are. We travel the world and we work with communities where I just cannot imagine what I would have done in that situation, and they come up with very brilliant ways to do things.” Similarly, AbdulAziz wrote about to us about the obstacles he faces as he builds a robotics ecosystem where none currently exists, but he also about his advantage: “low developing and operation cost.” 

Yet whether it’s about supporting a local hacker space for inner city kids, or doing field research in a developing region of the world, at the end of the day it all comes down to funding. Expertise costs money, and paying for people’s time is difficult when resources are limited. Even a volunteer’s travel costs can be insurmountable. In this way, lack of funding also undermines efforts in mentorship and collaboration. And while seed funding can get exciting projects off the ground, it’s the decidedly unsexy sustained funding for long term operating costs that are mostly like to make a difference in the end.

Jonathan Ledgard, Director of Afrotech, a future Africa initiative based at EPFL tells us that “Inventiveness often comes from the margins, but we need to invest much more seriously in the tools that allow for inventiveness, which is why ultimately a Facebook Internet providing drone over Burundi with free access to astrophysics MOOCs may have more effect than any gestures.”

The elephant in the room

Ahmed Mohamed’s school board stands behind its original response to the ‘bomb’, stating that “Out of an abundance of caution, we had to take action.” The latest development in the story is that Mohamed’s parents are reportedly withdrawing him from the school. This is to be expected: the fury of attention and the divisiveness would be overwhelming to anyone at this age. Most teens would rather fit in than be the centre of a national controversy.

It may come as a surprise, but for some, Ahmed’s story is familiar. Mahmoud AbdelAziz, founder of EG Robotics and coordinator of the Minesweepers competition for developing de-mining robots in war torn regions wrote to tell us that: “Ahmed’s issue, for me, is a normal situation. Through the robotics competitions I organize in Egypt, I know many students who faced the same situation due to lack of knowledge from the police.” (You can read about his fascinating efforts to build a robotics ecosystem in Egypt here.)

Personally, I have heard organizers of other competitions describe the difficulty foreign teams can face trying to bring equipment and people over borders, and professors describe their frustration at having their students’ visa applications rejected when they have applied to attend a conference in order to present their first paper — a critical milestone for any young academic.

These stories and Ahmed Mohamed’s share a common theme: they are not so much about ‘ignored potential’ as they are about ‘potential perceived as threat’. Would Ahmed have been arrested if he were a nerdy white kid? What these stories remind us is that racial stereotyping is not just career limiting in an abstract sense.

The handcuffs make it all too real.

Many thanks to the Robohub core team — especially Andra Keay, Sabine Hauert and Yannis Erripis — for their help shaping this essay, as well as Mahmoud AbdulAziz and Jonathan Ledgard for generously taking the time to share their thoughts.  

Transcript below

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews M. Bernardine Dias, Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, about TechBridgeWorld. TechBridgeWorld in an organization, founded by Dias, that develops technology to help serve developing communities. This interview focuses on a device that helps the blind learn to write. 

TechBridgeWorld would like to acknowledge the Qatar National Research Fund (NPRP #30-6-7-91), the Fetzer Institute, and individual donors for making this work possible.

M. Bernardine Dias

M. Bernardine Dias is an Associate Research Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. She is also the Founder and Director of the TechBridgeWorld research group at CMU. Her research expertise are in technology for developing communities, assistive technology, and autonomous team coordination. Dr. Dias is a native of Sri Lanka. Her career goal is innovating means of developing and disseminating suitable and sustainable technology for empowering underserved communities. She is a strong supporter and mentor for women in science and technology.

Links:

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• TechBridgeWorld website
• Braille Tutor project website
• Braille Tutor SourceForge page

Transcript

Audrow Nash: Welcome to the Robots Podcast. Can you introduce yourself?

Bernadine Dias: I am Bernadine Dias, and I am an associate research professor at Carnegie Melon University in the robotics institute. I run a research lab, which I founded there, called TechBridgeWorld.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me the goal and motivation around your work?

Bernadine Dias: Our goal is to essentially re-think what technology can do for the communities around the world that aren’t currently served by technology – primarily communities in the developing world and communities with disabilities.

I grew up in Sri Lanka. I was born and raised there in a low-to-middle income family and was very lucky to get the chance to fly to the US and get an education in technology. Everything I ever learned about technology was at college. It’s been an interesting trajectory for me, and I’ve always been interested in understanding technology and becoming an expert in it so I can actually change technology to fit communities rather than forcing communities to change to fit technology. That’s basically our strategy and our motivation.

There are a lot of exciting things happening in the field of robotics, as I’m sure you would agree, but most of what was happening about ten years ago when we started this endeavor was only benefiting about two billion people (if we’re being generous). That’s not even half the global population. In our lab we’re trying to understand how we can change technology in ways that are accessible, relevant and affordable to the rest of the world.

Audrow Nash: Can you give an example of these kinds of projects? How are you fitting technology to people?

Bernadine Dias: We start by talking to people about their community, and about their vision: what their hopes are, what their dreams are and what is preventing them from getting there. We don’t ever want to go into community and tell them how they should live their lives. What we bring is our technology expertise; we rely on them for everything else.

For example, in 2006, we were introduced through a series of friends and connections to a small school for blind children in India. This school is pretty amazing. It’s a private school run by a woman named Miss Muktah, who herself had a disability due to an injury. Through her rehabilitation she met a lot of people who are blind and realized how difficult their lives are, so she started a school in order to help kids who are blind have a better education and access to a better life.

She raises funds through donations and then goes out to poor areas around Bangalore and slums where kids wouldn’t really be able to afford any form of education. The school is residential, and she brings them in, of course with their parents’ consent. They live there and they learn everything: life skills, health, hygiene, navigation, and she gets them through as far as they can get in their education system. It’s really amazing. A lot of the teachers there are also blind.

We started talking to them about what they do and we were very impressed about all the things they’ve accomplished. We were looking for ways we might be able to play a role. Those initial conversations were really to tell us more about the school, and then they got a local volunteer to get video of the classes – because this is all remote – and they would send that back to us.

One of the key things we are identified was that the students struggle to learn how to write braille, and braille is the only way blind people can be truly literate. In the developing world it’s especially important that they’re literate because they don’t have access to braille books, or audio books for that matter, or anything in terms of educational resources. How it works is that you learn to write braille in first grade, and then as you progress, the teacher tells you things and you take down notes in braille. Then you study your notes and you take your exams, and that’s how you pass out of the different grades in school. If you don’t learn how to read and write braille then you don’t get an education. It’s a pretty huge issue.

To make things worse, in the developing world students write braille using a slate and stylus. Braille is basically a tactile way of reading: the configuration of embossed dots on the paper maps onto either a character, or a contraction of several characters, depending on which grade of braille you’re writing or reading. To write braille, you insert a sheet of paper into the plastic pocket of the stylus, and you push down on the dots of the stylus to emboss the paper, and then you slide the paper out, flip it over and read it.

Now, because you have to flip the paper over, you have to write the mirror image of what you read … so if you read from left to right then you’re writing from right to left. Essentially you’re learning three alphabets at once: you’re learning English (Kannada is what they learn in this school, but they also learn English or Hindi or Arabic or whatever); you’re learning the dot pattern of the read version, which is typically a direct character map translation from each character; and then you’re learning the mirror image of that for writing. For a little kid in first grade this is a pretty stunning endeavor to undertake, and they don’t really understand why it’s important, so a lot of them to end up being literate.

We looked at this problem and we realized there were a lot of things we could do with technology, but we had to think very carefully about what exactly would be a tool that would be helpful.

One option would have been to eliminate braille all together … we could have come up with some form of audio system so they can avoid needing to learn to write braille. But this is not sustainable; when the kids leave the school they would not be able to afford something like this for a long time – maybe decades.

Another option would have been to create a tool that lets you eliminate that mirror image. In the developed world there are already digital braillers that let you write the same as you read, and it does the flip for you, and there are six key braille typewriters that you can type with. But even this technology can’t compete with the price point of a plastic slate.

We decided that the most appropriate and sustainable solution was to build an electronic tutor that would help make learning to writing braille using the slate and stylus more fun and effective. We call it our Braille Writing Tutor. We’re on our fourth version, and we’ve been developing it with this school and also other schools around the world.

It’s essentially an electronic slate that speaks to the child and gives them feedback while they are writing braille. We’ve incorporated games and curriculum to make it more fun and interesting.

Audrow Nash: What does the device look like?

Bernadine Dias: There are a few different versions. The version for young children who haven’t got fine motor skills looks like a box with six big buttons. They start by learning the configuration of the braille cells, the dot numbering, and the patterns.

The next level up is still a box with buttons, but it has three braille cells, which are a little smaller now, and underneath that there are two rows of holes for the six-dot system; you press the stylus into the holes to connect the circuit. You’re trying to scaffold their learning and their motor skills.

The advanced version is essentially like a slate. It’s a box with a lot of holes in the six-dot configuration, and the goal is to get the kids to just use the slate and the stylus, so that eventually they can move onto the actual slate.

Audrow Nash: Can you talk a bit about the development process of working with the community to create these devices?

Bernadine Dias: Our methodology is to spend whatever time it takes to really understand each other. It’s not just about learning from them, but they learn from us as well … who we are and our process … and that takes time.

When we come to a point where we think the parties involved are in agreement on what is worth trying, we do a paper prototype or a sketch, depending on who the community is. If they’re literate we can write; if they’re not then we try to do things diagrammatically. If they’re blind, sometimes there is braille involved, or we will build something physical with paper or cardboard that they can feel.

We start with this initial prototype stage so that we can get their feedback early. This is really important because if you give them something too advanced, in some cultures they won’t say anything negative about it; they feel like you already did this pretty amazing thing and they don’t want to be negative … they want to be polite. People are really nice.

Audrow Nash: They won’t give you honest feedback on the device … ?

Bernadine Dias: Exactly. The more rugged or ‘prototypish’ it looks, the more they’re willing to say “Oh wouldn’t be nice to add this?” or “This part probably won’t work so well.” That whole conversation – that iterative process of designing with the community – is also good for us because it ends up building more trust, and it gives that joint ownership of the project.

When we feel that we are at a point where it’s worth going for a more complete prototype – it could be software, it could be hardware, it could be both – then we run field tests and iterate again. In some places that can happen really fast, in others it takes years. You just have to go with the flow of what is best for that community, because you’re taking people’s time and energy (including yours), and it needs to fit with everybody’s lifestyle and whatever they’re investing in the project.

Audrow Nash: You mentioned that when you were working with the school in India, you were often remote. What challenges were there?

Bernadine Dias: Oh gosh, everything! The school in India is actually one of our easier communities to work with because, even though they’re on the other side of the world, they generally have phone connections and they have access to a power grid. They sometimes have Internet and we can Skype, or we can call on a cellphone … they can send us things like video, we’ve helped them build their website … these kinds of things are possible, and it’s been nice to see their view of technology expand.

Some of our other communities are really difficult. For example we worked with a small school for the blind in Mongu, Zambia and that community just didn’t have any infrastructure. Even to call the school, you had to call the private cellphone of the principal or the headmaster, who might change over time. In places like that you have to find a third party … a person on the ground who can contact the school. You won’t get as frequent updates.

