In celebration of the launch of International Women in Robotics Day, the Women in Robotics organization is proud to release another “50 women in robotics you need to know about” collection of stories. With a growing robotics industry there are many opportunities for everyone to get involved. This is why we showcase the wide range of roles that women play in robotics today.

Since 2012, the Women in Robotics organization has released a list of women building the future in robotics. The list has covered all ages, career stages, types of occupation and experience. We’ve featured more than 350 women already and we’ve shown that women have always been working in the robotics industry, in the earliest robotics research labs and companies, although those stories have often been forgotten.

This year’s collection includes Nancy Cornelius, co-founder of Boston Dynamics and the first engineer hired. Cornelius remained an integral part of Boston Dynamics until the company was sold to Google in 2013. Vandi Verma is the head of NASA’s rover (robot) program. Joanna Buttler is the head of the Global Autonomous Technology Group for Daimler Truck. And Whitney Rockley founded a venture capital company investing exclusively in ‘industrial internet’ companies like Clearpath Robotics.

For the first time, we feature an Indigenous (Ojibwe) American roboticist, Danielle Boyer. Boyer started a non-profit The STEAM Connection to combat the difficulties that many kids have getting access to robotics. She created an affordable robot kit that’s been distributed to thousands of students, and is proudest of the SKOBOT project. Personalized robots that keep culture and language traditions alive. Boyer epitomizes the motto “Building the Future”.

We also try to feature women from all regions of the world and this year’s collection represents Nigeria, India, China, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Croatia, Korea, Denmark, Singapore, Italy, Romania, United States, Sweden, Spain, Canada, the UK, Israel, Austria, Belgium, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. There is an active Latinx community in Women in Robotics engaged in translating more robotics information into Spanish, hoping to create more connections between the global robotics community and the roboticists, and potential roboticists, of Latin America.

There have always been women doing great things in robotics! And we’re pleased to present another collection of strong female role models for young and upcoming roboticists (of any gender).

You can also join in the Women in Robotics celebrations today and throughout October, with events listed on the women in robotics site, like Diversity Cocktails at the IROS conference in Detroit, or the launch of the Los Angeles women in robotics chapter. Women in Robotics is a global community organization for women and non-binary people working in robotics and those who’d like to work in robotics. Learn more at https://womeninrobotics.org

Join our events, host your own events, share our celebration on social media!

The role models these 50 women represent are diverse, ranging from emeritus to early career stage. 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 and there are still not enough women in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM). One key reason is clear: the lack of visible female role models and so we continue to run our women in robotics photo challenge, to showcase real women building real robots. Women in STEM need to be equally represented at conferences, keynotes, magazine covers, or stories about technology. Although this is starting to change, the change is not happening quickly enough. You can help. Spread the word and use this resource to inspire others to consider a career in robotics. As you will see there are many different ways the women we profile are making a difference.

We hope you are inspired by these profiles, and if you want to work in robotics too, please join us at Women in Robotics. We are now a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, but even so, this post wouldn’t be possible if not for the hard work of volunteers and the Women in Robotics Board of Directors.

Want to keep reading? There are more than 300 other stories on our 2013 to 2021 lists (and their updates):

• 50 women in robotics you need to know about (2021)
• 30 women in robotics you need to know about (2020)
• 30 women in robotics you need to know about (2019)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2018)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2017)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2016)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2015)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2014)
• 25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)

Please share this and cite Women in Robotics as the author. Why not nominate a woman or non-binary person working in robotics for inclusion next year! Tweet this.

Unmanned and master/slave are two terms that are offensive to many in the community. Such terms may once have been accepted by society, but not any longer, and we are pleased to see many organizations starting to use alternative terms.

We call on you in 2022 to remove words with negative connotations, like the ones listed below, from all materials, course descriptions, department names, products, forms, reports or articles. The benefit to you is in broadening your appeal to all the community members who find those terms, if not outrightly offensive, then at the least old-fashioned and representative of a mindset that has not engaged meaningfully with creating inclusive or modern robotics.

Women in Robotics has taken the lead in curating a list of best practices in inclusive terminology, in consultation with other groups, and now we would like to share the first draft of “Terminology for 21st Century Technologists” for comment. So far we’ve considered gender, ethnicity and some disability issues. Our goal is to create a comprehensive directory of terminology, which can go through an update process periodically, just as standards do. There is obviously a little more work to be done and we want to include sections on ‘how to retire terms’, ‘how to implement changes constructively’ and more information about the process. This is where you can help us.

Please send comments in response to the first draft by June 28 2022 to reports@womeninrobotics.org

Diligent Robotics, founded by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, develops socially intelligent automation solutions for hospitals. Moxi, their flagship robot, delivers items like medications and wound dressings between departments to save the clinical staff’s time. Diligent has just closed their Series B funding round with $30 million. 

We sat down with Dr. Thomaz to talk about Moxi, how to manage people’s expectations about robots, and advice for young people and women in robotics. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Andrea Thomaz with Diligent’s flagship robot Moxi.

What kinds of problems are you trying to solve with Moxi?

We are building Moxi to help hospitals with the massive workforce shortage that they’re seeing now more than ever. We actually started the company with the same intention several years ago before there was a worldwide pandemic, and it really has just gotten to be an even bigger problem for hospitals. I feel really strongly that robots have a place to play in teamwork environments, and hospitals are a great example of that. There’s no one person’s job in a hospital that you would actually want to give over to automation or robots, but there are tiny little bits of a lot of people’s jobs that are absolutely able to be automated and that we can give over to delivery robots in particular like Moxi. [The main problem we’re trying to solve with Moxi is] point to point delivery, where we’re fetching and gathering things and taking them from one area of the hospital to another. 

Hospitals have a lot of stuff that’s moving around every day. Every person in the hospital is going to have certain medications that need to be delivered to them, certain lab samples that need to be taken and delivered to the central lab, certain supplies that need to come up to them, food and nutrition every day. You have a lot of stuff that’s coming and going between patient units and all these different support departments. 

Every one of these support departments has a process in place for getting the stuff moved around, but no matter what, there’s stuff that happens every single day that requires ad-hoc [deliveries] to happen between all of these departments and different nursing units. So sometimes that’s going to be a nurse that just needs to get something for their patient and they want that to happen as soon as possible. They’re trying to discharge their patient, they need a particular wound dressing kit, they’re going to run down and get it because they want to help their patient get out. Or if there’s something that needs to be hand carried because the regular rounding of medications has already happened, a lot of times you’ll have a pharmacy technician stop what they’re doing and go and run some infusion meds for a cancer patient, for example. It sort of falls between these departments. There’s different people that would be involved but a lot of times it does fall on the nursing units themselves. A nurse explained to us one time that nurses are the last line of defense in patient care.

Moxi performing a delivery for a clinical staff member.

What is changing with this most recent round of funding?

Over the last 6-12 months, the demand has really skyrocketed such that we’re barely keeping up with the demand for people wanting to implement robots in their hospitals. That’s the reason why we’re raising this round of funding, expanding the team, and expanding our ability to capitalize on that demand. A couple of years ago, if we were working with a hospital it was because they had some special funds set aside for innovation or they had a CTO or a CIO that had a background in robotics, but it certainly wasn’t the first thing that every hospital CIO was thinking about. Now that has completely changed. We’re getting cold outreach on our website from CIOs of hospitals saying “I need to develop a robotic strategy for our hospital and I want to learn about your solution.” Through the pandemic, I think everyone has seen that the workforce shortage in hospitals is only getting worse in the near term. Everybody wants to plan for the future and do everything they can to take small tasks off of the plates of their clinical teams. It’s been really exciting to be part of that market change and see that shift to where everybody is really really open to automation. Before we had to say “No no no, this is not the future, I promise it’s not scifi, I promise these really work.” Now [the climate has] really shifted to people understanding “This is actually something that can impact my teams.”

[Two of our investors are hospitals, and] that’s been one of our most exciting parts of this round. It’s always great to have a successful funding round, but to have strategic partners like Cedars-Sinai and Shannon Healthcare coming in and saying “Yeah, we actually want to build this alongside you” — it’s pretty exciting to have customers like that. 

What kinds of technical problems did you run into when you were either building Moxi or deploying it in a hospital environment? How did you solve those problems? 

One that was almost surprising in how often it came up, and really impacted our ability [to run Moxi in the hospital environment] because we have a software-based robotic solution that is connecting at a regular basis to cloud services, [was that] we had no clue how terrible hospital WiFi was going to be. We actually spent quite a while building in backup systems to be able to use WiFi, backup to LTE if we have to, but be smart about that so we’re not spending a whole bunch of money on LTE data. That was a problem that seemed very specific to hospitals in particular.

Another one was security and compliance. We just didn’t know what some of the different requirements were for hospitals until we actually got into the environments and started interacting with customers and understanding what they wanted to use Moxi for. When we were first doing research trials in 2018 or 2019, we had a version of the robot that was a little bit different than the one we have today. It had lots of open containers so you could just put whatever you wanted to on the robot and send it over to another location. We quickly learned that that limited what the robot was allowed to carry, because so much of what [the customers] wanted was to understand who pulled something out of the robot. So now we have an RF badge reader on the robot that is connected to locking storage containers that are only going to open if you’re the kind of person that is allowed to open the robot. That was an interesting technical challenge that we didn’t know about until after we got out there. 

Moxi’s locking storage containers.

How did you work with nurses and the other healthcare professionals you were working with to figure out what would be the most helpful robot for them? 

My background, and my co-founder Vivian Chu’s background, is in human-robot interaction so we knew that we didn’t know enough about nursing or the hospital environment. We spent the first 9 months of the company in 2018 building out our research prototype. It looked a lot like what Moxi looks like today. Under the hood it was completely different than what we have today in terms of the reliability and robustness of the hardware and software, but it was enough to get that platform out and have it deployed with nursing units. We embedded ourselves with four different nursing units across Texas over a year-long period. We would spend about 6-8 weeks with a nursing department, and we were just there — engineers, product people, and everybody in the company was cycling in and out a week or two at a time. 