The biggest challenge is finding communication channels that work reliably and over time. Sometimes you won’t hear back until you get a chance to visit again, and that’s okay with us too. When we’re on the ground we try to do the best we can to not only create a technology of impact, but to also create and ecosystem of volunteers from the community who have some sort of technical background. We’ll train them in how to maintain whatever technology we’ve created … we try to build partnerships among different groups on the ground that might be beneficial to sustaining whatever technology solution we have developed, and then we hand it over to the community. And that’s okay.

With some communities we have more interaction, and with others, less. Language barriers can be a big problem unless you have a translator, but that’s okay too.

Audrow Nash: You’ve mentioned devices for the blind. What other devices and communities do you develop for?

Bernadine Dias: We’ve primarily focused on education. The first two years after we started our group were spent talking to communities around the world. We talked to anyone who would talk to us, whether it was remote or in person. We asked them about what they really wanted – not from technology, but in life – and their two biggest requests were for health and education. They wanted to be empowered to be healthy, and know enough to solve their own problems, to do their own thing, to earn their own living. After those two years, we were definitely more qualified to do education-related work, so that’s where we started and that’s been our primary focus since.

That said, we’ve done a few other projects, depending on what comes up.

Another popular project of ours looks at English literacy. A lot of communities want to improve their English literacy for job reasons.

You have teachers who want to improve their skills, but who sometimes haven’t been trained very well, who don’t have access to a lot of technology, who often work multiple shifts, and are so busy that they really don’t have time to do a lot of extras.

Then we have students … we’ve worked with a wide range all the way from primary school students and children with special needs, to adult learners, immigrant workers in Doha for example, and refugees in Pittsburg … who all have very different motivations for learning English and the kind of English they want to learn. Think of it as functional literacy versus educational literacy.

We were looking at ways to motivate students and teachers, and give them tools to work together. One exciting way to do this is through games, of course. There is a triangle of people … the game developers who want to build games that are cool, the teachers who have their own subjects and ways of teaching, and the students have to do homework but would rather be playing the games they are in to … so we put all these three together and created a framework where you can do your homework while playing a game.

The teacher can upload his or her exercises, and the game developers only have to follow a few different rules for embedding this educational content in their games. They can decide, for example, that you will do quizzes or exercises to get more lives or get extra tools to get through your adventure game. It’s up to them, but we can have certain gradations, so that if it’s a quiz then it has to happen so often, for example. Then the students get to decide whether they will play the Dragon Game or the Adventure Game or this role-playing game, etc … they get to pick their exercise and their game, and they get their homework done.

It’s been really successful because everybody gets to do what they’re best at: the teachers like it because they don’t have to do the extra work of changing the format of their educational materials; the students like it because they get to the play games they want; and the gamers like it because there is a social component to what they are doing.

We have more requests for this project than we can field for it, and we’re at the stage where we have a pretty good prototype and we’re doing field tests around the world.

Audrow Nash: In working with communities to develop these projects, what kind of lessons have you learned?

Bernadine Dias: So many! I think the biggest lesson that I have learned is how incredibly resourceful people are. We travel the world and we work with communities where I just cannot imagine what I would have done in that situation, and they come up with very brilliant ways to do things. We work the deaf-blind community for example … and when I’m trying to teach my 4-year-old son to read and write, or my 1-year-old daughter to point to things and when I say “this is a bottle” or “this is the TV,” all I can think is: if my child was born both blind and deaf how do I even do that?! It’s just incredible to me how people find ways.

I think the biggest lesson for technologist is that you have to be open to learning; you’re not the expert in anything other than the technology. When you go into a situation with that mindset, then you end up building much more impactful solutions. You end up having a much richer experience because of it, instead of getting frustrated about not having a data connection or having a power failure or whatever it is that comes your way.

Another lesson is learning to roll with the punches. You cannot plan everything. You have to plan a lot, there is a lot of logistical planning that goes on especially in field tests, but you have to be prepared to adapt at any given time.

The final important lesson is diverse teams. Getting people of different backgrounds who can come up with very creative solutions, whatever conditions get thrown your way.

I could talk about lessons for years, but it’s incredibly rewarding work, and there is never a problem recruiting people to work on these projects. People find them incredibly motivating. We handle the logistics and creating the partnerships, which most people find very difficult to do. Given the opportunity, people are very excited to work on these projects, and everyone is touched by them. You have stories to tell your grandkids for a lifetime.

Audrow Nash: How would someone get involved in helping these communities?

Bernadine Dias: You asked earlier about lessons learned, but the flipside to that are the challenges that continue to arise. Finances are the biggest problem. People in the US cost a lot of money, people in Europe cost a lot of money, and people in Australia cost a lot of money as bcompared to someone who lives a developing community. Just paying for people’s time and travel costs money, and not a lot people, institutions or organizations fund this work.

At the end of the day it all comes down to funding. We’ve tried to provide internship opportunities where we can. We’ve had people come in and work with us from other universities, but these are much more limited opportunities. We’ve also tried to mentor others who are interested in starting similar efforts in their own universities, and we’ve certainly helped a lot in answering questions about how we set things like students groups up. We’ve also connected them to other organizations in the areas that we might know about, where they can get a similar experience.

We also help make connections with partners. Sometimes we’ll get requests from partners in the developing world, but we don’t have the right technical expertise for whatever they want, and then we’ll try and connect them to some else who we know has an interest. That’s the best we can do right now.

What’s nice is that in the ten years we’ve been doing this, more and more groups have been starting to do this work – not only universities, but now companies as well … startups that have grown and are now taking interns and hiring people. That’s been exciting, and that’s probably something we’ll compile through our website now that more people are asking for that information.

Audrow Nash: We all know about the publish or perish paradigm … how can researchers get involved in doing this kind of work if it means not publishing as frequently?

Bernadine Dias: It’s less about not publishing as frequently, and more about not being able to publish in the venues that are considered esteemed. You can publish – there are a lot of lessons learned and there are a lot of things that come out of it, but it’s about what people expect and what’s traditionally viewed as great or not.

There are two methodologies for this …

One is that, as an academic community, we need to create more venues for people who do this sort of work to publish, where there is a community that understands and values the work, and that can meaningfully review the work and contribute to tenure cases and such.

We’ve trying to do that through a community called Information Communication Technology for Development (ICTD). It brings together social scientists, technologists and humanitarian workers to take courses together and to publish in joint venues. We found that the social sciences were much more amenable to this, and their cases were going through a lot more easily than the technology cases. There was an ACM DEV conference started in 2010 that started as an offshoot of ICTD and now it’s become a conference on its own … it’s purely focused on the technology side but all the people who come to that conference are working in this space, so they can give more technical feedback. I’m hoping that will continue to grow.

Meanwhile, people still have to figure out their lives until this all gets accepted. So another method is to carve out a niche within your space of expertise, and when you write your regular grants and you publish your standard publications, you push part of that work into the developing world or whichever underserved community you’re most interested in working with. In that way you can cross subsidize the funding.

On the publication side, there are the major publications, but then you also have [development-focused] publications too. They can give you good PR, and generally universities like that.

As long as you don’t do only this kind of work, it ends up being a benefit …

… Unless you want to be a renegade like me, and go all-or-nothing, which is fine too, if that’s who you are!

Audrow Nash: Thank you!

Bernadine Dias: You’re welcome!

All audio interviews are transcribed and edited for clarity with great care, however, we cannot assume responsibility for their accuracy.

Our immediate goal is to develop novel, integrated technologies to support independent limb repositioning, which is particularly valuable for those with reduced muscular strength, and helps minimize the occurrence of contractures and pressure ulcers. Our longer term goal is to develop devices that can also be used for assisting such individuals with personal care tasks, and for transferring themselves, from a bed to a commode, for example.

System requirements

The most prominent challenges include accessible and multimodal interaction, autonomy, safety, privacy, affordability, real-time performance, and intelligence.

There are a variety of assistive technologies for input control, and depending on the nature of their disability, some users may prefer a trackball mouse while others prefer speech recognition or an eye-tracking system. Another important design consideration is to determine when it is permissible for robots to override user commands or not follow instructions. Since the capabilities of robotic devices exceed the speed and force of human movement, safety is of great concern; a user may not be able to respond quickly and effectively when the robot behaves unexpectedly.

Because personal care robots are equipped with the ability to sense, process and record information, their use raises concerns about client privacy. Solutions must also be affordable, and strike a balance between price and capability if they are to be successfully marketed in the long run.

In addition, being able to provide immediate assistance is critical when urgent medical care is needed, so the assistive robot must be able to perform tasks in real-time. It must be sensitive and intelligent, delivering services while ensuring that it does not inadvertently cause harm or injury to its users. Such a device must be able to learn and intuitively make decisions in order to safely trade off user comfort and speed when required.

UMBC Research

At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), we recently began developing a solution to support the movement and repositioning of an individual’s arms. We first conducted a survey of people with severely limited arm strength. The aim was to examine their attitudes toward using BCI and speech recognition tools, such as the Emotiv Epoc headset pictured below, for controlling a robotic aid to assist with arm repositioning. The Emotiv headset is an off-the-shelf electroencephalography (EEG) system that provides a non-invasive means of recording electrical activity of the brain along the scalp, and can detect emotions, facial expressions, and conscious thoughts.

Emotiv Epoc BCI Headset. Source: Emotiv

From our study we learned that participants were most interested in multimodal interaction since it provides the most options for effective control. The preferred interaction mode was speech recognition for the overall tasks. However, all the participants said that a BCI device was also useful when speech recognition was not possible, such as when brushing teeth or when breathing difficulties make speech-input solutions challenging. We therefor decided to integrate BCI and speech recognition.

To show the feasibility of integrating BCI with speech recognition for self-directed arm repositioning tasks, we designed a robotic interface for repositioning the simulated arm of an avatar using the Emotiv Epoc headset and Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software. The system incorporated an accessible GUI.

BCI robot interface with female avatar. Source: UMBC

In an exploratory pilot study, four participants without disabilities performed ten arm movement tasks using four inputs (the keyboard, Emotiv Epoc headset, mouse, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking) in sequential order to move the avatar’s shoulder and elbow joints up and down. Participants used a motion imagery paradigm to control the avatar, for example looking towards the left to raise the avatar’s left elbow, looking towards the right to raise the avatar’s right elbow, and so on.

Total time spend using all four interaction methods. Source: UMBC

Preliminary results suggest that, while all participants were able to interact with the avatar using all four input methods, using BCI and speech were most challenging. However, time spent training with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the Emotiv Epoc can improve performance, and it should be noted that individuals with severely limited hand strength may find voice control and BCI relatively easier to use than a keyboard and mouse.

Further work at UMBC has focused on developing designs for three robotic transferring prototypes, a powered commode wheelchair, a toileting aid, a robotic toothbrush system, and a universal gripper for feeding. Videos simulations of these prototypes can be watched in the playlist below. Kavita Krishnaswamy’s PhD proposal defense Increased Autonomy with Robotics for Daily Living further discusses effective assistive prototypes.

Outlook

One of the most craved aspects of the human experience is to be independent: the abilitiy to take care of one’s self establishes a sense of dignity, inherent freedom, and profound independence. Our goal is to bring robotic assistive devices into the real world where they can support individuals with severe disabilities and alleviate the workload of caregivers, with the ultimate vision of helping people with severe physical disabilities to achieve physical independence without relying on others. As robotic assistive devices become ubiquitous, they will enable people with severe physical disabilities to confidently use technology in their daily lives, not just to survive, but to flourish.

• Unpowered exoskeleton improves efficiency of human walking
• Noonee testing Chairless Chair exoskeleton at Audi production plants
• Walking assistive devices for the elderly
• Readers optimistic about role of robots as care assistants for seniors

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

By: Vanessa Bleich
Next year’s Cybathlon will host people with physical disabilities equipped with advanced assistive devices including robotic technologies. The goal of this unique competition is to remove barriers between people with physical disabilities, researchers and the general public and to promote the development of assistive technologies that are useful for daily life. We talked to Robert Riener, the Cybathlon’s main organizer and Professor of Sensory-Motor Systems at ETH.

Robert Riener is the initiator and organizer of the Cybathlon. (Photo: ETH Zurich / Giulia Marthaler)

You are the initiator and main organizer of the Cybathlon. How did the idea for this event come about?
As a researcher, I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to present my research to the general public. A few years ago, I read an article in the newspaper about a man who climbed the stairs at the Willis Tower in Chicago using a motorised prosthetic leg. It inspired me to think about a similar event that could be held here in Switzerland – an event that would extend beyond a single race to include many other disciplines. Through talks with colleagues and employees, I gradually developed the idea further. I also thought increasingly about what exactly we wanted to communicate and achieve with this event.

What do you hope to achieve through the Cybathlon?
Our original idea, which was to present our research findings to a wider public, of course remains a goal that we continue to pursue. But we would also like to raise people’s awareness of the needs of people with physical disabilities and the obstacles they face in everyday life. Unfortunately, many people without disabilities know very little about the challenges faced today by people with physical disabilities. Alongside technical assistance, for example, accessibility is also extremely important. We believe this knowledge, in turn, can break down more barriers.

Besides overcoming reservations about the field, we want to motivate developers to create technologies that provide real support to people in daily life. That is why the races feature everyday obstacles, such as stairs, ramps and doors. We hope Cybathlon’s competitive nature will boost the development of powered assistive technology in the long term. It’s already having a positive impact: new student groups have been formed and research projects have emerged. Both students and researchers are working at full speed on their prototypes.

What are the main difficulties when developing electrically powered devices?
The weight-performance relationship is one of the greatest challenges. For example, if you want to build a wheelchair that climbs stairs, it must be wider for stability reasons. When combined with the additional mechanics and propulsion system, it’s automatically heavier. The same goes for the development of the exoskeleton. The integrated batteries must be very efficient to allow the wearer to move freely and independently throughout the day, but these batteries weigh a lot.

Cybathlon

The Cybathlon will take place on 8 October 2016 at the Swiss Arena in Kloten. People with varying degrees of disability, aided by cutting-edge assistive technology, will participate in the unique competition. A team is comprised by a technology provider and at least one pilot who directs the technological device. As a result, two medals await each winning team at the Cybathlon: one for the parathletes and another for the provider. The technological device that is deployed can either be a product that is already available on the market or a prototype from a research lab.

The competition features six different disciplines:

• Powered leg prosthesis race
• Powered arm prosthesis skills course
• Powered exoskeleton obstacle course
• Powered wheelchair race
• Functional electrical stimulation bike race
• Brain-computer interface virtual race

Robert Riener, head of ETH Zurich’s Sensory-Motor Systems Lab, is the initiator and main organizer of the Cybathlon.

Are there other challenges besides the power supply?
While the performance data for the powered leg prosthesis is already very good, the control is more problematic. The wearer’s intended movements must be correctly conveyed to the leg prosthesis. This means that the prosthesis should automatically detect what the person wants to do, be it standing up, sitting down or climbing stairs. This is less of a problem when it comes to conventional, passive prostheses because the wearer intuitively propels them by moving or swaying.

What is the current state of research in the area of powered assistive technology?
The technology is already quite advanced today in some areas. For example, it is now possible to run quicker with certain leg prostheses than a human with natural legs could. But such prostheses are only helpful for specific movements. You may be able to walk quickly, but not be able to sit down, walk up stairs, or drive a car. Most of the available aids have significant deficits with regards to everyday functions and potential users have therefore failed to embrace them. This is where the idea behind the Cybathlon comes in: systems need to be developed that provide help to people with disabilities where they need it the most – in daily life.

How does the Cybathlon differ from other competitions such as the Paralympics?
People with disabilities can participate and compete in both events. The Paralympics, however, is primarily a sporting competition. Technology remains in the background and the use of motorised wheelchairs or powered prostheses is not permitted. As a result, many people are unable to compete. At the Cybathlon, on the other hand, «pilots» with greater restrictions who primarily direct the technical aids – are also eligible to participate. Although people are at the centre of our event, technology also plays a relatively large role.

The Paralympics are focused on sporting disciplines. In addition to races honouring the athlete who reaches the finish line first, the Cybathlon competition also includes skills and obstacle courses featuring everyday tasks and barriers. It’s not only the time that counts; pilots also receives points for their skills. Just like in classic sporting events, competition drives both the pilots and the technology developers at the Cybathlon. They inspire each other to deliver their best performance.

What has the response been to the planned event up until now?
There’s been a great deal of interest in the event. We have received very positive feedback from the scientific community, the media and well-known Swiss organisations for the disabled. The disability associations share our view that the Cybathlon could contribute to the development of current devices. Some critics, however, argue that these sorts of efforts should be focused exclusively on making buildings and the environment barrier-free. But the world does have barriers and you can’t just make them disappear – there are hills, forest paths and so forth. Researchers are developing technologies so they no longer pose obstacles in the future.

• Novel robots for gait and arm rehabilitation: Interview with Robert Riener
• Introducing the Cybathlon
• Registration now open for Cybathlon 2016

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Melonee Wise, Erin Rapacki, Katherine Scott, Steffi Paepcke, Dale Bergman. What do these five women have in common? Aside from robotics, not much – they are all role models in robotics in quite different ways. (And that means that there are many opportunities for other women to make robotics their area.)

Melonee Wise is the CEO of a very new startup, Fetch Robotics, that is building autonomous mobile manipulators for things like warehouse and ecommerce operations. Fetch is not her first startup – she launched Unbounded Robotics in 2013. Fetch also draws on Wise’s experience as Manager of Robot Development at Willow Garage, building the world’s most sophisticated personal robot. Wise’s background also includes building Battlebots and the low cost open source Turtlebots for research and hobby robotics.

“For the past 14 years I have been designing, building, and programming robotic hardware. As part of past projects, I have had the opportunity to develop algorithms, libraries, and hardware for an autonomous boat, autonomous car, personal robot platforms, battlebots, and several low cost platforms. From this experience, I have gained a broad understanding of robotic technologies and have experience developing complex robotic systems.”

Erin Rapacki is Director of Marketing at Suitable Technologies. Suitable Technologies is a spinoff of Willow Garage, making telepresence devices. Suitable prefer not to call them robots because it distracts people from how useful they are. Rapacki previously worked at Industrial Perception Inc., Adept Technology and Anybots, building robots. She has built on her mechanical and industrial engineering background to become a product ‘storyteller’.

“I care about fantastic products; so I specialize in market research, writing product requirements documents, leading product launches, and defining emerging customer segments. My strength is the ability to analyze customer processes to discover new value propositions for the latest robotic technology, and communicate the associated technical requirements to engineering teams.”

Katherine Scott is the CoFounder and Software Lead at Tempo Automation. Tempo Automation is a desktop pick-and-place robot that automates surface mount assembly and speeds up the electronics prototyping or small batch manufacture process. Scott was previously a cofounder at Sight Machines, and computer vision engineer at Essess and Cybernet Systems Corp.  Along the way Scott developed a large part of SimpleCV Python library, and a number of innovative software prototypes in the fields of computer vision, graphics, augmented reality and robotics.

Steffi Paepcke is the CoFounder and Lead UX Designer at OSRF, the Open Source Robotics Foundation, which was created to support the development and distribution of open source source software for robotics research, education and product development. Paepcke previously worked at Intuit and Willow Garage and draws on a background in psychology and human-computer or human-robot interaction.

“Managing user expectations of personal robots becomes particularly challenging when the end-user just wants to know what the robot can do, and neither understands nor cares about its technical specifications. … we found that erring on the side of setting expectations lower rather than higher led to less disappointment and more positive appraisals of the robot’s competence.”

Dale Bergman is the Research Coordinator at Intuitive Surgical, one of the largest and most successful robotics companies in the world. Bergman was previously research coordinator and clinical research manager at companies like Hansen Medical, Acuson and Siemens Medical, transferring her experience with ultrasound and other medical devices into more sophisticated robotics systems. Bergman is a great example of expert knowledge in other domains intersecting with robotics.

Robotics is much more than just engineering. Robotics includes computer science, mech eng, electrical eng, control systems, user interface, human-robot interaction, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, biomechanics, industrial design and product management. Applied robotics (ie. robots working alongside people in the real world) also requires caring about what people are going to need robots for.

As Rodney Brooks, the founder of iRobot and Rethink Robotics, says, “Robotics isn’t a technology problem any more. It’s a business model problem.”

Business model problems require people with more than engineering skills. This requires customer development thinking and domain knowledge of areas outside of robotics. To generalize, these are things that women do really well. And yet to date, robotics has remained rather … masculine.

This needs to change for lots of reasons. First, because robotics needs better business models in order to make positive change in the world. And also pragmatically, because there just aren’t enough roboticists out there. Robotics is a rapidly growing area, and the combinations of skills and holistic thinking that develop when you work in robotics are also in demand in other employment areas. We have a skills shortage in robotics that is only getting worse.

So we decided to do something about it. Silicon Valley Robotics is the non-profit organization supporting the innovation and commercialization of robotics technology in the Bay Area. The first panel event in our new Influencer series is celebrating the achievements of women in robotics with these five fantastic speakers. SVR Influencer Series: Women in Robotics – is Silicon Valley a challenge or opportunity?

The event will be at IDEO SF on Wednesday April 29 from 7pm to 9pm. We have extra tickets available if you’re a woman interested in getting involved in robotics.

And I’m the moderator of the evening, which is apt, because I’m also a woman in robotics, and my background is in communications, technology and the sociology of science. Or what I like to call ‘human-robot culture’.

• Steffi Paepcke on Robots, women and design: Opportunities abound

• Talking Machines: Women in Machine Learning (WiML), with Hanna Wallach

• Ex Machina: When Turing meets Bechdel test
• Women in engineering at IROS 2014
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2014)
• CompuGirls: Young women have role to play in technology field

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

This piece was written by Steffi Paepcke as a precursor to the Silicon Valley Robotics panel titled “Women in Robotics: Challenge or Opportunity?” 

Let me get the basic statistics out of the way. It is widely acknowledged and reported that women are grossly underrepresented in the STEM fields. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) reported in 2011 that women hold less than 25% of the country’s STEM jobs. Women comprise a mere 17% of Google’s technology workforce; Apple sits at 20%. There are many factors at play, from what the ESA describes as the lack of “family-friendly flexibility in the STEM fields,” to gender discrimination and stereotyping, to the shortage of strong female role models.

It is the latter point that I wish to touch on first, because indeed, I found my niche in robotics due in large part to the outstanding mentor I found in Leila Takayama. I met Leila during an internship at Willow Garage, back when I was struggling to apply a psychology degree to a burgeoning interest in badass robots. I began at Willow as an operations intern. I did everything from inventory management, to lunch clean-up, to multimeter measurements on robot stress tests, to light switch labeling. As much as label making satisfies my deepest desire for order, I saw everyone around me designing and building the PR2. At that time, the PR2 was arguably the world’s most sophisticated personal robot. I wanted in on the action. That’s about as far as I got, though – a keen interest in robots – until Leila joined and introduced me to Human-Robot Interaction.