We would ask those nurses: “What would you actually want a robot like this to do?” Part of this that was really important was they didn’t have good ideas about what they would want the robot to do until they saw the robot. It was a very participatory design, where they had to see and get a sense for the robot before they would have good ideas of what they would want the robot to do. Then we would take those ideas [to the company] and come back and say “Yes we can do that,” or “No we can’t do that.” We came out of that whole process with a really great idea. We like to say that’s where we found our product market fit — that’s where we really understood that what was going to be most valuable for the robot to do was connecting the nursing units to these other departments. We can help a nurse with supply management and getting things from place to place within their department, or we can help them with things that are coming from really far away. [The second one] was actually impacting their time way way more.

Because the capabilities of robotic systems are usually misinterpreted, it can be really hard to manage the relationship with stakeholders and customers and set appropriate expectations. How did you manage that relationship?

We do a lot of demonstrations, but still with almost every single implementation you get questions about some robot in Hollywood, [and you have to say] “No, that’s the movies” and explain exactly what Moxi does. 

From a design perspective, we also limit the English phrases that come out of Moxi’s mouth just because we don’t want to communicate a really high level of intelligence. There are lots of canned phrases and interactions on the iPad instead of via voice, and a lot of times the robot will just make meeps and beeps and flash lights and things like that. 

Before starting the company, I had a lab, and one of the big research topics that we had for a number of years was embodied dialogue — how robots could have a real conversation with people. I had a very good appreciation for how hard that problem is, and also for just how much people want it. People come up to a robot, and they want it to be able to talk to them. How you can [set expectations] with the design and behavior of the robot has been a focus of mine since before we started the company. We purposefully don’t make the robot look very human-like because we don’t want there to be android human-level expectations, but [the robot does have a face and eyes so it can] communicate “I’m looking at that thing” and “I’m about to manipulate that thing,” which we think is important. It’s really about striking that balance. 

What would you say is one lesson that you’ve learned from your work at Diligent so far and how are you looking to apply this lesson moving forward?

The difference between research and practice. On the one hand, the motivation and reason for starting a company is that you want to see the kinds of things that you’ve done in the research lab really make it out into the world and start to impact real people and their work. That’s been one of the most fascinating, impactful, and inspiring things about starting Diligent: Being able to go and see nurses when Moxi is doing work for them. They are so thankful! If you just hang back and watch Moxi come and do a delivery, almost always people are super excited to see the robot. They get their delivery and they’re like, “Oh, thank you Moxi!” That feels like we’re really making a difference in a way that you just don’t get with just research contributions that don’t make it all the way out into the world. 

That being said though, there is a long tail of things that you have to solve from an engineering perspective beyond [developing a feature]. My VP of engineering Starr Corbin has this great way of putting it: The research team will get a certain thing on the product to be feature complete, where we’ve demonstrated that this feature works and it’s a good solution, but then there’s this whole phase that has to happen after that to get the feature to be production ready. I would say my biggest lesson is probably everything that it takes, and the entire team of people it takes, to get something from being feature complete to production ready. I have a deep appreciation for that. How fast we can move things out into the world is really dictated by some of that. 

Andrea Thomaz (left) and Vivian Chu with Moxi.

What advice would you give young women in robotics? 

If I put my professor hat on, I always had advice that I liked to give women in robotics, in academia, and just kind of pursuing things in general. Imposter syndrome is real, and everybody feels it. All you can do to combat it is not underestimate yourself. Speak up and know that you deserve a seat at the table. It’s all about hard work, but also making sure that your voice is heard. Some of the mentorship that I gave to a lot of my women grad students when I was a professor was around speaking engagements, speaking styles, and communication. It can be really uncomfortable when you’re the only anything in the room to stand up and feel like you deserve to be the one speaking, and so the more that you practice doing that, the more comfortable it can feel, the more confident you’ll feel in yourself and your voice. I think finding that confident voice is a really important skill that you have to develop early on in your career. 

What’s one piece of advice you’ve received that you always turn to when things are tough? 

There are two mentors that I’ve had who are women in AI and robotics. [In my] first year as a faculty member [the first mentor] came and gave a research seminar talk. I for some reason got to take her out to lunch by myself, so we had this amazing one-on-one. We talked a little bit about her talk, probably half of the lunch we talked about technical things, and then she just kind of turned the conversation [around] and said “Andrea, don’t forget to have a family.” Like, don’t forget to focus on that part of your life — it’s the most important thing. She got on a soapbox and said “You have to have a work life balance it’s so important. Don’t forget to focus on building a family for yourself, whatever that looks like.” That really stuck with me, especially as [when you’re] early in your career you’re worried about nothing but success. It was really powerful to have somebody strong and influential like that telling you “No, no, this is important and you need to focus on this.” 

The other person that’s always been an inspiration and mentor for me that I’ll highlight [was the professor teaching a class I TA’d for at MIT]. I had found a bug in one of her homework problems, and she was like, “Oh, fascinating.” She was so excited that I had found a question that she didn’t know the answer to. She [just said], “Oh my gosh I don’t know, let’s go find out!” I remember her being this great professor at MIT, and she was excited to find something that she didn’t know and go and learn about it together as opposed to being embarrassed that she didn’t know something. I learned a lot from that interaction: That it’s fun to not know something because then you get to go and find the answer, and no matter who you are, you’re never expected to know everything.

What is a PhD?

A PhD is a terminal degree, meaning it is the highest degree that you can earn. Almost without exception, people only earn one PhD. This degree is required for some jobs, mostly in academia, but is often just considered equivalent to years worked in industry. For some positions, hiring managers may even prefer to hire people without PhDs. A PhD is a paid (though not well paid) position at a university that lasts for between 4 and 10 years. To learn more about the PhD process, check out this previous post. 

The author on a field trip to Oceano Dunes in California. She is controlling RHex, a six-legged robot, outfitted with sensors to study dune migration.

The day-to-day life of a PhD student versus an industry professional

The process of earning the PhD is very different from the process of earning a bachelor’s or a master’s degree. It is more like an internship or a job. The first two or so years of any PhD program will be largely coursework, but even at this stage you will be balancing spending time on your courses against spending time on research – either because you are rotating through different labs, because you are performing research for a qualifier, or because your advisor is attaching you to an existing research project to give you some experience and mentorship before you develop your own project. This means that getting a PhD is not actually a way to avoid “getting a job” or to “stay in school” – it is actually a job. This also means that just because you are good at or enjoy coursework does not mean you will necessarily enjoy or excel in a PhD program, and just because you struggled with coursework does not mean you will not flourish in a PhD program. After you are done with coursework, you will spend all of your time on research. Depending on the day, that can mean reading textbooks and research papers, writing papers, making and giving presentations, teaching yourself new skills or concepts, programming or building robots, running experiments, and mentoring younger students. If you excelled at either conducting research as an undergraduate or very open-ended course projects much more than typical coursework, you’ll be much more likely to enjoy research as a PhD student. 

Types of goal setting in academia and industry

In course work, and in industry jobs with a good manager, you are given relatively small, well defined goals to accomplish. You have a team (your study group, your coworkers) who are all working towards the same goal and who you can ask for help. In a PhD program, you are largely responsible for narrowing down a big research question (like “How can we improve the performance of a self-driving car?”) into a question that you can answer over the course of a few years’ diligent work (“Can we use depth information to develop a new classification method for pedestrians?”). You define your own goals, often but not always with the advice of your advisor and your committee. Some projects might be team projects, but your PhD only has your name on it: You alone are responsible for this work. If this sounds exciting to you, great! But these are not good working conditions for everybody. If you do not work well under those conditions, know that you are no less brilliant, capable, or competent than someone who does. It just means that you might find a job in industry significantly more fulfilling than a job in academia. We tend to assume that getting a PhD is a mark of intelligence and perseverance, but that is often not the case — sometimes academia is just a bad match to someone’s goals and motivations. 

Meaning and impact

Academic research usually has a large potential impact, but little immediate impact. In contrast, industry jobs generally have an impact that you can immediately see, even if it is very small. It is worth considering how much having a visible impact matters to you and your motivation because this is a major source of PhD student burnout. To give a tangible example, let’s say that you choose to do research on bipedal robot locomotion. In the future, your work might contribute to prostheses that can help people who have lost legs walk again, or to humanoid robots that can help with elder care. Is it important to you that you can see these applications come to fruition? If so, you might be more fulfilled working at a company that builds robots directed towards those kinds of tasks instead of working on fundamental research that may never see application in the real world. The world will be better for your contributions regardless of where you make them – you just want to make sure you are going to make those impacts in a way that allows you to find them meaningful! 

Pay and lifetime earning potential

Engineers are significantly better paid in industry than academia. Since working in industry for a minimum of five to ten years and getting a PhD are often considered equivalent experience for the purposes of many job applications, even the time spent getting a PhD – where you will earn much less than you would in industry – can mean that you give up a substantial amount of money. Let’s say that an entry-level engineering job makes $100,000 per year, and a graduate student earns $40,000. If your PhD takes 6 years, you lose out on $60,000 x 6 = $360,000 of potential pay. Consider also that a PhD student’s stipend is fairly static, whereas you can expect to have incremental salary increases, bonuses, and promotions in an industry job, meaning that you actually lose out on at least $400,000. This is a totally valid reason to either skip the PhD process completely, or to work in industry for a few years and build up some savings before applying to PhD programs. 

Robotics Institute at University of Toronto

How do I know what I want?

It’s hard! If you’re still uncertain, remember that you can gain a few years of work experience in industry before going back to get the PhD, and will likely be considered an even stronger candidate than before. Doing this allows you to build up some savings and become more confident that you really do want to get that PhD. 

Thinking through these questions might help you figure out what direction you want to go:

• Are you much more motivated to do class projects that you are allowed to fully design yourself? 
• When you think about something small you built being used daily by a neighbor, how do you feel?
• Is your desire to get a PhD because of the prestige associated with the degree, or the specific job opportunities it opens up?

The basics

A PhD (doctoral degree) in engineering or a DEng (Doctorate of Engineering) is the highest degree that you can earn in engineering. This is generally a degree that people only earn one of, if they earn one at all. Unlike a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree, a PhD studying a topic relevant to robotics should be free and students should receive a modest stipend for their living expenses. There are very few stand-alone robotics PhDs programs, so people generally join robotics labs through PhD programs in electrical engineering, computer science, or mechanical engineering. 

Joining a lab

In some programs, students are matched with a lab when they are accepted to the university. This matching is not random: If a university works this way, a professor has to have a space in their lab, see the application, and decide that the student would be a good fit for their lab. Essentially, the professor “hires” the student to join their lab. 

Other programs accept cohorts of students who take courses in the first few years and pick professors to work with by some deadline in the program. The mechanism through which students and professors pair up is usually rotations: Students perform a small research project in each of several labs and then join one of the labs they rotated in. 

The advisor

Regardless of how a student gets matched up with their advisor, the advisor has a lot of power to make their graduate school experience a positive one or a negative one. Someone who is a great advisor for one student may not be a great advisor for another. If you are choosing an advisor, it pays to pay attention to the culture in a lab, and whether you personally feel supported by that environment and the type of mentorship that your advisor offers. In almost every case, this is more important for your success in the PhD program than the specifics of the project you will work on or the prestige of the project, collaborators, or lab. 

Qualifiers

PhD programs typically have qualifiers at some point in the first three years. Some programs use a test-based qualifier system, either creating a specific qualifier test or using tests from final exams of required courses. In some programs, you are tested by a panel of faculty who ask the student questions about course material that they are expected to have learned by this point. In other programs, the student performs a research project and then presents it to a panel of faculty. 

Some universities view the qualifiers as a hurdle that almost all of the admitted PhD students should be able to pass, and some universities view them as a method to weed out students from the PhD program. If you are considering applying to PhD programs, it is worth paying attention to this cultural difference between programs, and not taking it too personally if you do not pass the qualifiers at a school that weeds out half of their students. After all, you were qualified enough to be accepted. It is also important to remember, if you join either kind of program, that if you do not pass your qualifiers, usually what happens is that you leave the program with a free master’s degree. Your time in the program will not be wasted!

The author testing a robot on a steep dune face on a research field trip at Oceano Dunes.

Research

Some advisors will start students on a research project as soon as they join the lab, typically by attaching them to an existing project so that they can get a little mentorship before starting their own project. Some advisors will wait until the student is finished with qualifiers. Either way, it is worth knowing that a PhD student’s relationship to their PhD project is likely different from any project they have ever been involved with before. 

For any other research project, there is another person – the advisor, an older graduate student, a post doc – who has designed the project or at least worked with the student to come up with parameters for success. The scope of previous research projects would typically be one semester or one summer, resulting in one or two papers at most. In contrast, a PhD student’s research project is expected to span multiple years (at least three), should result in multiple publications, and is designed primarily by the student. It is not just that the student has ownership over their project, but that they are responsible for it in a way that they have never been responsible for such a large open-ended project before. It is also their primary responsibility – not one project alongside many others. This can be overwhelming for a lot of students, which is why it is impolite to ask a PhD student how much longer they expect their PhD to take. 

The committee

The “committee” is a group of professors that work in a related area to the student’s. Their advisor is on the committee, but it must include other professors as well. Typically, students need to have a mix of professors from their school and at least one other institution. These professors provide ongoing mentorship on the thesis project. They are the primary audience for the thesis proposal and defense, and will ultimately decide what is sufficient for the student to do in order to graduate. If you are a student choosing your committee, keep in mind that you will benefit greatly from having supportive professors on your committee, just like you will benefit from having a supportive advisor. 

Proposing and defending the thesis

When students are expected to propose a thesis project varies widely by program. In some programs, students propose a topic as part of their qualifier process. In others, students have years after finishing their qualifiers to propose a topic – and can propose as little as a semester before they defend! 

The proposal and defense both typically take the form of a presentation followed by questions from the committee and the audience. In the proposal, the student outlines the project they plan to do, and presents criteria that they and their committee should agree on as the required minimum for them to do in order to graduate. The defense makes the case that the student has hit those requirements. 

After the student presents, the committee will ask them some questions, will confer, and then will either tell the student that they passed or failed. It is very uncommon for a PhD student to fail their defense, and it is generally considered a failure on the part of the advisor rather than the student if this happens, because the advisor shouldn’t have let the student present an unfinished thesis. After the defense, there may be some corrections to the written thesis document or even a few extra experiments, but typically the student does not need to present their thesis again in order to graduate.

The bottom line

A PhD is a long training process to teach students how to become independent researchers. Students will take classes and perform research, and will also likely teach or develop coursework. If this is something you’re thinking about, it’s important to learn about what you might be getting yourself into – and if it’s a journey one of your loved ones is starting on, you should know that it’s not just more school!

It’s been a hard year for women all over the world, and I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to Women in Robotics in 2021, whether you’ve simply shared information about yourself in our community #intros channel, or organized an online event, or made yourself available as an advisor in our pilot mentoring program. Perhaps you’ve been furthering our mission in an ‘unofficial’ way simply by supporting other women, and non-binary people, who are working in robotics, or who are interested in working in robotics. 

We recognize and appreciate the community building work that women do, which is so often out of the spotlight, and on top of everything else. Women’s work has rarely been given economic value as one of my heroes Marilyn Waring wrote in “Counting for Nothing”. She founded feminist economics, now called triple bottom line accounting, and changed the way that the World Bank and other global organizations evaluate economies. 

The pandemic has forced women out of the workforce at twice the rate of men, leaving women’s participation in the workforce lower than it’s been for 30 years. And the pressure shows no sign of stopping. However, I believe that whenever women are forced to step backwards, we move forward again with renewed determination and focus. And so my inspiration is renewed to further the mission of Women in Robotics, to support women and non-binary people who work in robotics, and those who would like to work in robotics. We may all find it hard to find time, but small actions in the right time and place can move mountains. 

In 2021, our annual showcase featured not 25 or 30 but ‘50 women in robotics you need to know about’ from 21 different countries, from industry, startups and academia, with particular mention of the women featured who have fought for the rights of refugees and persecuted women, especially the Afghanistan Women’s Robotics Team. For other women, this recognition has helped to raise their profile within universities or companies, leading to increased opportunities.

Our annual list also means that there’s no excuse for not including women in conferences, articles, policy making, job searches etc. In 2022, I’d love to see us create wikipedia pages for more women in robotics, and create a speaker database, and a citation list, similar to what Black in Robotics has done, and the work of 500 Women Scientists. 

The work of women in science is still less likely to be cited than that of men. Recent UNESCO research has found that citation bias is the start of career long lack of recognition for women, starting with women citing themselves less often than men do. In 2022, let’s focus on improving citation rates, increasing the number of women in panels, journals and conferences, or holding organizers accountable. We can target increasing the number of women cited in robotics curricula, reading lists and coursework. As an organization we can reach out to universities, labs, conferences and journals in a way that individual women can not.

Another grassroots campaign that we started was the Women in Robotics Photo Challenge, which has already resulted in some great new photos of women building robots joining the image search results. Since then we’ve realized that ordinary google or wikipedia search steer you to Sophia or sex robots, rather than referencing real women building robots. It’s also time to retire the word ‘unmanned’. Women in Robotics is planning to request that any university still referencing ‘Unmanned’ Vehicles should substitute with driverless, uncrewed or a better term.

The lack of in person conferences is severely impacting the benefits of in person networking at a senior level for women in robotics, and so we’d like to finally launch our Advisory Board through an online networking event(s) for senior women in robotics, both in academia and industry..

We piloted our first mentoring program over 12 weeks with 16 women and it was a very successful experience for almost every participant. We know that there is a lot of demand to run the program again but we’ll need more volunteers to help organize the events and match mentors/mentees. This is one area in which sponsorship for Women in Robotics could be useful, but sponsorship comes with a significant administrative cost, so we will only seek sustainable major sponsorships in 2022.

My gratitude goes to CITRIS & the Banatao Institute, through the People and Robots Lab, for providing me with some funding for the last two years that has allowed me to spend some of my time on Women in Robotics, Black in Robotics and the Society, Robots and Us Seminars. 

My call to action is for you to make your volunteer labor impactful by investing your time in a call to action with a big outcome. I hope it’s one of our Women in Robotics actions, but in everything you do you represent women in robotics and allies. Best wishes to you all for 2022. And thank you to the 2021 Women in Robotics Board of Directors! Our full Annual Report is here.

1. Counting for Nothing (originally If Women Counted) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Women_Counted by Marilyn Waring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Waring
2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/19/great-resignation-mothers-forced-to-leave-jobs
3. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/women-and-middle-managers-will-lead-the-great-resignation-into-2022/
4. https://en.unesco.org/news/unesco-research-shows-women-career-scientists-still-face-gender-bias

Reflections from the Women in Robotics Board of Directors:

We are very grateful for the work of our Board Members over the last year and we thank Kerri Fetzer-Borelli, Hallie Siegel and Ariel Anders for their vision and experience on the 2020 and 2021 Board. We are delighted to have them join our Advisory Board in 2022.

Allison Thackston:

Women in Robotics community and support in 2021 was different from previous years when we relied a lot on local chapters, meetups, and networking.  With many offices locked down and people more hesitant to do events in person, we’ve struggled a bit.  On the bright side, we’ve been bringing up our online presence, improving our website, and increasing our social media outreach.  In the year ahead, I hope we continue this growth.

Cynthia Yeung:

Launching the Project Advance mentorship program was a highlight of my service on the WiR board in 2021. We have received lots of great feedback from the inaugural cohort which we can use to improve the programming for the second cohort in 2022. One of the key success metrics was the percentage of returning mentors (demand is unlimited in two-sided marketplaces; supply is the constraint) and we are pleased to report that all mentors are interested in returning for the second cohort. It is personally gratifying to be in a position to implement the kind of program that I wanted to have access to earlier in my career. On a macro level, I believe that strong focus and measurable progress on a small number of initiatives will bode well for WiR’s impact roadmap.

Lisa Winter:

2021 was a year of self-reflection and a test of patience. I think 2022 will be the year when a lot of us take bigger risks as we try to figure out a better work/life balance. I would like to see more communication on the WiR Slack, specifically giving job advice and engineering advice. What I enjoy about other sites that I think we could incorporate is more sharing of personal projects; connecting over them and also learning.

Laura Stelzner:

WiR provides community and  support in a field where it can be lonely being one of the few women at your company/department.  As the field of robotics grows we would like to show women and non-binary people all the amazing career opportunities that exist, by providing them with mentorship,  networking, leadership and career advancement opportunities.

Laurie Linz:

2021 was a quiet year for Boulder/Denver, we didn’t hold any local (in person)  meetings. I do have good news and that is I am in process with setting up some in person events again. We’ll approach with caution given the covid situation, but happy to be starting again. 