Without a doubt, it was my experience as Leila’s research assistant, her advice and encouragement, and the challenges she emboldened me to take on, that opened my eyes to how I could make a place for myself in the world of robotics. With Leila as my role model and mentor, I conducted HRI research, co-authored a paper, gradually become comfortable surrounded by a nearly all-male engineering team, and shed the sometimes crippling doubt around whether I had what it took to work in a highly technical field. Witnessing Leila successfully navigate this male-dominated industry cemented in me the confidence I needed to pursue a career in robotics, not only as a woman, but as a designer and researcher.

At Leila’s urging, I applied and was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction masters program. This turned out to be the second most influential factor in getting me to where I am now, co-founder and Lead UX Designer at OSRF. I mention this because, while UX researchers and designers are now in high demand at technology companies, that path would have been unknown to me without Leila’s example.

The message here is twofold: find a mentor within robotics, as I did with Leila; and realize there can be more to a STEM career than only engineering. There is enormous opportunity for women and researchers and designers; there are countless ways for women to kick ass in the robotics field. Don’t misunderstand me: be an engineer if that’s where your passion lies, but know that there’s more to robotics than engineering.

As robots become increasingly commonplace in our everyday lives, the need for robotics designers and researchers (and engineers) is growing, opening up vast opportunities to shape how robots function and behave, and how we in turn perceive and interact with them. Just one simple example: What should happen during a robot-human encounter in a narrow hallway? Numerous social norms govern this scenario on how to negotiate passage when only humans are involved. Bringing such an encounter to a satisfactory and natural conclusion when a robot is involved requires thoroughly technical as well as social and user experience expertise. Who knows, maybe having a female perspective in this research means that robots will never be guilty of manslamming.

For robots to weave seamlessly into daily life, we must design and construct them with a keen understanding of the preference differences not just between genders, but within male and female populations as well. Robots need to appear non-threatening yet capable, be able to accommodate personal space preferences, and provide the desired amount of information with the communication style or tone most effective with its current audience. Robots designed and built exclusively by men, or exclusively by women, will fail in some regards to meet the needs of half their users. If we wish for robotic technologies to flourish, it would be foolhardy to accept the STEM fields’ gender ratio status quo.

Robotics is special among technical areas in that the breadth of required specialties is exceptionally broad. Without an understanding of technical, psychological, cognitive, and social factors robotics will stay locked in limited industrial application areas. Such a limitation would be a enormous opportunity lost.

• Talking Machines: Women in Machine Learning (WiML), with Hanna Wallach
• Ex Machina: When Turing meets Bechdel test
• Women in engineering at IROS 2014
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2014)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)
• CompuGirls: Young women have role to play in technology field

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

YouTube starlet and CBBC actress Kate Mandeville sports a Swarovski-crystal-adorned prosthetic at London’s Wearable Tech Show. Designed and 3D printed by Open Bionics, Mandeville’s bionic arm is a statement in fashion and personality.

The personalisation of healthcare devices has been a growing trend in the maker-sphere. From gold-plated hearing aids, neon walking sticks, and sparkling blade prosthetics to 3D printed arm casts, people with disabilities are no longer waiting for health services to catch up – they are dragging their medical devices into the future on their own.

These medical aids are getting a long-awaited makeover and today it’s the turn of the bionic hand with Open Bionics unveiling of their latest 3Dprinted prosthetic at London’s Wearable Tech Show.

Open Bionics, a startup of four based inside the Bristol Robotic’s Laboratory’s Technology Incubator, has 3D printed a custom-fitted bionic hand with enough sparkle to rival a disco ball for a woman born without a hand.

Grace Mandeville is a YouTube starlet and CBBC actress who applauds the growing popularity for diverse prosthetics.

Grace has taken to YouTube on multiple occasions to discuss diversity and her love of inventive prosthetics that can show off a bit of her vibrant personality.

Grace said: “This is my favourite thing about this whole topic. I really love fashion, and therefor dress to illustrate my personality, so being able to wear a creative prosthetic that shows who I am seems awesome – it’s like a one off accessory that nobody else can wear, basically like vintage Chanel.”

“You should be proud of what makes you different, and I think being able to wear a fun looking prosthetic is something to be proud of! You’re basically saying to the public “my arms cool and I know”.”

Open Bionics’ COO Samantha Payne said that the idea behind the Swarovski hand was to show off the possibilities for prosthetics within 3D printing.

Samantha said: “We printed Grace a socket and robotic hand in three days, and because 3D printing is so affordable we can add Swarovksi crystals and create something really eye-catching that will not break the bank. We also added four fibre optic wires to the socket so that whenever Grace closes her hand, a blue light would shoot up her 3D printed arm.”

“Prosthetics are entering the realms of fashion and we wanted to show how bionic prosthetics can be functional and fun.”

“We’ve been very experimental with Grace’s hand. This is a completely new socket design and this is the first time we’ve experimented with placing the EMG sensors above the elbow. Grace is actually controlling her hand by the muscle signals from her back.”

“The idea is to give hand amputees more option and a choice to have something they’d get some enjoyment out of wearing.”

“We’ve been told a lot by amputees that they want something that will get a compliment not a strange stare, something far away from a ‘flesh’ coloured prosthetic.”

Grace’s sister, Amelia Mandeville, said that having an attractive prosthetic could help turn something that is seen as ‘negative into a positive’. Amelia echoed her sister’s stance for having the option to stand out, asking “Who wants to be the same?”

As Grace eloquently puts it, “Why try to blend in, when you can have a piece of art as an arm instead?”

Grace was given a traditional cosmetic prosthetic when she was little and has one now but says, “I never wear it, I don’t like wearing it, it gets in the way.”

Grace said: “I love what Open Bionics is doing. So many people at the ‘Wearable Tech Show’ thought I had a hand and that I was wearing a fashionable sleeve, making some kind of fashion statement. I had to keep pulling my arm out and showing people that I wasn’t wearing some kind of glove but an actual bionic arm.”

“I found the hand really easy to operate, I tried it on for the first time Monday and I could control the hand straight away. I thought it was going to be really heavy but it wasn’t. I obviously still feel the difference, I was born with a foreshortened forearm so wearing anything is going to feel different and will always be an added weight.”

“I don’t ever wear prosthetics because I don’t feel like I need to. I would however absolutely love a bionic hand like this for events and evening’s out. I love fashion and this looks incredible.”

Open Bionics is still developing their robotic prosthetics and hope to be selling 3D printed hands within a year. They have won multiple awards for their open source 3D printed robotic hands and was recently named as one of the Top 50 international robotics companies to watch along with Google.

• This robotic prosthetic hand can be made for just $1000
• CES 2014 – Robotics on the Runway
• Robots: the “ables” of the next technology trend
• Designing Jibo: Subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful
•  Rehab robots, smart prostheses and exoskeletons to reach $1.8 billion by 2020

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Expanding into emerging markets brings with it a specific set of challenges for designing products and services. Not only do cultural differences play a role in what, how, and why customers behave the way they do, but existing technologies, distribution channels, and the wants and needs of consumers become additional challenges when establishing market shares in the developing world.

In an ecosystem, the individual elements are dependent on the ecosystem and the ecosystem dynamics in a way that dictate the organisms’ behavior and adaptation. Many elements of an ecosystem have interdependence; a dynamic of being mutually and physically responsible to and sharing a common set of principles with others. An interdependent relationship implies that all participants are emotionally, economically, ecologically and morally dependent on each other.

– Innovative Solutions, What Designers Need to Know for Today’s Emerging Markets, Apala L.Chavan, Girish V.Prabhu

Building a new ecosystem in an emerging market is a challenge that requires not only support for technology creation, but also support for education, system integration, and the nurturing of consumers. Developing countries are emerging in all of these areas simultaneously, and present an additional challenge to researchers and entrepreneurs seeking to build up a new technology-based industry. And yet high-tech industries such as robotics have enormous potential to benefit and transform an emerging economy.

EG Robotics is an initiative launched by Hadath Egypt for Innovation and Entrepreneurship that aims to build new scientific and business communities in the emerging field of robotics in Egypt and MENA. What began as a series of robotics competitions for students in Egypt has evolved into a roadmap for long-term growth: students from the competition became graduates, and now these graduates are eager to build an industry. The hope is that each generation will build on the successes of the generation before it, creating a value chain that is able to take advantage of a growing pool of talented human resources.

To achieve this will require continuous support for the various elements of the ecosystem, from pre-university STEM education, to engineering students, to research and development, entrepreneurship and support for robotics startups, to the industrial sector (both vendors and system integrators) and, finally, to the various types of consumer. By building a roadmap and fostering events and conferences, EG Robotics hopes stimulate interdependence between all these elements. In addition, it hopes to build bridges and foster technology transfer between the Egyptian market and European and Mediterranean markets.

EG Robotics Meetup, February 2015.

EG Robotics had its first public launch this February as community partner to Makers Hackathon Cairo, the first hardware hackathon in Egypt and the Arab world. The event was organized by Integreight, TIEC and Dimensions, and spurred other Arab hackathons powered by Zoomaal. Our first Meetup took place on 14 Feb 2015 in collaboration with National Telecommunications Institute NTI, and included participation from ABB Robotics Egypt. The goal of this meetup was to provide a venue where university-level robotics students, robotics competitions organizers and people from industry and research to network, with the goal of building first long term cluster.

EG Robotics 2015 initiatives:

• ROV Egypt Competition organized in participation with AASTMT and MATE
• Minesweepers Competition organized in participation with IEEE RAS Egypt Chapter and Catholic University of the North.
• Industry Academia Collaboration IAC in participation with ASRT and STDF.
• RoboCamp: It is 3 days camp, which teams of robotics geeks work on idea related to robotics and automation to convert it to a real prototype by the end of the camp.
• Field Trips: trips to industrial and research sites to reduce the gaps between them and start to find solutions to the market needs.
• Market Research support: for startups or industrial firms to help them in finding the market opportunities and needs as a type of market acceleration.

Find more information on the website: www.egyptrobotics.com and follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/egyptrobotics

If you liked this podcast, you may also be interested in:

• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2014)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)
• Women in engineering at IROS 2014
• Microsoft layoffs claims Robotics Research team over the weekend
• Microsoft pays 5M CHF to ETHZ and EPFL for research on flying robots and new memory architectures

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Minesweepers competition arena with surface and buried mines.

Minesweepers: Towards a Landmine-Free World is an outdoor robotic competition initiated by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society – Egypt Chapter that aims to raise public awareness of the seriousness of the landmines and unexploded ordnances (UXOs) contamination and the role of science and technology in solving this serious problem. The final competition took place last month at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. 

Minesweepers was designed as a technical challenge to motivate new research and applications of mobile robotics in the area of humanitarian demining, and participants had to face many challenges not typically found in other robotic competitions. The rough landscape of the minefields can take a toll on a vehicle’s locomotion system, and the sunny, hot and dusty climate makes it impossible to use traditional electronics meant for indoor use. Minefields are also frequently strewn with small metal fragments that can camouflage landmines and cause high false detection rate, and so detection systems must be able to differentiate between buried/surface mines and randomly scattered metal fragments.