WiR helps women level up or launch their career in robotics. We welcome those not ready to launch with networking and educational support. Learn, launch, level up.

Sue Keay:

One of the concerns that keeps me awake at night is wondering what important challenges we might have solved already and what technologies are missing because of the lack of diversity in robotics. That’s why Women in Robotics exists, to help to support the small number of women who are contributing to developing robotic technologies and to encourage more to join our ranks. The global list of women in robotics has been an important way to signal the important contributions that women are making in this space and to raise the profile of robotics as a valid career choice for women. Joining WiR is acknowledging that we can be doing better with diversity in robotics and may provide much needed support to a woman in robotics who may be questioning their reason for remaining in such a male-dominated field. My own experience has been that women have always been my greatest supporters and I feel less alone by being part of WiR.

Sue Keay (Robotics Australia) with Erin McColl (Toyota Research Institute) with a Ghost Robotics platform.

Here’s the handy guide to what a great photo looks like with some awesome examples. This is a great opportunity for research labs and robotics companies to showcase their talented women and other underrepresented groups.

Film still by schwarzpictures.com

Meet Maria Vittoria and Inés!

To celebrate Women’s Day 2021 and the 50th anniversary of women’s right to vote in Switzerland, the Swiss NCCRs (National Centres of Competence in Research) wanted to show you who our women researchers are and what a day in their job looks like. The videos are targeted at women and girls of school and undergraduate age to show what day to day life as a scientist is like and make it more accessible. Each NCCR hosted a week where they published several videos covering multiple scientific disciplines, and here we are bringing you what was produced by NCCR Digital Fabrication.

The videos cover a wide range of subjects, including (but not limited to) maths, physics, microbiology, psychology and planetary science, but here we have two women who work with robots.

Maria Vittoria Minniti is a robotics engineer and PhD student, she enhances mobile manipulation capabilities in under-actuated robots.

Inés Ariza is an architect, she uses a robot to 3D print custom metal joints for complex structures.

Head over to YouTube or Instagram (English, German or French) to see the women featured in the #NCCRWomen campaign.

Eliza Kosoy is a Ph.D Student at UC Berkeley. She studied mathematics in college and then worked for Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum at MIT in his computational cognitive science lab. She then started on a Ph.D at UC Berkeley working with Professor Alison Gopnik in 2018. She is most proud of receiving funding and winning an innovation prize that catalyzed her business!  Her startup is called E-liza Dolls. They are 18’’ electronic “liza” dolls that introduce young girls to coding and hardware in a fun way!

She chose this topic because as a woman in STEM she couldn’t help but feel the gender and racial divide and discrepancies in the hard sciences. With her background in child development, it only made sense that it’s best to expose children to these concepts early on so they will be embedded into their hypothesis space as they develop. The hardest challenge for her is “Soldering Errors” and when tiny components fall off without notice.

E-liza Dolls Kickstarter will open very soon in March 2021… We’ll update this post the moment it goes live!

Roboticists in Residence is a Silicon Valley Robotics initiative that provides free studio space and support for creative artists and engineers making a difference, whether it’s modding a Tesla with all the conveniences of the Victorian era or adding to the ROS2 navigational stack. For more information and updates from our Roboticists in Residence

Here’s a Women in Robotics Spotlight, where we share stories from women who are working on all sorts of interesting projects who haven’t yet been featured in our Annual Showcase. We hope these stories provide inspiration to everyone to join us working in the field of robotics. And if you’re a woman working in robotics, why not contribute your story too!

“I love robots however I do find it frustrating when the code that was working the day before doesn’t work. I also find it hard supplying my robots with power. I learn online although I do have a few mentors that help me but it’s really not easy learning on my own. My favourite thing about robotics is making them, and when they work like they should. My robots make people really happy so I love that. I also love succeeding – the feeling when my robots come to life is unbelievable.” says Selin Alara Örnek a high school student who has built five robots, including a robot guide dog for the blind.

Andra Keay  Managing Director at Silicon Valley Robotics, Visiting Scholar at CITRIS People and Robots Lab and Founder at Women in Robotics Why robots? “My background is Human-Robot Interaction, Design, and Communications Technology – which seems a long way from robotics, but our mass communication technologies (including internet) were the most powerful and creative technologies of the 20th century. I’ve always been interested in robots, firstly as a philosophical thing, then as interesting robots became possible, fascinated by the way in which this latest evolution of technology is spreading into society. The sheer scope of the technology is my favorite thing, but historically, the incredible homogeneity or lack of diversity in robotics is my least favorite thing. Fortunately, we’re changing that! We have technology that can solve the world’s greatest challenges, if we can continue to find ways to market and avoid frittering away our advances on novelty devices, games or advertising.” What suggestions do you have for other Women in Robotics? “Every time I was trusted to lead a project I grew a lot and gained confidence. Until then, I hadn’t even realized that I was lacking in confidence. At the time, it just seemed expected of young women to follow other people, not go my own way. I’d like to call out people on being too self deprecating, putting themselves down, or apologizing for themselves. If I had a dollar for every time a women in robotics has said “but I’m not really a….” then I’d be able to fund a great robotics company! I also call on people to stop blaming women for not speaking up or ‘leaning in’ when no one in industry is listening to them!”

Nguyen Sao Mai   Assistant Professor at ENSTA-Paris, IP-Paris and also affiliated at IMT Atlantique Why robots? Nguyen Sao Mai has enabled a robot to coach physical rehabilitation in the projects RoKInter and the experiment KERAAL she coordinated, funded by the European Union through FP-7 project ECHORD++. She has participated in project AMUSAAL, for analysing human activities of daily living through cameras, and CPER VITAAL for developing assistive technologies for the elderly and disabled. She has developed machine learning algorithms combining reinforcement learning and active imitation learning for interactive and multi-task learning, contributing to the start of interactive reinforcement learning. She is currently associate editor of the journal IEEE TCDS and co-chair of the Task force “Action and Perception” of the IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive and Developmental Systems. “Cognitive Developmental Robotics is a wonderful field to allow us to build new assistive robots that can evolve in interaction with humans and adapt to the needs of its users by continual learning. It is also an amazing tool to understand and model biological cognition and learning processes. Robotics is unleashing little by little its potential as a tool to address humankind’s challenges, such as the medical advances, environmental issues or social assistance for the elderly and the disabled. This year’s situation has for instance has shown the usefulness of robotics in medical environments and nursing homes.” What suggestions do you have for other Women in Robotics? “Robotics and artificial intelligence are wonderfully multidisciplinary fields. It can be surprising at first sight that social sciences play an essential role in the scientific advances. They need contributions from researchers of different fields. They could also greatly benefit from the women’s outlook on intelligence or the social role of robots in our future society. “

Selin Alara Örnek High School Student and Inventor Why robots? “I am a 14 year old high school student, I have been coding since I was 8 and building robots since I was 10 years old. I have built 5 robots till now one is a guide dog for blind people, ic4u and ic4u2, I have built 2 versions. I have another robot BB4All which is a school aid robot to help students, teachers and staff its main aim is to prevent bullying. I have also built an Android robot and a Starwars Droid DO as I love both of them. When I was 9 we lost our family dog I was really upset as I don’t have any brothers or sisters and he was like my brother. I wanted to bring him back to life as I was little I dreamed of bringing one of my soft toys to life. Whilst on holiday with my family I saw a guide dog with its blind owner. I love dogs and was really happy to see a dog helping in such way. But then I remembered how sad I was and I thought if the blind person’s dog was to die they would not only lose their best friend but their eyes again too. So I decided to build my robot guide dog ic4u. I am currently rebuilding BB4All as the first one I built was not very strong and made of cardboard now I am printing the pieces with a 3d printer and adding some more features. In my robots, I use image recognition, object detection, face recognition, voice commands, dialogflow, omnidirection movements, Google maps api and Google assistant integration and various sensors. I believe that robots will be part of our everyday life and that we will need them more and more. I love robots so that makes me really happy. My dream is to build a humanoid in the future and send it to space so that it can do research on the black hole.” What suggestions do you have for other Women in Robotics? “I used to love playing games minecraft, etc then in English class my teacher started making games for us to play whilst learning and I really wanted to do so. I asked him how he did it and he told me to have a look at MIT Scratch and encouraged me to code my own games. He told me I could do it and that I should try. That is how I started to learn how to code and I am very happy to have a teacher like him. A lot of girls are not very interested in coding robotics and find what I do very boring. I spend a lot of time taking my robots to events to talk about my robots and show how coding and robotics can be fun and also how technology can be used for good. I recently did a TEDx talk and have given presentations at plenty of local and international events. A lot of other kids get in touch with me to ask questions which I also like to answer. Especially little girls that get in touch as it makes me happy to see them so interested and excited. I also try to send messages to parents in my presentations and interviews, pointing out that they should respect their children’s choices and that they need to give equal opportunities to both their daughters and sons.”

We encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org  We’re a global network with local chapters around the world. The guest speaker at our most recent event, Women in Robotics Melbourne Australia was Nicole Klouet, a PhD candidate in aerospace engineering working on reducing the acoustic impact of drones on society.

Andra Keay, Women in Robotics President Managing Director at Silicon Valley Robotics | Visiting Scholar at CITRIS People and Robots Lab | Startup Advisor & Investor Andra Keay founded Women in Robotics originally under the umbrella of Silicon Valley Robotics, the non-profit industry group supporting innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. Andra’s background is in human-robot interaction and communication theory. She is a trained futurist, founder of the Robot Launch global startup competition, Robot Garden maker space, Women in Robotics and is a mentor, investor and advisor to startups, investors, accelerators and think tanks, with a strong interest in commercializing socially positive robotics and AI. Andra speaks regularly at leading technology conferences, and is Secretary-General of the International Alliance of Robotics Associations. She is also a Visiting Scholar with the UC’s CITRIS People and Robots Research Group.

Allison Thackston Roboticist, Software Engineer & Manager– Waymo Allison Thackston is the Chair of Women in Robotics Website SubCommittee and CoChair of our New Chapter Formation SubCommittee. She is also a Founding Member of the ROS2 Technical Steering Committee. Prior to working at Waymo, she worked at Nuro and was the Manager of Shared Autonomy at Toyota Research Institute, and Principle Research Scientist Intelligent Manipulation. She has an MS in Robotics and MechEng from the University of Hawaii and a BS in EEng from Georgia Tech. With a passion for robots and robotic technologies, she brings energy, dedication, and smarts to all the challenges she faces.