The competition had three main categories:

• Minesweepers–Academia: for undergraduate and postgraduate students, where only metallic objects are in the competition arena; landmine detection and minefield mapping were required.
• Minesweepers-Juniors: for elementary and high school students, where only metallic objects were in the competition arena; only landmine detection was required.
• Minesweepers–Industry: for professional companies where metallic and non-metallic objects with different dimensions and profiles were in the competition arena; and landmine detection, landmine imaging and minefield mapping were required.

Some of the robots participating in the local and final rounds of the Minesweepers competition.

Each participating team was required to construct a teleoperated/autonomous unmanned ground/aerial vehicle that could search for underground and aboveground anti-personnel landmines and unexploded ordnances (UXOs). Teams had to visualize the position and the type of object and overlay this information on the minefield map, and their robots were required to navigate through rough terrain that mimicked a real minefield.

The competition attracted many undergraduate and postgraduate students from various universities who were primarily motived by the technical challenge and the need to raise awareness about the problem of humanitarian demining. 115 teams from 9 countries subscribed to participate in the competition, 45 of which passed the eligibility round. A local round was organized in Egypt as a classification round for the final event in Portugal. In this local round, 35 teams participated, and the best three teams from each category went on to participate in the final event in Portugal.

Participants in the final round in Coimbra, Portugal.

Five teams from Portugal and Egypt successfully participated in the final round of the competition: Husky team (ISR, University of Coimbra, Portual), Pioneer team (1st place, MUST-Misr University for Science & Technology, Egypt), Robosapien team (2nd place, October 6 University, Egypt), Minebusters team (3rd Place, German University in Cairo, Egypt) and Divergent (1st Junior team, Mansoura High School for Girls, Egypt). Other four qualified teams from Belgium, UK, Bolivia and Tunisia were unable to join the final round due to financial and technical problems. No teams qualified to participate in the industry category.

The success of the Minesweepers competition will be measured by its long-term sustainability. The goal is to run the competition annually, and next year more technical challenges will be considered, such as exploring the applicability of multirobot systems in minefield reconnaissance and mapping.

The ultimate goal of this competition is to put into practice the new strategic mission of IEEE, “…to foster technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity” and to serve as an educational and a research forum to provide efficient, reliable, adaptive and cost-effective solutions for the serious problem of humanitarian demining, which impacts many countries across the world. The competition also motivates the participants to create new companies and industries geared towards minefield reconnaissance and mapping technologies. The applicability of the robotic systems presented in this competition can be extended to a wide range of other applications such as security and surveillance, search and rescue, health monitoring of civil infrastructure, pipeline monitoring, and environment monitoring.

Minesweepers was organized this year by the Institute for Systems and Robotics, University of Coimbra under the auspices of IEEE RAS Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology (RAS-SIGHT) and in collaboration with Hadath for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Generous support was also provided by the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT), Misr University for Science & Technology (MUST), October High Institute for Engineering & Technology and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

For more information, visit http://www.landminefree.org/

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Minesweepers: Towards a landmine-free world
• First TRADR EU FP7 Joint Exercise (TJEx)
• Introducing the Cybathlon
• € 7M EuRoC competition opens call to ignite EU manufacturing industry

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Just last week at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella gave women some questionable career advice: “It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along. Because that’s good karma.” The event moderator, Professor Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College and a Microsoft director, immediately disagreed with Nadella’s advice, suggesting instead that women do their homework on salary levels and practice asking for pay raises. 

Indeed, good karma seems to be slow coming. Women account for only 17% of Microsoft’s management and technical staff. It’s been calculated by the National Women’s Law Center that women still earn only 78c on the dollar compared to their male counterparts. And the consequences of not negotiating a starting salary at the beginning of one’s career can amount to the loss of millions in earnings over a woman’s lifetime.

From Hypatia to Grace Hopper, there have been many amazing women who have carved themselves out a name in the fields of science, engineering, mathematics and technology, despite the lack of financial reward. However, these comparatively few women can easily be lost from the pages of history without an ongoing push to make sure that they are represented; women are still well under 20% of the tech workforce, and role models are important.

And yet there is movement in the right direction: This spring, Harvey Mudd College broke new ground when 56% of its engineering degrees were awarded to women – the first time the college’s women graduates have outnumbered men in this discipline. And this fall, Lynne Parker announced a 50 strong all-female organizing committee for ICRA – one of the premier academic robotics events worldwide.

If Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women in science, technology, engineering and math to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields, stories like these can only inspire us to keep pushing.

In celebration we’ve once again created a short list of women in robotics that everyone should know about (see also 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)).

Although all the women listed here are doing great things, our list isn’t by any means a ranking. Rather, it is a range: from early stage to emeritus, from many different countries and in a variety of robotics disciplines; researchers, entrepreneurs and academics, innovators, artists and policy makers. In short, here are 25 more reasons why women can do anything. Please share. 

25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order)