Ariel Anders Roboticist – Robust.AI Ariel Anders is a black feminist roboticist who enjoys spending time with her family and artistic self-expression. Anders is the first roboticist hired at Robust.AI, an early stage robotics startup building the world’s first industrial grade cognitive engine. Anders received a BS in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Cruz and her Doctorate in Computer Science from MIT, where she taught project-based collaborative robotics courses, developed an iOS app for people with vision impairment, and received a grant to install therapy lamps across campus. Her research focused on reliable robotic manipulation with the vision of enabling household helpers.

Cynthia Yeung Robotics Executive & COO, Advisor, Speaker Cynthia Yeung is the Chair of the Women in Robotics Mentoring Program SubCommittee, which will be piloting shortly. She is also a mentor and advisor to robotics companies, accelerators and venture capital firms, and speaks at leading technology conferences. Cynthia studied Entrepreneurship at Stanford, Systems Engineering at UPenn, and did a triple major at The Wharton School, UPenn, where she was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and a Joseph Wharton Scholar. She has led Strategic or International Partnerships at organizations like Google, Capital One and led Product Partnerships at SoftBank Robotics, Checkmate.io and was COO of CafeX. In her own words, “I practice radical candor. I build teams to make myself obsolete. I create value to better human society. I edit robotics research papers for love.”

Hallie Siegel Associate Director, Strategy & Operations at University of Toronto Hallie Siegel is the driving force behind the emerging robotics network in Canada, centered at the University of Toronto. She is a communications professional serving the technology, innovation and research sectors, specifically robotics, automation and AI. She is pursuing a Masters in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCADU, where she was Dean’s Scholar. Hallie was also the first Managing Editor at Robohub.org, the site for robotics news and views, after doing science communications for Raffaelo D’Andrea’s lab at ETH Zurich. In her spare time, she is a multidisciplinary artist, and Chair of the Women in Robotics Vision Workshops.

Kerri Fetzer-Borelli Head of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Community Engagement at Toyota Research Institute Kerri Fetzer-Borelli is the CoChair for the Women in Robotics New Chapter Formation SubCommittee. They have worked as Scientific Data Collector for the military, as a Welder in nuclear power plants, and as the Manager of Autonomous Vehicle Testing, then Prototyping and Robotics Operations at Toyota Research Institute where they now lead DEI and Community Engagement. Kerri mobilizes cross functional teams to solve complex, abstract problems by distilling strategic, actionable items and workflows from big ideas.

Laura Stelzner Robotics Software Engineer at RIOS Laura Stelzner is the Chair of the Women in Robotics Community Management SubCommittee increasing activity and engagement in our online community. By day, she is in charge of software for emerging robotics startup RIOS which provides factory automation as a service, deploying AI powered and dexterous robots on factory assembly lines. Prior to RIOS, Laura worked at Toyota Research Institute, Space Systems Loral, Amazon Labs, Electric Movement and Raytheon. She has a BS in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Cruz and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford.

Laurie Linz, Women in Robotics Treasurer Software Development Engineer in Test at Alteryx Laurie Linz is the Women in Robotics Treasurer, as well as founder of the Boulder/Denver Colorado WiR Chapter. When not working as a software developer or QA tester, Laurie can be found with her hands on an Arduino, or a drone, or a camera. As she says, “I like to build things, break things and solve puzzles all day! Thankfully development and testing allows me to do that. Fred Brooks was right when he wrote that the programmer gains the “sheer joy of making things” and he talks of “castles in the air, from air” as we are only limited by the bounds of human imagination.”

Lisa Winter Head of Hardware at Quartz A roboticist since childhood, Lisa has over 20 years experience designing and building robots. She has competed in Robot Wars and BattleBots competitions since 1996, and is a current judge on BattleBots. She currently holds the position of Head of Hardware at Quartz, an early stage startup working on the future of construction. Her rugged hardware can be seen attached to tower cranes all around California. In her free time she likes to volunteer her prototyping skills to the Marine Mammal Center to aid in the rehab of hundreds of animals each year. She is a Founding Board Member of Women in Robotics and Chair of the Artwork/Swag SubCommittee.

Sue Keay, Women in Robotics Secretary CEO at Queensland AI Hub and Chair of the Board of Directors of Robotics Australia Group Currently CEO of Queensland AI Hub, after leading cyber-physical systems research for CSIRO’s Data61. Previously Sue set-up the world’s first robotic vision research centre. She led the development of Australia’s first robotics roadmap, the Robotics Australia Network and the Queensland Robotics Cluster. A Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, she founded and Chairs the Board of Robotics Australia Group. Sue also serves on the Boards of CRC ORE, Queensland AI Hub and represents Australia in the International Alliance of Robotics Associations.

With such a go-getting Board of Directors, you can be assured that Women in Robotics is preparing for an active 2021. As of 1/1/21, we had 1270 members in our online community, 900 additional newsletter subscribers, and six active chapters in the USA, Canada, UK and Australia. All Women in Robotics events abide by our Code of Conduct and we offer it for use at any robotics event or conference.

Our focus for 2021 is on:

• Project Inspire – our annual 30 women in robotics you need to know about list, plus regular updates, spotlights, and wikipedia pages for women in robotics.
• Project Connect – forming new chapters, promoting our online community, and enjoying  regular member led activities and events, under a Code of Conduct.
• Project Advance – piloting a mentoring program, providing educational resources for women in robotics, and improving accountability metrics in our workplaces.

We’d also like to thank our two Founding Board Members, Sabine Hauert of the Hauert Lab at University of Bristol UK and Founder of Robohub.org and Sarah Osentoski SVP of Engineering at Iron Ox, who are leaving the WiR Board but who will be leading our new Women in Robotics Advisory Board, another new initiative for 2021.

You can subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on our activities, to sign up for our speaker database or volunteering opportunities, or to show your support as an ally. Please support our activities with a one off or recurring donation (tax deductible in the USA). 

Introducing the seventh post in our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Melonee Wise, Maren Bennewitz and Alicia Casals and from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2014. These women have pioneered foundational research in robotics, created organizations of impact, and inspired the next generations of robotics researchers, of all ages.

Melonee Wise CEO of Fetch Robotics Melonee Wise(featured in 2014), now a CEO of Fetch Robotics has been designing, building, and programming robotic hardware for an autonomous boat, autonomous car, personal robot platforms, battlebots, and several low cost platforms since 19 years. At Fetch Robotics, she and her team provide the best AMR or Autonomous Mobile Robot solutions for the logistics industry through a fleet of products that provide ‘On Demand Autonomy’. Fetch Robotics was also the first winner of Overall Excellence Award in the Silicon Valley Robotics ‘Good Robot’ Industry Awards in 2020. Wise was recognized by Silicon Valley Business Journal as 40 under 40 and by Technology Review TR35 as a ’40 female founders who crushed it’ in 2016. She also received the Women of Influence in 2017 Silicon Valley Business Journal. She has more than 4 Patents and more than 20 published articles. Wise received the Distinguished Alumni Award from University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana in 2016. After the ceremony Wise shared that, “Women in Engineering is definitely a small community. There’s only so many women in engineering and there’s only so many engineers in robotics. So you’re looking at a pretty thin cross-section of a population that is not as diverse as we all hope it would be. And so sometimes it can be very challenging. But I actually think it’s harder as a start-up entrepreneur to be a woman than it is to be potentially a roboticist.”

Maren Bennewitz Professor at the University of Bonn Maren Bennewitz (featured in 2014) is a professor for humanoid robots and vice rector for IT at the University of Bonn and her research focuses on robots acting in human environments. She and her team have developed several innovative solutions for robotic systems co-existing and interacting with humans such as 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 also on the Executive Board of the Cluster of Excellence PhenoRob and the Center for Mind Research since 2019. Bennewitz’s paper was selected as one of the outstanding papers and best papers at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids) and Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) in 2018. She also received one of the best paper award at the International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR) and the European Conference of Mobile Robots (ECMR) in 2019. She has more than 8000 citations and 150 publications. Bennewitz was Inspired by the participation in the Minerva project, led by Sebastian Thrun back in 1998, where she and the team programmed a robot to act as a museum tour guide in the National Museum of American History. ” My favorite thing is doing experiments on real robots evaluating novel developed techniques,” says Bennewitz. “Which is also one of my least favorite things since it is so time-consuming to get the algorithms running on real-world systems with real sensor data, even when the algorithms worked reliably in simulation before.”

Alicia Casals Professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) Alicia Casals (featured 2014) is professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) doing her research in medical robotics, mainly in the surgical field, and has been collaborating with companies and other non-academic institutions to find the solutions to the challenges that come with Integration of robotics to real situations. She has been recently cofounder of two companies in the robotic medical field. Casals received the “Nit de la Robòtica” award as recognition of her research and professional career, awarded in 2019 by the Industrial Engineers of Catalunya. She has been active as referent model that drives scientific and technical vocations amongst young women while taking into account the human side within the area. Casals is significantly involved with the IEEE, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology (IEEE RAS and IEEE EMBS), European Robotics Network (EURON), and founded the Spanish Robotics Chapter. In this 2015 Oral History for Engineering and Technology History Wiki, Casals describes what got her started in robotics, her projects, her startup experience and her message to all the young roboticists, “It’s important to think on the ethics of robotics, on the efficiency of the work, and so trying to really solve what the problem is, because it’s a very wide area, so it’s easy that the projects solve things but don’t reach anything in particular. But because robotics has a wide field of applications, and they can be very good and can be used as an assistant tool. We are working in the medical field, so we basically work in robotics for aiding people. So that is a fantastic area of research we consider.”

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

Welcome to the first of our Women in Robotics Spotlights, where we share stories from women who haven’t yet been featured in our Annual Showcase but who are working on all sorts of interesting projects. We hope these stories provide inspiration to everyone to join us working in the field of robotics. And if you’re a woman working in robotics, why not contribute your story too!

“Making robots communicate with humans in natural language is a fascinating challenge. There is a lot going on during interactions between robots and humans. Humans make gestures, observe or interact with visible objects in the environment, and display emotions. What motivates me is equipping social robots with the ability to interact seamlessly, by recognizing a given situation and talking about it” says Dimitra Gkatzia who specializes in Natural Language Generation for Human-Robot Interaction.