Ruzena Bajcsy
	Ruzena Bajcsy took the helm at CITRIS in November 2001, after devoting more than 30 years of her life to research in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence and machine perception. Bajcsy’s credentials reach across the traditionally discrete fields of neuroscience, applied mechanics and computer science. She is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, a distinction few people can match.
Berkeley	Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences | Director of CITRIS
Sampriti Bhattacharya
	Sampriti Bhattacharya is a PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the department of Mechanical Engineering doing research on underwater robotics for nuclear reactor inspection. Coming from a small college in Kolkata, India, Bhattacharya realized that the opportunities for engineering research and creativity were too limited in her country. This led her to start the Lab-X Foundation to provide hands-on engineering training to those with limited resources, and to bring world class education into developing countries.
MIT	PhD Student | Director & Founder of Lab-X Foundation
Maren Bennewitz
	Maren Bennewitz developed several innovative solutions for robotic systems co-existing and interacting with humans. Among them are probabilistic techniques for navigation with humanoid and wheeled robots as well as for reliably detecting and tracking humans from sensor data and analyzing their motions. She is currently PI on EU projects Squirrel and Rovina and the German cluster BrainLinks-BrainTools.
University of Freiburg	Juniorprofessorin of Computer Science | Head of Humanoid Robots Lab
Ekaterina Bereziy
	Ekaterina Bereziy graduated from from Moscow State University’s mechanics and mathematics faculty, before founding ExoAtlet, Russia’s first exoskeleton startup. ExoAtlet features maneuverability, brain-to-computer interface and comfort, and the startup has won a spot in the Skolkovo IT cluster, beating 750 other startups.
ExoAtlet	Founder & CEO
Alicia Casals
	Alicia Casals is currently leading the research group on Robotics and Medical Imaging program of the Institute for Biomedical Engineering of Catalonia (IBEC), and the research group GRINS: Intelligent Robots and Systems (UPC-IBEC). The research is oriented to improve human robot interaction through multimodal perception, focused mainly in the area of medical robotics. In this field she is working in robotic systems and control strategies for rehabilitation, assistance and surgical applications. In 2001 she was one the founders of the European Robotics Network, Euron, being part of its Board until 2008. In 2004 she created the Spanish Robotics Chapter, which she led until 2006. She was Vice-President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in the period 2008-2009. Among other prizes, she received the Narcís Monturiol Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya in 1998.
Technical University of Catalonia	Full Professor in the Automatic Control and Computer Engineering Dept | Leader of the Robotics Group at IBEC
Elaine Chen
	Elaine Chen is an MIT-trained engineering and product development executive. She has over 20 years of experience building great teams and developing disruptive products with hardware and software components in a startup setting. She has served as a product management and product development executive for several startups at the VP level, including SensAble Technologies (now part of the Geomagic division of 3D Systems), Zeemote, Zeo, and most recently Rethink Robotics, the company that brought the revolutionary Baxter collaborative robot to market.
MIT Sloan School of Management	Senior Lecturer | Entrepreneur in Residence at Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship | Consultant at Concept Springs
Marita Cheng
	Marita Cheng is currently the founder and CEO of 2Mar Robotics, making robotic arms for people with disabilities. In 2008, while a mechatronics undergraduate at University of Melbourne, Marita founded Robogals, a university club to encourage girls into STEM. Robogals is now a global program of volunteers with branches at 21 universities in 5 countries. Cheng was named Young Australian of the Year in 2012.
2Mar Robotics	Founder & CEO | Founder of Robogals
Vanessa Evers
	Vanessa Evers likes to take theories on human behaviour from social psychology and see if similar processes occur when we interact with technology. Her research focuses on Human Interaction with Autonomous Agents such as robots or machine learning systems and cultural aspects of Human Computer Interaction. Vanessa won the best thesis prize awarded by the Dutch National Society of Registered Information Specialists, was co-author of the James Chen best paper award of the journal on User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction together with her Ph.D. student Henriette Cramer. She is a member of the ACM International Human Robot Interaction Steering Committee and Associate of the Human Robot Interaction Journal.
University of Twente	Professor of Computer Science at Human Media Interaction Group
Silvia Ferrari
	Silvia Ferrari’s research aims at providing intelligent control systems with a higher degree of mathematical structure to guide their application and improve reliability. Decision-making processes are automated based on concepts drawn from control theory and the life sciences. Recent efforts have focused on optimal control problems in computational geometry and multiscale dynamical systems aimed at improving the effectiveness of mobile sensor networks, such as, acoustic and demining sensors installed on underwater vehicles and ground robots. New methods for neural network training are also being developed to retain long-term procedural memories, solving partial differential equations online, and training in-vitro and in-silico spiking neural networks to solve complex sensorimotor learning problems.
Duke University	Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science | Director Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls & WISeNet
Maria Gini
	Maria Gini’s research covers multi-robot systems, swarm robotics, behavior-based robots, autonomous agents, multi-agent systems, auctions, distributed planning and decision making. She is the Winner of the Inaugural Distinguished Women Scholars Award, University of Minnesota, 2001, AAAI Fellow, ACM Distinguished Scientist and is the chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART), a member of the AAAI Executive Council and of the board of the International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. Gini is also on numerous editorial boards for journals.
University of Minnesota	Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science
Ayanna Howard
	Ayanna Howard’s area of research is centered around the concept of humanized intelligence, the process of embedding human cognitive capability into the control path of autonomous systems. This work, which addresses issues of autonomous control as well as aspects of interaction with humans and the surrounding environment, has resulted in more than 130 peer-reviewed publications about a number of projects—from scientific rover navigation in glacier environments and intelligent terrain assessment algorithms for landing on Mars to assistive robots for the home. She was named a top young innovator of 2003 by MIT Technology Review, recognized as Educator of the Year in 2009 by NSBE and received the Georgia Tech Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award in 2013.
Georgia Tech	Motorola Foundation Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering | Director Human-Automation Systems (HumAnS) Laboratory
Noriko Kageki
	Noriko Kageki is the business development manager for Kawada Robotics Corp, makers of Nextage, Japan’s newest two-armed industrial collaborative robot. Nextage is very good at electronics assembly and other tasks in manufacturing facilities, but has potential service applications as well. Noriko’s background is in physics, engineering and science communication. Before joining Kawada, Kageki was a robotics and technology journalist for the Nikkei and founded GetRobo, an online publication focusing on news about robots for the home and community.
Kawada Robotics Corp	Business Development Manager
Kendra Kerrisk
	Kendra Kerrisk has contributed significantly to the national and international knowledge regarding application of Automatic Milking Systems with pasture-based dairying. Kerrisk has developed a set of Management Guidelines for Pasture-Based AMS farms, which have been an extremely valuable tool for farmers adopting (and contemplating adopting) AMS across Australia and further abroad. One of the highlights of the work conducted within FutureDairy has been the involvement with the co-development of the world’s first Robotic Rotary (Automatic Milking Rotary, DeLaval AMRTM). This internationally recognised work will increase the feasibility of robotic milking for large dairy herds that are more common within the Australian and New Zealand industries.
University of Sydney	Associate Professor of Veterinary Science | Lead Researcher Future Dairy
Maarja Kruusma
	Maarja Kruusma co-founded Intelligent Materials and Systems Lab at the Tartu University of Technology Estonia, focusing on modeling, control and mechanical design of electroactive polymer artificial muscles. In 2008, she founded the Center for Biorobotics in Tallinn University of Technology, which is an interdisciplinary research center for conducting research and development on the borderline of science and technology. Her research interests include biologically-inspired underwater robotics, computational and experimental fluid dynamics, flow sensing, robot learning and adaptation, soft body modeling and control. She is an R&D director of Fits.me, a start-up company using robotics technology for virtual online fitting rooms. She is also a member of ISTAG, an advisory body to the European Commission in the field of Information and Communication Technology, the General Chair of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics held in Tallinn at 2011 (ICAR 2011) and the coordinator of several EU projects; Fishview, Robocademy, ARROWS, FILOSE, SAFROS, and I-SUR.
Taillin University of Technology	Professor | Head of TUT Biorobotics
Tessa Lau
	Tessa Lau is currently at Savioke creating easy-to-use robots for the services industry, like SaviOne. Lau was formerly a research scientist at Willow Garage where she developed simple, usable interfaces to robots. Before that, she was a research staff member and manager at IBM Research, leading the Smarter Web research group within Almaden’s Computer Science department. Her research goal is to develop innovative interfaces for enhancing human productivity and creativity through the use of techniques drawn from human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. Lau is also on the board of the CRA-W, the CRA’s committee on the status of women in computing research, and has played several organizational roles in the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
Savioke	Chief Robot Whisperer
Rezia Molfino
	Rezia Molfino is professor of Robot Mechanics, Industrial and Service Robotics, Automation and Robotics and Control of Mechanical Systems at the University of Genova. Holder of 12 patents and author of hundreds of publications, she has held numerous positions and is among other things responsible for the PMARlab (Laboratory of Design and Measurement for Automation and Robotics), President Siri (Italian Association of Robotics and Automation) Italian coordinator in IFR (International Federation of Robotics).
University of Genova	Full Professor of Robotics | Director of the PMARlab Robotics
Mihoko Otake
	Mihoko Otake’s research topics include modeling and simulation of cognitive function of humans and electroactive polymers and their applications to design and control of intelligent systems and services. She has been an Associate Professor with Department of Mechanical Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Chiba University, Japan since 2012. She is concurrently the Founding Director of the Fonobono Research Institute (FRI) since 2007. She has been a Principal Investigator of the PRESTO Program of JST from 2010 to present on “Individually Adapted Cognitive Activity Support based on Large Scale Conversation Data”, and since 2004 to 2008 on “Development of Bilateral Multiscale Neural Simulator” respectively. For her contributions in electroactive polymer gel robots, involving beam-shaped gels curling around an object and starfish-shaped gel robots turning over, Otake was awarded the Young Investigator Award from Robotics Society of Japan.
Chiba University | University of Tokyo	Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering | Founding Director NPO Fonobono Research Institute
Lea Rosen
	Lea Rosen is an attorney who specializes in drones and aerial robots, privacy, data security, freedom of expression and the right of anonymity, software licenses and users’ rights, corporate liability for human rights abuses, government liability for unwarranted surveillance, and legal developments around UAS integration into the national airspace. She is a licensed member of the CA state bar. Rosen is also the Head of Research at Freedom of the Press Foundation and Director of Research at DARC. DARC is a multidisciplinary conference about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and drones—with an emphasis on civilian applications.
Attorney	Director of Research | DARC Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference
Julie Shah
	Julie Shah has developed innovative methods for enabling fluid human-robot teamwork in time-critical, safety-critical domains, ranging from manufacturing to surgery to space exploration. She previously worked at Boeing Research and Technology on robotics applications for aerospace manufacturing. Her group draws on expertise in artificial intelligence, human factors, and systems engineering to develop interactive robots that emulate the qualities of effective human team members to improve the efficiency of human-robot teamwork. Shah is the recipient of a 2014 NSF CAREER Award, and her work was recognized by the Technology Review as one of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2013.
CSAIL MIT	Boeing Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics | Lead of the Interactive Robotics Group
Inna Sharf
	Inna Sharf has addressed numerous problems associated with the development and control of autonomous systems. Her research expertise lies in dynamics and control of robotic, mechatronic and autonomous systems and her focus in the last several years has been specifically in the areas of dynamics and control of small highly maneuverable unmanned (i.e. remotely piloted) aerial vehicles. Sharf has been involved in many collaborative projects with industry, including MDA Inc., Quanser Consulting Inc., CSA, and DRDC, four NCFRN partners, as well as academic partners in the US, Europe and Israel. These collaborations and the work of her research group resulted in numerous publications in leading conferences and journals. Sharf’s work is currently funded by NSERC and FQRNT.
McGilll University	Professor of Mechanical Engineering | Cofounder of Aerospace Mechatronics Lab
Mari Velonaki
	Mari Velonaki has worked as a researcher and artist in the field of interactive media since 1995. Velonaki has created interactive installations that incorporate movement, speech, touch, breath, electrostatic charge, artificial vision and robotics. In 2003, Velonaki’s practice expanded to robotics, when she initiated and led a major Australian Research Council art/science research project “Fish-Bird: Autonomous Interactions in a Contemporary Arts Setting” in collaboration with robotics scientists at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR, University of Sydney). In 2007, Velonaki was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, and in 2009 she was awarded an ARC Australian Research Fellowship. In 2006, Velonaki co-founded the Centre for Social Robotics (CSR). Velonaki is also the Director of the recently established Creative Robotics Lab (CRL) at NIEA.
University of New South Wales | NIEA	Director of CRL, NIEA | CoDirector Centre for Social Robotics, USYD | Adjunct Assoc. Prof. Australian Center for Field Robotics, USYD
Barbara Webb
	Barbara Webb’s main research interest is in perceptual systems for the control of behaviour. The work is largely concerned with building computational and physical models of these mechanisms to explicate and evaluate hypotheses. In particular Webb focuses on insect behaviours, as their smaller nervous systems may be easier to elucidate. Recent work has focussed on some of the more complex capabilities of insects, including multimodal intergration, navigation and learning. She also has an interest in theoretical issues of methodology; in particular the problems of measurement, modeling and simulation.
University of Edinburgh	Professor of Biorobotics
Holly Yanco
	Holly Yanco’s research interests include human-robot interaction, better visualization of sensor data, adjustable autonomy, urban search and rescue, assistive technology, and robotics education. Her lab is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, Microsoft and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She founded the Robotics Lab, which consists of students at all stages of their careers, from freshmen to doctoral candidates. Research focuses on human-robot interaction (HRI), which includes multi-touch computing, interface design, robot autonomy, trust, and evaluation methods. Application domains include assistive technology, telepresence, and urban search and rescue (USAR). Yanco is also the director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center.
U Mass Lowell	Professor of Computer Science | Director New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center
Xiaorui Zhu
	Xiaorui Zhu’s research interests include control and localization of mobile robots, flight control of unmanned helicopter, mechatronics, and medical robotics. In 2012, Zhu won the Award for National Science and Technology of China.
Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen	Associate Professor | Chair Women in Engineering IEEE RAS
Girls of Steel
	Girls of Steel is an all girl FIRST Robotics Competition team, founded in Pittsburgh in 2010. Initially, the team consisted of 24 girls from 12 different high schools, and 4 different educational options. The team now numbers almost 60 girls, with FIRST LEGO League teams. The Girls of Steel mission is to empower women in STEM, giving girls skills that go beyond building robots and last longer than high school.
FIRST Team 3504	Pittsburgh, PA

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• 25 women in robotics you need to know about – 2015
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)
• Mentors of Steel: The role of mentoring in robotics education
• Getting into the driver’s seat: Girls of Steel tell us how they got hooked on robotics
• Robot Launchpad on Robots Podcast
• Jobs isn’t the issue for robotics

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Shame that the missing engineering hero on the cover of IEEE Spectrum’s July issue looks like superMAN , because the IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) lunch at IROS 2014 was a super gathering of high achievers who are making statements about 6% representation looking more like a glass half full, if you harness the potential. Lynne Parker, for example, is the General Chair of ICRA 2015, with a 50 strong all-female organizing committee for the premier robotics research event .

ICRA is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s flagship conference and is a premier international forum for robotics researchers to present their work. The 2015 conference will be held May 26-30, 2015 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, Washington, USA. Having an all-women committee serves as an important watershed for the robotics community.

Parker said, “There are usually only one or two women involved in conferences and when I ask why so few, people say that there aren’t enough women with experience. So, look at all these women with experience now who can be helping with future committees.” Women might make up only 6% of the global IEEE community but Parker feels that even that presence hasn’t been sufficiently felt. She also encourages women to submit papers or workshops to ICRA 2015 by the deadline of October 1st, 2014 (just around the corner!).

As well as the incredible list of women on the ICRA 2015 committee (below), Robohub published a ’25 women in robotics you need to know about’ list in 2013 and we’ll be publishing a new list for Ada Lovelace Day on October 14, 2014. Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the achievement of women in computing, science, technology and engineering.

The idea is to provide inspiring role models across a wide range of robotics fields. The women on these lists are a fantastic sample from an admittedly small group. I encourage everyone to look further afield when searching for women to meet targets for boards, committees, positions and outreach, rather than expect the same few women to pick up all the slack. (This ’empowerment 101′ applies to any diversity demographic.)

Of course women are not the only ones who can change the demographics of the field, but it definitely helps to see women rising to positions of influence. For example, Lynne Parker has just been appointed Division Director for the NSF’s Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division within the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate.

This 3-year role covers overseeing the National Robotics Initiative alongside big data, human-centered computing, and core computer science. Parker is looking not just at internal program management but is also looking ahead to see what are the new directions for the robotics community. “To be somewhat visionary, to the extent that we can be,” said Parker. “For example, we’re an international community. Can we do better at representing that from a funding perspective? That’s a hard challenge, but that does’t mean we can’t look at it.”

In closing, the CISE Directorate enthusiastically welcomes Dr. Parker to NSF and looks forward to working with her to advance the frontiers of knowledge in information and intelligent systems.” Farnam Jahanian, NSF 

We also heard from Ayanna Howard, HumAnS Laboratory and GIT,  and Jeff Trinkle, NSF, NRI and Rensselaer, at the WIE luncheon at IROS 2014. With over 15,000 members around the world, IEEE’s Women in Engineering (WIE) is the largest international professional organization dedicated to promoting women engineers and scientists and inspiring girls around the world to follow their academic interests to a career in engineering. Formed in 1994, the luncheon marks the 20th anniversary of WIE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pukuQw0Ov0s

ICRA 2015 Organizing Committee

Honorary Chair
Ruzena Bajcsy (University of California, Berkeley)

General Chair
Lynne Parker (University of Tennessee)

Program Chair
Nancy M. Amato (Texas A&M University)

Program Co-Chairs
Dani Kragic (Royal Institute of Technology, KTH)
Hong Qiao (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Jing Xiao (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)

CEB Editor-in-Chief
Allison Okamura (Stanford University)

Finance Chair
Yi Guo (Stevens Institute of Technology)

Workshops and Tutorials Chair
Monica Anderson (University of Alabama)

Workshops and Tutorials Co-Chairs
Spring Berman (Arizona State University)
Alicia Casals (Technical University of Catalonia)
Yukie Nagai (Osaka University)

Interactive Sessions Chair
Ani Hsieh (Drexel University)

Interactive Sessions Co-Chair
Ming Lin (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Awards Chair
Lydia Kavraki (Rice University)

Awards Co-Chairs
Jessica Hodgins (Carnegie Mellon University)
Daniela Rus (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Carme Torras (Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC)

Publication Chair
Dawn Tilbury (University of Michigan)

Publicity Chair
Nora Ayanian (University of Southern California)

Publicity Co-Chairs
Raffaela Carloni (University of Twente)
MIhoko Otake (Chiba University)

Exhibitions Chair
Robin Murphy (Texas A&M University)

Exhibitions Co-Chair
Cecilia Laschi (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna)

Sponsorships Co-Chairs
Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)
Maja Mataric (University of Southern California)

Industry Forum Chair
Aude Billard (Ecole Polytechniuque Federale de Lausanne)

Industry Forum Co-Chairs
Dana Kulic (University of Waterloo)
Angelika Peer (TU Munich)
Yuru Zhang (Beihang University)

Developing Countries Outreach Chair
M. Bernardine Dias (Carnegie Mellon University)

Developing Countries Outreach Co-Chairs
Chinwe Ekenna (Texas A&M University)
Ayorkor Korsah (Carnegie Mellon University)

Career Fair Chair
Hadas Kress-Gazit (Cornell University)

Career Fair Co-Chairs
Maren Bennewitz (University of Freiburg)
Jana Koseca (George Mason University)

PhD Forum Chair
Ayanna Howard (Georgia Institute of Technology)

PhD Forum Co-Chairs
Jamie Paik (EPFL)
Hae Won Park (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Xiaorui Zhu (Harbin Institute of Technology)

Competitions Co-Chairs
Sonia Chernova (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)

Travel Awards Chair
Maria Gini (University of Minnesota)

Student Activities Chair
Lydia Tapia (University of New Mexico)

Student Activities Co-Chair
Hanna Kurniawati (University of Queensland)

K-12 Outreach Chairs
Radhika Nagpal (Harvard University)
Claire Tomlin (University of California, Berkeley)

Web Chair
Shawna Thomas (Texas A&M University)

Local Arrangements Chair
Kristy Morganson (University of Washington)

Local Arrangements Co-Chair
Maya Cakmak (University of Washington)

Senior Program Committee

Ruzena Bajcsy (University of California, Berkeley)
Alicia Casals (Technical University of Catalonia)
Bernardine Dias (Carnegie Mellon University)
Maria Gini (University of Minnesota)
Yi Guo (Stevens Institute of Technology)
Ayanna Howard (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Lydia Kavraki (Rice University)
Jana Koseca (George Mason University)
Dani Kragic (Royal Institute of Technology, KTH)
Ming Lin (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Robin Murphy (Texas A&M University)
Radhika Nagpal (Harvard University)
Allison Okamura (Stanford University)
Katia Sycara (Carnegie Mellon University)
Dawn Tilbury (University of Michigan)
Carme Torras (Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC)
Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)
Jing Xiao (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
Yuru Zhang (Beihang University)

Detection and removal of antipersonnel landmines is, at present, a serious problem of political, economical, environmental and humanitarian dimensions in many countries across the world. It is estimated that there are 110 million landmines in the ground right now; one for every 52 inhabitants on the planet. These mines kill or maim more than 5,000 people annually. If demining efforts remain about the same as they are now, and no new mines are laid, it will still take 1100 years to get rid of all the world’s active land mines because current conventional methods of removal are very slow, inefficient, dangerous and costly. Robotic systems can provide efficient, reliable, adaptive and cost effective solutions for the problem of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) contamination.

Minesweepers: Towards a Landmine-free World was initiated in 2012 as the first international outdoor robotic competition on humanitarian demining by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society – Egypt Chapter, which won the Chapter of the Year Award in IEEE Region 8 that year. It aims to raise public awareness of the seriousness of landmines and UXO contamination and the role of science and technology in addressing these; it also aims to foster robotics research in the area of humanitarian demining by motivating professors, engineers and students to work on innovative solutions for this serious problem.

In this competition, each participating team constructs a teleoperated/autonomous unmanned ground/aerial vehicle that must be able to search for underground and aboveground anti-personnel landmines and UXOs. The position and the type of each detected object are visualized and overlaid on the minefield map. The robot must be able to navigate through rough terrain that mimics a real minefield. Teams can participate in one of the following categories:

• Minesweepers – Academia: For undergraduate and postgraduate students where only metallic objects must be detected in the competition arena and landmine detection and minefield mapping are required.
• Minesweepers – Juniors: For elementary and high school students where only metallic objects must be detected in the competition arena and only landmine detection is required.
• Minesweepers – Industry: For professional companies where metallic and non-metallic objects with different dimensions and profiles must be detected in the competition arena, and landmine detection, landmine imaging and minefield mapping are required.

The competition arena of Minesweepers 2014 is an open area with a size of 20 x 20 m, delimited by 4 GPS coordinates. The competition area will be marked by plastic tape for visualization purposes, and there is a virtual fence to stop the robots from going outside the competition area. There are no mines in a stripe of 0.5 m of terrain along the borders of the competition area. Most of the arena is covered by low grass with a few trees, some steep inclines, ditches and culverts.

The ultimate goal of the Minesweepers competition is to put into practice the new strategic mission of IEEE, “…to foster technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity” and to serve as an educational and a research forum to provide efficient, reliable, adaptive and cost-effective solutions for the serious problem of humanitarian demining in many affected countries in the world. The competition also motivates the participants to create new companies and industries geared towards minefield reconnaissance and mapping technologies. Moreover, the applicability of the robotic systems presented in this competition can be extended to a wide range of other applications such as security and surveillance, search and rescue, health monitoring of civil infrastructure, pipeline monitoring, and environment monitoring.

The third edition of Minesweepers is organized by the Institute for Systems and Robotics at University of Coimbra in September 1-3, 2014 under the auspices of IEEE RAS Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology (RAS-SIGHT), and in collaboration with IEEE RAS Egypt Chapter and Hadath for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The competition is technically co-sponsored by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) and supported by Executive Secretariat for the Demining & Development of the North West Coast, Mines Action & Human Rights Foundation and Protection against Armaments & Consequences and African Robotics Network (AFRON).

Teams submitting to the eligibility round are requested to submit a technical report and a short video about their robot by July 1, 2014.

More info

landminefree.org
Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQ)
Facts about Landmines
Resources

Contact
world@landminefree.org
Facebook
Facebook Group
@LandmineFree

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In 2012, the African Robotics Network (AFRON) challenged the robotics community to design a $10 educational robot that could inspire kids worldwide about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. With so many expensive products on the market, the goal was to create a class of robots that are “an order of magnitude less expensive than existing products”. The latest iteration of the competition challenged teams to enhance upon the winning 2012 designs, and to develop easy-to-use software and curricula to go with them. AFRON announced the winners earlier this week.

The big winner for the competition was the print-and-fold robot from MIT, which won first place in the Hardware and Curriculum categories, and second place in the software category. This robot is made from a “patterned 2D sheet, which is folded and then equipped with actuation mechanisms and electronics,” allowing for quick, low-cost assembly. The AERobot from Harvard followed close behind with first place in Software, and two second place spots, in the Hardware and Curriculum categories. The PANYABOT from iHub in Kenya also caught the judge’s attention, earning first place in the Community Challenge category and honourable mentions in the Software and Curriculum categories.

Creating affordable robots for STEM education was AFRON’s mission, but education is not the only area where ultra low-cost robots are desirable. Swarm robotics (where large numbers of robots might work together to perform collective tasks) is another area where robustness, simplicity and affordability reign high.

Says Mike Rubenstein, team member behind the AERobot, “In my research I have created swarm robots, which have many properties that are also desirable in education robots. After seeing the contest requirements, I realized that with some minor modifications, my swarm robots could make useful education robots.” The AERobot is in fact a modified version of the Kilobot robot, with Kilobot’s swarm capabilities removed, the charging and programming simplified, and with some additional sensors.

Despite Rubenstein’s previous experience developing low-cost robots, he says that creating an $11 robot with features like sensing, thinking and locomotion was a challenge, especially when considering that one of the assessment criteria for the competition was the ability of the robot to engage with students and teach them about robotics.

“The software and planned curriculum drove the robot design, so it was critical to understand how the design choices for the robot impacted the possible curriculum for the robot,” says Rubenstein. “For example, we wanted to use software that allowed the robot to be programmed over USB without any additional hardware, which impacted the robot shape, and choice of micro-controller.”

Jury members Dr. Sam Cubero (The Petroleum Institute, UAE), Dr. M. Bernardine Dias (Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA), and James Manyika (Mckinsey Global Institute) evaluated each of the submissions along several criteria, including robustness, cost, versatility, ease of use/assembly, documentation, and the ability to engage students and help them learn.

Here are the winners and runners up in each category:

Hardware category

First Place: MIT Printable Robot (MIT, USA)	Ankur Mehta Joseph DelPreto Benjamin Shaya Lindsay Sanneman Daniela Rus
Second Place: AERobot (Harvard, USA)	Michael Rubenstein Bo Cimino Radhika Nagpal
Honorable Mention: Tiny CNC Drawing Robot (PlotterBot, USA)	Jay Shergill

Software Category

First Place: AERobot (Harvard, USA)	Michael Rubenstein Bo Cimino Radhika Nagpal
Second Place: MIT Printable Robot (MIT, USA)	Ankur Mehta Joseph DelPreto Benjamin Shaya Lindsay Sanneman Daniela Rus
Honorable Mention: PANYABOT (iHub, Kenya)	Jessica Colaco Wachira Ndaiga Muuo Wambua Elizabeth Ondula James Kinyanjui Brian Bosire

Curriculum Category

First Place: MIT Printable Robot (MIT, USA)	Ankur Mehta Joseph DelPreto Benjamin Shaya Lindsay Sanneman Daniela Rus
Second Place: AERobot (Harvard, USA)	Michael Rubenstein Bo Cimino Radhika Nagpal
Honorable Mention: PANYABOT (iHub, Kenya)	Jessica Colaco Wachira Ndaiga Muuo Wambua Elizabeth Ondula James Kinyanjui Brian Bosire

Community Challenge Category

First Place: PANYABOT (iHub, Kenya)	Jessica Colaco Wachira Ndaiga Muuo Wambua Elizabeth Ondula James Kinyanjui Brian Bosire
Second Place: ARX LollyBot Workshop (Ashesi, Ghana)	Wumpini Alhassan Hussein
Honorable Mention: Tiny CNC Drawing Robot (PlotterBot, USA)	Jay Shergill

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As we have been enjoying amazing scenes from Sochi, Russia where disabled athletes have been completing in the winter Paralympics, researchers in Switzerland have been considering a new route for athletes for whom normal devices such as prosthetic feet and modified wheelchairs are not suitable. For these athletes, robotic technology that can interface with the user, such as powered exoskeletons, may be better adapted to allow fair and exciting competitions.