Ecem Tuglan The Mecademi of Team Think Tank | Cofounder of Fenom Robotics Ecem Tuglan is a The Mecademi of Team Think Tank and Cofounder of Fenom Robotics who is active Robopsychologist working on Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, Neurophilosophy, Human-Robot interaction, Biopolitics, Robopsychology, Cognitive Sciences and Political Theory. At Fenom Robotics, she and her team builds holograms displaying humanoid robots. She is also working on projects with Dr. Ravi Margasahayam from NASA as a robopsychologist. Tuglan says her interest in robots started during her childhood when she prefered robotic toys and electronic gadgets and this childhood obsession turned more professional when she started studying philosophy. And still, she is always intrigued by how from micro scale to macro scale, everything is changing with robotics and how cell-like robots can save us from various diseases while AI based astrobots can find new home-planets. She enjoys the width of the research in robotics and its interdisciplinary knowledge enhancing our creativity and productivity because we are able to combine anything in our mind to this field.

Tuong Anh Ens CEO and Founder at Go West Robotics Tuong Anh Ens is CEO and founder of Go West Robotics which is a robotics software consulting Company. Exposed to many exciting robotics projects and having very good connections in the robotics community, she decided to focus on helping robotics companies succeed. Her main objective here was to reduce hurdles that occur for so many creative and revolutionizing ideas to take shape and get implemented. Thus, at Go West Robotics, she and her team work with the world’s leading robotics companies to build better automation systems and robots. Ens enjoys the challenges with the future in robotics, ever-changing unknown and our ability to push beyond the boundaries of what was previously inconceivable. Going through the hurdles of both the personal and professional life balance herself, she strongly believes in hardwork and perseverance and believes in her team at Go West Robotics for the accomplishments and growth in robotics.

Sravanthi Kanchi  Data  Engineer at Bayer Crop Science | The Founding Member of The Founders Vault Sravanthi Kanchi is a data engineer at Bayer Crop Science and the founding member of the Founders Vault. She loves learning, building and researching about building robots and she is currently working to build the home cleaning robot. She enjoys the ideas coming into life in robotics. She aspires to make an impact into people’s lives by building something useful for mankind as she believes in robotics contribution in transformation of healthcare , ergonomics, space, industrial sectors etc.

Kajal Gada Content creator at Youtube Kajal Gada is a robotics software engineer and youtuber. She has 3 years of professional experience. At her last job at Brain Corp, she helped support Brain OS – a software for autonomous mobile vehicles. Her interest in robotics was sparked by a video of drones doing flips autonomously by her mentor who continuously encouraged her to explore robotics.  Gada started working on robotics on her own starting with creating her own robot for simple projects such as a line follower and obstacle avoidance and then further enhanced her knowledge in the area with Masters in Robotics from University of Maryland. As the way of giving back to the robotics community she creates and posts tutorials in her youtube channel for free open source software webots to create projects that are beginner friendly, and thus making it easy for anyone to get started with robotics. She has been interviewing existing women in robotics in her youtube channel as well and wants to continue it to inspire younger women and set an example of how someone looking like you started it and did it.

Dimitra Gkatzia Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University Dimitra Gkatzia is an associate professor at School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University where she leads a UK-funded project in robotics, CiViL. CiViL aims to provide robots with human-like abilities, such as reasoning and communicating using commonsense. She is also a co-founder of the workshop series NLG4HRI, which aims to bring together researchers interested in developing NLG methods for Human-Robot Interaction.  Gkatzia’s expertise is in Natural Language Generation (NLG), i.e. teaching computers “how to talk”, Data-to-text generation, AI, Machine Learning, summarization of time-series data. With her proficiency in this field she is dedicated to  making dialogue systems (such as Alexa, Siri) converse naturally, by enhancing their responses with commonsense and world knowledge. She entertains the far-ranging scope and the endless possibilities for robotic applications. “Robotics has shown promising results in assistive technology, education, and health”, says Gkatzia who envisions a future where humans and robots coexist and collaborate in domestic, public and work settings and robots used to solve real-world problems.

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

Introducing the sixth post in our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Ruzena Bajcsy and Radhika Nagpal from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2013 and 2014. These women have pioneered foundational research in robotics, created organizations of impact, and inspired the next generations of robotics researchers, of all ages.

“Being an engineer at heart, I really always looked at how technology can help people? That was my model with robots, and in fact, my research in the medical area, as well as how can we make things not just empirical, but predictable, ” says Ruzena Bajcsy, expressing the motivation that guides her in both medicine and robotics.

Ruzena Bajcsy NEC Chair and Professor at University of California Berkeley | Founder of HART Ruzena Bajcsy (featured 2014) is a National Executive Committee (NEC) Chair and Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. She has been a pioneer in the field since 1988 when she laid out the engineering agenda for active perception. Bajcsy works on modeling people using robotic technology and is inspired by recent animal behavioral studies, especially as they pertain to navigation, namely measuring and extracting non-invasively kinematic and dynamic parameters of the individual to assess their physical movement capabilities or limitations and their respective solutions. Professor Ruzena Bajcsy became the founder of many famous research laboratories, such as, for example, the GRASP laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, CITRIS Institute and currently the HART (Human-Assistive Robotic Technologies) laboratory. Bajcsy has accomplished and received many prestigious awards in her 60 years in Robotics. Since, last featured she has received the Simon Ramo Founders Award Recipient in 2016, for her seminal contributions to the fields of computer vision, robotics, and medical imaging, and technology and policy leadership in computer science education and research. She also received the 2020 NCWIT Pioneer in Tech Award which is awarded to the role models whose legacies continue to inspire generations of young women to pursue computing and make history in their own right. Throughout her career she has been at the intersection of human and machine ways of interpreting the world, with research interests that include Artificial Intelligence; Biosystems and Computational Biology; Control, Intelligent Systems, and Robotics; Human-Computer Interaction; and “Bridging Information Technology to Humanities and Social Sciences. In her recent interview at the National Center of Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) to the women who are starting in robotics and AI, she says, ” I have a few rules in my book, so to speak. First of all, when you are young, learn as much mathematics and physics as you can. It is never enough of that knowledge…….. Number two, you have to be realistic. What, with the current technology, can you verify? Because in engineering science it’s not just writing equations, but it’s also building systems where you can validate your results.”

Radhika Nagpal Fred Kavli Professor at Harvard | Cofounder of Root Robotics Radhika Nagpal  (featured in 2013) is a Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. At her Self-Organizing Systems Research Group she works on Biologically-inspired Robot Collectives, including novel hardware design, decentralized collective algorithms and theory, and global-to-local swarm programming and Biological Collectives, including mathematical models and field experiments with social insects and cellular morphogenesis. Her lab’s Kilobots are licensed and sold by KTeam inc and over 8000 robots exist in dozens of research labs worldwide. Nagpal has won numerous prestigious awards since 2013. She was distinguished as the top ten scientists and engineers who mattered by Nature 10 in 2014. For her excellent empowerment and contribution to next-generation, she received the McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising at Harvard in 2015. She was named an AAAI fellow & Amazon Scholar in 2020. “Science is of course itself an incredible manifestation of collective intelligence, but unlike the beautiful fish school that I study, I feel we still have a much longer evolutionary path to walk….. There’s this saying that I love: Who does science determines what science gets done…… I believe that we can choose our rules and we can engineer not just robots, but we can engineer our own human collective, and if we do and when we do, it will be beautiful”, says Nagpal in her Ted Talk “Harnessing the intelligence of the collective” from 2017 which has more than 1 million views. Nagpal is also a co-founder and scientific advisor of Root Robotics which has been acquired by iRobot.  Here, she and her team designed Root, an educational robot that drives on whiteboards with magnet+wheels, senses colors, and draws under program control which can be used to teach programming across all ages. With Root, she aims to transform the home and classroom experiences with programming, by making it tangible and personal. “Every kid should learn to code in a fun way, that enhances their interests, and that inspires them to become creative technologies themselves,” says Nagpal.

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

Introducing the fifth post in our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Robin Murphy and Ayanna Howard from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2013 and 2014. These women give unstintingly of their time, creating robots that improve the quality of life, advancing research, inspiring and supporting students, and sharing their passion for engineering with the world.

Ayanna Howard says “I think as engineers we have an amazing power, where we can take people’s wishes and convert them into reality”

And Robin Murphy agrees, “My job is so incredibly fulfilling, it’s about the science and technology and the way it could be used for societal good, that’s a big deal to me,”

Robin Murphy Raytheon Professor at Texas A&M University | Director of Humanitarian Robotics and AI Laboratory Robin Murphy (featured in 2013), is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in Texas A & M and Director of the non-profit Humanitarian Robotics and AI Laboratory, (formerly known as Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR). She is a distinguished Disaster Roboticist pioneering the advancement of AI and mobile robotics in unstructured and extreme environments. At CRASAR, she has been actively supplying her rescue robot since 9/11 in 2001 and has now participated in more than 30 disasters which include building collapses, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, marine mass casualty events, nuclear accidents, tsunamis, underground mine explosions, and volcanic eruptions, in five different countries. And she has developed and taught classes in robotics for emergency response and public safety for over 1,000 members of 30 agencies from seven countries. Murphy was named as one of the top ’30 Most Innovative Women Professors Alive Today’ in 2016 and the Engineering Faculty Fellow for Innovation in High-Impact Learning Experiences. She is also the recipient of the Eugene L. Lawler Award in 2014 for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics. She has more than 400 publications and 17000 citations, 4 books (Introduction to AI Robotics, Disaster Robotics, and Robotics Through Science-Fiction Vols 1 and 2). In her Robotics Through Science-Fiction books, Murphy explains what real robotics and AI can and can’t do alongside classic robot stories from Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick and Vernor Vinge. Murphy is also the chair of Robotics for Infectious Diseases, a non-profit organization which uses robotics and technology in over 20 countries for public health, public safety, and continuity of work and life. She has been tracking the wide range of work that robots have been pioneering in COVID19 as described in her recent article in The Conversation, “Robots are playing many roles in the coronavirus crisis – and offering lessons for future disaster”. “My job is so incredibly fulfilling, it’s about the science and technology and the way it could be used for societal good, that’s a big deal to me,” says Murphy in CNN’s the Great Big story in 2018. And Murphy’s TED talk from 2015 “These robots come to the rescue after a disaster” has more than 1 million views.

Ayanna Howard Professor and Chair of School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech | Director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS) Ayanna Howard (featured 2014), is currently the Chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is on the Board of Directors for Autodesk. She is also the founder and director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS) where she and her team study and develop techniques to enhance the autonomous capabilities of intelligent systems in different areas such as Human-Robot Interaction, Assistive Robotics, Education and Robotics, Robot Learning, Human-Robot Trust, and Space and Field Robotics. In 2021, Howard will take up the position of Dean of Engineering at The Ohio State University. Her contributions to robotics has been recognized many times since 2013! She received an A. Richard Newton Educator ABIE Award in 2014 from the Anita Borg Institute. In 2015, she was listed in The Root 100 website, as one of the most prestigious African American achievers, and recognized by Business Insider as one of the ’23 most powerful women engineers in the world’. In 2016 she received the Computer Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award and Brown Engineering Alumni Medal. She was an AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador from 2016 to 2017 which is designed to showcase the modern voices that are addressing the grand challenges facing humanity and to influence policy makers. She also received the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award in 2018 for her contribution in bringing girls, underrepresented minorities, and people with disabilities into computing through programs related to robotics. In 2020, for the demonstrable and sustained societal impact of her work she received Georgia Tech Outstanding Achievement in Research Innovation Award 2020. In 2020, Howard co-founded the Black in Robotics community organization, and also became the first black woman to achieve IEEE RAS Fellow status for her contributions to human-robot interaction systems. She has more than 350 papers, 4000 citations, and recently published an audiobook “Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI” about how the tech world’s racial and sexual biases are infecting the next generation of robots and AI, with profoundly negative effects for humans of all genders and races. “Robotics is me, It’s part of my life …. I think as engineers we have an amazing power, where we can take people’s wishes and convert them into reality.” says Howard, who also founded Zyrobotics where she has been developing assistive technologies for children with disabilities. “Robots can improve quality of life; Humans inherently trust them”, says Howard in her TedX talk where she explains how humans develop emotional attachments to social or interactive robots.

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

Introducing the second of our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Maja Mataric and Arianna Menciassi from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2013. Since we started Women in Robotics has focused on positive role models in robotics, highlighting women’s career work, but we’d like to point out just how much energy that these amazing women extend to outreach, to inspiring and supporting their junior colleagues and to science management, supporting and advancing the increasingly complex machinery of research.

For example, Ariana Menciasi has held many editorial and technical committee roles, and manages both European and extra-European research projects, which involves extensive collaboration efforts. And Maja Mataric started the US Women in Robotics Research Database, which inspired similar initiatives in Canada, with the goal that you should always be able to find a female robotics researcher for interviews, positions, panels and conferences.

Maja Mataric Interim Vice President at University of Southern California | Founder of Embodied Inc Maja Matarić (featured 2013) is now Interim Vice President of Research at the University of Southern California (USC) and the founding director of the USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems. She is a pioneer of socially assistive robotics (SAR) which focuses on developing robots that provide therapies and care through social interaction, especially for special-needs populations; her Interaction’s Lab has worked with children with autism, stroke patients, elderly users with Alzheimer’s, and many others. Matarić received the Distinguished Professor award at USC in 2019. She became a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2017 and in 2015 she was listed in Top 100 Inspiring Women in STEM by Insight into Diversity. Matarić was also a recipient of the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award in Innovation in 2013 and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) in 2011. She has more than 650 publications and 39000 citations and is very passionate about mentoring and empowering students and communicating the excitement of interdisciplinary research and careers in STEM to a diverse audience including K-12 students and teachers, women, and other underrepresented groups in engineering. In 2016, Matarić founded Embodied Inc, which in 2020 launched Moxie, a socially assistive robot for child development that provides “play-based learning that is paced to weekly themes and missions with content designed to promote social, emotional, and cognitive learning”. As Liz Ohanion at KCET said, “Maja Mataric is a robotics powerhouse and, when she’s not inspiring the next generation of engineers, she’s working on a series of robots that could very well change the lives of the people who use them.”

Arianna Menciassi Full professor at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna Arianna Menciassi (featured in 2013) is now a full professor in Biomedical Engineering at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA). She is also a team leader of the “Surgical Robotics & Allied Technologies” Area at The BioRobotics Institute in SSSA where she has been advancing intelligent devices that permit medical or surgical procedures to be performed in a minimally invasive regime, and in an increasingly reliable, reproducible and safe way. As Menciassi says in her interview at Autonomous Robotic Surgery : “I am looking for solutions for giving the best care to the patients not only using scissor and knife but also using energy for example ultra sounds, focused ultra sounds, when you take a pill this is sort of autonomous treatment, this is not an autonomous robot but it is an autonomous treatment.” Menciassi has received The Women Innovation Award, for female scientists in biomedical robotics, by WomenTech in 2017. Her SupCam project was awarded as Special Electronic Design with the Compasso d’Oro, ADI Associazione per il Disegno Industriale (Golden compass, Association for Industrial Design) in 2016 for her cost-effective and minimally invasive endoscopic device. Also, the FUTURA project, a novel robotic platform for Focused Ultrasound Surgery (FUS) in clinics, which was coordinated by Menciassi was awarded the Technology Award for the Society of Medical and Innovation Technology (SMIT) in 2015. In an already prolific career, Menciassi has more than 19000 citations, 650 publications, 7 book chapters and almost 50 patents in her name and has been constantly improving the fields of surgical and biomedical robotics. Her vision for the future is strong, “Maybe in 30 years all drugs will be more robotic and let’s say autonomous because they will be able to reach some specific areas of the human body to treat cells or to treat a disease.”

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

“Girls of Steel Robotics (featured 2014) was founded in 2010 at Carnegie Mellon University’s Field Robotics Center as FRC Team 3504. The organization now serves multiple FIRST robotics teams offering STEM opportunities for people of all ages.

Since 2019, Girls of Steel also organizes FIRST Ladies, an online community for anyone involved in FIRST robotics programs who supports girls and women in STEM. Their mission statement reflects their commitment to empowering everyone for success in STEM: “Girls of Steel empowers everyone, especially women and girls, to believe they are capable of success in STEM.”

Girls of Steel celebrated their 10th year in FIRST robotics with a Virtual Gala in May 2020 featuring a panel of four Girls of Steel alumni showcasing a range of STEM opportunities. One is a PhD student in Robotics at CMU, two are working as engineers, and one is a computer science teacher. Girls of Steel are extremely proud of their alumni, of whom 80% are studying or working in STEM fields.

In August 2020, Girls of Steel successfully organized 3 weeks of virtual summer camps and were also able to run 4 teams in a virtual FIRST LEGO League program from September 2020. Girls of Steel also restructured their FIRST team and launched two new sub teams; Advocacy and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) focusing on continuing their efforts to advocate for after-school STEM programs, and for creating an inclusive environment that welcomes all Girls of Steel members. The DEI sub team manages a suggestion box where members can anonymously post ideas for team improvements.

In 2016, Robohub published a follow up on the Girls of Steel and their achievements.

In 2017, Girls of Steel won the 2017 Engineering Inspiration award (Greater Pittsburgh Regional), which “celebrates outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering within a team’s school and community.”

In 2018, Girls of Steel won the 2018 Regional Chairman’s Award (Greater Pittsburgh Regional), the most prestigious award at FIRST, it honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST.

In 2019, Girls of Steel won the 2019 Gracious Professionalism Award (Greater Pittsburgh Regional), which celebrates the outstanding demonstration of FIRST Core Values such as continuous Gracious Professionalism and working together both on and off the playing field.

And in 2020, Girls of Steel members, Anna N. and Norah O., received 2020 Dean’s List Finalist Awards (Greater Pittsburgh Regional) which reflects their ability to lead their teams and communities to increased awareness for FIRST and its mission while achieving personal technical expertise and accomplishment.

Clearly, all the Girls of Steel over the last ten years are winners. Many women in robotics today point to an early experience in a robotics competition as the turning point when they decided that STEM, particularly robotics, was going to be in their future. We want to thank all the Girls of Steel for being such great role models, and sharing the joy and fun of building robots with other girls/women. It’s working! (And it’s worth it!)

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

“Girls are natural engineers, highly capable in maths and physics. We need to show them that these tools can be used to design a better world….So far, we’ve done a poor job of communicating to girls the very powerful impact they can make through an engineering career.” Croft continues, providing us with the inspiration to introduce the second of our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Elizabeth Croft, Helen Greiner and Heather Knight from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2013.

Elizabeth Croft Dean and Faculty of Engineering at Monash University Elizabeth Croft (featured 2013) is now a Dean and Faculty of Engineering division at Monash University in Australia, advancing human-robot interaction, industrial robotics, trajectory generation and diversity in STEM. Previously she was the Founding Director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of British Columbia (UBC). As the Marshall Bauder Professor in Engineering Economics, Business and Management Training from 2015-2017, she launched the Master of Engineering Leadership degrees at the UBC. Recognized as one of the 100 most powerful women in Canada in 2014 by Women’s Executive Network, Croft also received the RA McLachlan Peak Career Award for Professional Engineering in the Province of British Columbia, Canada in 2018. She is a fellow of the ASME, Engineers Australia, Engineers Canada, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. She is also the recipient of other awards such as the Wendy MacDonald Award, Diversity Champion, Vancouver Board of Trade of 2016, and Just Desserts Award of University British Columbia, Alma Mater Society in 2015. She has more than 200 research publications and almost 6000 citations. She is an advocate for women in Engineering and has an exceptional record of propelling women’s representation and participation in engineering. As the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Chair for Women in Science and Engineering (2010-2015), she worked with partners in funding agencies, industry, academe, and the education system on comprehensive strategies to improve women’s participation and retention in the STEM disciplines at all levels. During this period Croft successfully increased female enrollment in Engineering to 30%.