On 8th October 2016 Zurich, Switzerland will host the Cybathlon, a championship for athletes using robotic assistive devices. Teams consisting of one or more “pilots” and a technology provider (academia or industry) will compete in one of six disciplines:

• Brain Computer Interface (BCI) race: BCIs will be used to enable pilots to control avatars in a racing game on a computer screen.
• Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) bike race: FES devices will be used to help pilots with complete spinal chord injuries to perform pedaling movements, thus enabling a short bike race to take place on a circular track.
• Leg prosthetics race: Amputees fitted with actuated exoprosthetic devices will compete in a short obstacle course.
• Powered exoskeleton race: Actuated exoskeleton devices will enable pilots with complete spinal chord injuries to complete a short obstacle course.
• Powered wheelchair race: Pilots will steer powered wheelchairs around an obstacle course.
• Arm prosthetics race: Actuated exoprosthetic hands and arms will be used by pilots to complete a coordination race.

Each race has its own set course complete with obstacles and activities (e.g. sitting and standing) that have been specially designed to test the compatibility of prosthetics with their pilot.

Teams will work together in advance of the race to create assistive devices that are functional and practical for the specially designed courses, and it is hoped that not only will the event deepen relations between the disabled and research robotics community, but also strengthen ties between research in industry and academia.

This event will open up athletics to individuals who had previously been barred by the rules governing prosthetics in international sport. One key group are those suffering from motor conditions where reflexes and control of limbs may not be sufficient to allow individuals to have the competitive edge over rivals. To enable participation of this group any robotic assistance is allowed, the only limits are that devices must be controlled by the wearer and carry their own power supply.

Sport is commonly understood to be a great unifier, and the organisers at NCCR Robotics in Switzerland see no reason why this can’t be extended to groups who have not been previously included.

Register to become a pilot or technological team and learn all the details on the Cybathlon website. or see the Cybathlon’s Facebook for regular updates. Please note that pilots and technological teams do not need to know each other before the competition – organisers will pair up those who enter alone. Bursaries covering travel expenses will be made available for pilots and academic teams on application.

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In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, we’ve compiled a short list of some women in robotics that everyone should know about. There are so many many more that we’re already looking forward to featuring them next year. But first, simply creating this post has reopened many arguments about gender and technology and whether we even need to say that there are women who are brilliant at engineering.

From Hypatia to Grace Hopper, there have been amazing women who have fought against massive prejudice to carve themselves out a name in the fields of science, engineering, mathematics and technology. These comparatively few women however can easily be lost from the pages of history and to create a more equal ongoing presence of women in technology, we need to show strong female role models.

Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer and in spite of her undoubted mathematical brilliance, she was reluctant to publish herself and made do with publishing ‘commentaries’ on the works of others. Her commentaries were far longer and more original than the originals and in the process she demonstrated the future applications for the universal computing machine that Charles Babbage proposed but never built.

Now in its fourth year, Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women in science, technology, engineering and math who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM.

Professionally, the women on our list are all field leaders with a huge impact on robotics, regardless of their gender. So if you need women for your board of directors, or conference panel etc. then you may need to look deeper, because these women are already super busy. But while there are an increasing number of women in robotics, there is nothing like equal representation so – here are 25 reasons why that should change. Please share.

Many thanks to Robohub contributors for all their great suggestions!

25 women in robotics you should know about (in alphabetical order)

Sarah Bergbreiter
	Sarah Bergbreiter packs impressive capabilities in tiny mobile robots. Her millimeter sized jumpers can overcome obstacles 80x their height, which is a record for the field. By tackling locomotion, power, actuation and fabrication at these small scales she hopes to develop technologies that could advance medicine, consumer electronics, and science.
University of Maryland	Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering | Director of the Micro Robotics Lab
Aude Billard
	Aude Billard makes strides towards building robots that can interact with, learn from and help humans. Her work has been used for children with autism and has pushed the frontiers of machine learning.
EPFL	Associate Professor | Director of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory
Cynthia Breazeal
	Cynthia Breazeal is a leading expert in creating personal robots that interact with humans in a natural way. She has developed some of the world’s most famous robotic creatures ranging from small hexapod robots to highly expressive humanoid robots and robot characters. Her recent work investigates the use of social robots to improve quality of life.
MIT Media Lab	Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences | Director of the Personal Robots Group
Elizabeth Croft
	Elizabeth Croft studies how interactions with robots can be designed to naturally adapt to what their non-expert human users want them to do. Her work in human-robot interactions is highly interdisciplinary and taps into expertise in computer science, psychology, health and biological sciences.
University of British Columbia	Professor | Director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory
Missy Cummings
	Missy Cummings is a mathematician, space systems engineer and one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots. She is currently teaching aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and researches autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction and ethics.
MIT	Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems | Director, Humans and Automation Laboratory
Kerstin Dautenhahn
	Kerstin Dautenhahn received her Ph.D. degree from the Biological Cybernetics Department of the University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, in 1993. She has published more than 300 research articles on social robotics, human-robot interaction, assistive technology and Artificial Life.
University of Hertfordshire	Professor Computer Science | Director Adaptive Systems Research Group.
Helen Greiner
	Helen Greiner is a co-founder of iRobot and currently CEO of CyPhyWorks. iRobot was the world’s first commercially successful consumer robotics product. She has degrees in mechanical engineering and computer science as well as being one of the ‘entrepreneurs and innovators of the 21st century’.
CyPhy Works	Founder and CEO
Heather Knight
	Heather Knight runs Marilyn Monrobot Labs in NYC creating robot performances and sensor based art. She is also founder of the Robot Film Festival and Cyborg Cabaret and a PhD student at CMU. Heather was on the 2011 Forbes List for 30 under 30 in Science. Her work also includes: robotics and instrumentation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, interactive installations with Syyn Labs, field applications and sensor design at Aldebaran Robotics, and she is an alumnus from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab.
CMU	Doctoral research | Marilyn Monrobot
Kaori Kuribayashi-Shigetomi
	Kaori Kuribayashi-Shigetomi uses living cells to power and actuate 3D robotic structures at the micro scale. Such structures could be useful for tissue engineering or 3D assembly at the microscale.
University of Tokyo
Maja Matarić
	Maja Matarić makes robots that help people. Her research in human-robot interactions and desire to solve real-world problems has lead her to design robots that can provide personalized assistance in convalescence, rehabilitation, skill training, and education.
University of Southern California	Professor and Chan Soon-Shiong Chair in Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics | Director, Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES) | Director of the Interaction Lab
Arianna Menciassi
	Arianna Menciassi designs micro- and nano-robots that can be used in biomedical applications. Examples include active endoscopic capsules or novel cell-based actuators.
Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna	Associate Professor of biomedical robotics
Robin Murphy
	Robin Murphy pioneered rescue robotics with aerial and ground robots used in disasters such as the World Trade Center disaster, Hurricanes Katrina and Charley, and the Crandall Canyon Utah mine collapse. She is currently leading an initiative in emergency informatics, which stems in part from witnessing valuable data from robots not reaching the right decision maker.
Texas A&M University	Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering | Director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue
Radhika Nagpal
	Radhika Nagpal studies self-organized multi-agent systems in nature and robotics. She takes inspiration from ants, termites and cellular systems to design robot swarms that can build complex structures, assemble into any shape or help pollinate fields. She also investigates models of self-organization in biology, specifically how cells and insects cooperate to achieve complex tasks.
Wyss Institute – Harvard	Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science
Allison Okamura
	Allison Okamura runs the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine lab [CHARM] at Stanford, where she supervises research in haptics, teleoperation and virtual robotics. This work has applications in medicine, rehabilitation, education and user interfaces.
Stanford University	Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering | Director of the CHARM Lab
Jamie Paik
	Jamie Paik is the founder and director of Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL) of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and a member of Swiss NCCR robotics group. RRL focuses on leveraging expertise in multi-material fabrication and smart material actuations. Her latest robots include self-morphing Robogami (robotic orgami) that transforms its planar shape to 2D or 3D by folding in predefined patterns and sequences, just like the paper art, origami.
EPFL	Assistant Professor | Director of the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab
Lynn Parker
	Lynne Parker is a leader in the field of distributed multi-robot systems. Her many-robot systems have helped explore mobile robot cooperation, human-robot cooperation, sensor networks, robotic learning, intelligent agent architectures, and robot navigation.
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville	Professor and Associate Head in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Director Distributed Intelligence Laboratory
Daniela Rus
	Daniela Rus is director of one of the most renowned laboratories in artificial intelligence and robotics in the world (CSAIL). At the distributed robotics laboratory she designs robots at all scales, soft and hard, that can self/dis-assemble, fold, fly and distribute to advance the frontiers of robotics.
MIT	Director of CSAIL | Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Director of the Distributed Robotics Laboratory
Angela Schoellig
	Angela Schoellig specializes in iterative/cooperative learning and data-based control for dynamic systems. Recent applications include learning fast dynamics and shared tasks for multiple UAVs. You probably saw her quadrotors dance solo or as a multi-robot ballet.
University of Toronto	Assistant Professor Institute for Aerospace Studies
Leila Takayama
	Leila Takayama is a researcher with a background in Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Human-Computer Interaction. Her current focus is understanding human encounters with robots in terms of how they perceive, understand, feel about, and interact with robots. She was named one of the Tech Review’s 35 innovators under 35 as well as one of Fast Company’s 100 most creative people in business.
Google X	Senior Researcher
Andrea Thomaz
	Andrea Thomaz explores human robot interactions with Simon, her expressive humanoid robot. She has been a driving force in making robots that can learn through social interactions, an essential feat to make robots a part of our daily lives.
Georgia Tech	Associate Professor of Interactive Computing | Director of the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab
Manuela Veloso
	Manuela Veloso is the mother of robot soccer. For years, her laboratory has been championing the Robocup competitions while exploring important questions in multi-robot control. She is currently working towards creating service robots that work symbiotically with humans.
Carnegie Mellon University	Herbert A. Simon Professor in Computer Science
Astrid Weiss
	Astrid Weiss is a research fellow in HRI at the Vision4Robotics group. She focuses on Human-Robot Cooperation, Theory of Mind and user centered design, with an interest in the impact technology has on our everyday life and what makes people accept or reject technology.
Vienna University of Technology	Postdoctoral research fellow at ACIN Institute of Automation and Control
Mary-Anne Williams
	Mary-Anne Williams is the director of the Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab at UTS, Sydney. Her work includes social robotics, robot ethics and law, robotics soccer competitions, artificial intelligence, knowledge mapping and cognitive models of decision making.
UTS	Associate Dean Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology | Director, Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab
Melonee Wise
	One of the first hires at Willow Garage, Melonee Wise has been deeply involved in the development of the PR2 and the Turtlebots. Now she is leading her own company, Unbounded Robotics, in the development of a mobile manipulating robot platform.
Unbounded Robotics	Founder and CEO
Amy Villeneuve
	With 24 years of experience in business, Amy Villeneuve has been instrumental in the rise of one of the most praised companies in robotics, Kiva Systems. Their acquisition by Amazon a few years ago at 775 million dollars made mainstream realize that robotics startups are the next big thing. At Kiva she is responsible for end-to-end customer engagement process, from sales and solution design through manufacturing, deployment and ongoing customer support.
KIVA Systems	President and COO

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