Helen Greiner CEO, Cofounder and Founder of Tertill, iRobot and Cyphy Works Helen Greiner (featured in 2013), is now a founder of Tertill , in addition to founding iRobot and CyPhy Works (aka Aria Insights). Tertill is a solar-powered, weed-snipping robot for home gardens patrolling throughout the day and looks somewhat like an outdoor Roomba, one of the products from iRobot, the world’s first commercially successful consumer robotics product. Greiner has received numerous awards and accolades, including being named an “Innovator for the Next Century” by Technology Review Magazine. She received the DEMO God Award at the DEMO Conference in 2014 and was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Leadership (PAGE) by US President, Barack Obama and US Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker. She was recognized for leadership in the design, development, and application of practical robots by the National Academy of Engineering, and was named “woman of the year” at Wentworth Institute of Technology in 2018. In 2018, she was also sworn in as a Highly Qualified Expert for the US Army. You can hear her speak in 2021 at the finals of the $2m GoFly competition . As a child Greiner became fascinated by the robots of StarWars, particularly the three-foot-tall spunky R2D2. Says Greiner “He had moods, emotions, and dare I say, his own agenda. This was exciting to me—he was a creature, an artificial creature.” Consistently pioneering in building the helping robots to perform dull, dirty and dangerous jobs and launching robotics into the consumer market since 2008, she says, “If we don’t take robots to the next level, we’ll have a lot of explaining to do to our grandchildren.”

Heather Knight Assistant Professor at Oregon State University Heather Knight, (featured 2013) is now an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Oregon State University and directs the CHARISMA* Research Lab. In CHARISMA Research Lab, she operationalizes methods for the performing arts to make more emotive and engaging robots, exploring minimal social robots, robot ethics, charismatic machines, and multi-robot/multi-human social interaction. Knight has presented a TED talk: Silicon-Based Comedy in 2010 where she demonstrated a robot stand-up comedian “Data” which has gotten almost 1 million views. She was mentioned in Forbes List’s 30 under 30 in Science and named one of AdWeek’s top 100 creatives in 2017. In 2017, she was also a Robotic Artist in Residence at X, the Moonshot Factory. Her installations have been featured at the Smithsonian-Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, TED, Pop! Tech, LACMA, SIGGRAPH, and the Fortezza da Basso in Florence, Italy. She is also the Assistant Director of Robotics at Humanity+ and a fellow at the Hybrid Realities Institute and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellow. She is also a founder of Marilyn Monrobot, a robot theater company performing comedy, dance and even Rube Goldberg Machine installations. Here, she successfully organizes the annual ‘Robot Film Festival’ which awards Botskers to various robot films and robot film stars. The film archives make for great viewing.

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

In spite of the amazing contributions of women in the field of robotics, it’s still possible to attend robotics conferences or see panels that don’t have a single female face. Let alone seeing people of color represented! Civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman said that “You can’t be what you don’t see”. Women in Robotics was formed to show that there were wonderful female role models in robotics, as well as providing an online professional network for women working in robotics and women who’d like to work in robotics. We’re facing an incredible skill shortage in the rapidly growing robotics industry, so we’d like to attract newcomers from other industries, as well as inspiring the next generation of girls. Introducing the first of our new series of Women in Robotics Updates, featuring Sarah Bergbreiter, Aude Billard and Cynthia Breazeal from our first “25 women in robotics you need to know about” list in 2013.

Sarah Bergbreiter Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Principle Investigator at the Microrobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University Sarah Bergbreiter (featured 2013) as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and acting director of Maryland Robotics Center has now moved to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a full professor, expanding the frontiers of knowledge pertaining to the actuation, sensing, power, and computational aspects of making tiny robots at Microrobotics lab at CMU. She was made a 2019 Fellow in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for her significant and critical engineering achievements, active practice, and membership in the organization. She was the winner of the Institute of System Research’s Outstanding Faculty Award in 2017 and received the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) awards from the U.S. Army in 2019. She also made InStyle’s ’50 Badass Women’ list in 2019. “Inspired by Star Wars, the professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon made her first foray into robotics at age 7 or 8. “I tried to build a robot to clean my room,” she recalls, laughing. Now she has loftier goals. Her robots, which can be smaller than an ant and up to the size of a Tic Tac, may eventually be used for microsurgery, search and rescue, and safety inspections for hard-to-reach spaces, like inside jet engines. She doesn’t envision a dystopian world where robots replace humans, however: “You want robots to complement humans.” She has more than 100 publications with almost 1500 citations and her 2014 TED talk about microrobotics has been viewed 1.68 million times. She specializes in micro/nanorobots and has brought impressive capabilities in millimeter-sized jumpers which can overcome obstacles 80x their height. She collaborates with experts from biology, neuroscience, dynamics and other fields to build agile robots with mechanosensors.

Aude Billard Professor and Director of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory at EPFL Aude Billard (featured 2013) is now a full professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA), teaching robots to perform skills with the level of dexterity displayed by humans in similar tasks. These robots move seamlessly with smooth motions. They adapt adequately and on-the-fly to the presence of obstacles and to sudden perturbations, hence mimicking humans’ immediate response when facing unexpected and dangerous situations. Billard has been nominated for the Outstanding Women in Academia by Swiss National Science Foundation, where she is a member of the Scientific Research Council, and was also nominated to the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. She is currently the vice president for publication activities of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, the associate editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics, elected president of the EPFL Teaching Body Assembly, and elected president of the EPFL Teachers’ Council. In 2017, Billard received a European Research Council Advanced Grant for Skill Acquisition in Humans and Robots. She is also cofounder of AICA, a young start-up from EPFL, active in the domain of artificial intelligence and robotics, which provides novel software for creating safe and flexible installations of industrial robots, with a modular approach. She specializes in building robots that can interact with, learn from, and help humans. She has also been studying the neural and cognitive processes underpinning imitation learning in humans. She has over 500 publications and more than 18000 citations, and you can watch her plenary talk at AAAI 2020 on ‘Combining Machine Learning and Control for Reactive Robots’.

Cynthia Breazeal Professor and Associate Director at MIT Media Lab | Founder and Director of the Personal Robots Group | Founder, Chief Scientist and Chief Experience Officer at Jibo Cynthia Breazeal (featured 2013) is currently a professor at the MIT Media Lab where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group. She is also Associate Director of the Media Lab in charge of new strategic initiatives and spearheads MIT’s K-12 education initiative on AI. She is a leading expert in designing personal robots that naturally interact with humans and specializes in balancing AI, UX design, and understanding the psychology of engagement to design personified AI technologies that promote human flourishing and personal growth. Breazeal was recently elected as a Fellow of the AAAI Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for significant sustained contributions. She has more than 350 publications and 23000 citations, and has spoken at prominent venues such as TED, the World Economic Forum, the UN, SXSW, CES. She was recognized as a Finalist in the National Design Awards. In 2014, she received the George R. Stibitz Computer & Communications Pioneer Award for seminal contributions to the development of Social Robotics and Human Robot Interaction. Breazeal has also been recognized for her entrepreneurship. She is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, the pioneering crowdfunded social robot featured on the cover of TIME magazine’s 25 Best Inventions of 2017. Her journey with Jibo isn’t over. NTT Disruption is relaunching the robot as an enterprise product in healthcare and education. Breazeal shared her experiences in a recent IROS 2020 plenary ‘Living with Social Robots: from Research to Commercialization and Back’. Make sure you watch the extra feature ‘Jibo Succeeded by Failing’ which includes the classic goodbye. We can’t wait to see the hello.

Want to keep reading? There are 180 more stories on our 2013 to 2020 lists. Why not nominate someone for inclusion next year!

And we encourage #womeninrobotics and women who’d like to work in robotics to join our professional network at http://womeninrobotics.org

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

• Lynn Urbina on FIRST, Watson and the Girls of Steel
• Six weeks to build a robot: A FIRST photo essay
• Getting into the driver’s seat: Girls of Steel tell us how they got hooked on robotics
• FIRST 2013 photo essay: Girls of Steel in the trenches at the FRC championship finals

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

Andrew Williams is shown with a couple of girls from the CompuGirls project. He says, “In this project we’re communicating to the girls that we’re going to teach you how to use these technology tools with robotics to advance your community, better understand yourself and show that you do belong in technology and you have some valuable contributions you can make.”
Photo credit: John C. Williams, Humanoid Engineering & Intelligent Robotics (HEIR) Lab, Marquette University

If one of the keys to building a future technology workforce is finding new ways to engage women and minorities in computer science, giving teenage girls an understanding of what the field is, and how they might contribute, matters.

Social scientist Kimberly Scott has been doing this since 2007, when she launched a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project called CompuGirls. Based at Arizona State University (ASU), the project reaches girls aged 8-12 from under-resourced schools in the Greater Phoenix area and Colorado, with activities to develop technical skills and encourage computational thinking in a way that’s culturally relevant.

CompuGirls is designed to reach girls outside of their normal school day. Opportunities include a one-week program during Fall or Spring Break, an 8th-period class over a couple of semesters, and a three-week summer class. In Phoenix, Scott is able to combine all three courses over five weeks. The activities include digital storytelling; working with Scratch software to build a game or simulation related to a social or community issue the girls have identified; and exposure to coding through researching a topic and putting it together in a virtual world. Some of the girls’ work is accessible at the CompuGirls website.

In engaging the girls in computer science, Scott and her team have to challenge assumptions that the field is boring and doesn’t relate to their interests.

“CompuGirls instills a sense of discipline, and we do see gains in their technical knowledge and comfort,” said Scott. “We also see that their definition of what a technologist is needs to be expanded.”

The program offers opportunities to interact with guest speakers from various scientific fields and to go on field trips to companies such as Intel.

In addition, taking on technical challenges such as performing debugging – which students may complain about at the time – gives them a sense of accomplishment; and Scott’s research shows that it makes them more interested in ideas related to computational thinking. Where Scott has analyzed the students’ outcomes across comparison groups, the CompuGirls participants have shown a greater ability to project themselves into the future, and are more able to articulate how what they do in the present can help them meet their future goals.

Being able to imagine a future identity as a technologist is key.

“The technology workforce is made up primarily of men,” said Scott. “It’s one thing to say we want to broaden the pipeline. I tell the girls I want them to transform the system and technologies to make them more inclusive.”

CompuGirls participants learn how to program the robots as well as study social aspects of human to robot interactions. They also look at questions such as how robots should interact with different kinds of people, and whether there’s a way for them to express emotions.
Photo credit: John C. Williams, Humanoid Engineering and Intelligent Robotics (HEIR) Lab, Marquette University

There is evidence that the CompuGirls experience has a positive impact on the educational experience of its graduates.

A couple of girls from the original class of 60 CompuGirls became first-generation college students at ASU, and worked with Scott in a Research Experiences for Undergraduates project over the summer. One of them contacted their CompuGirls classmates and found that among 10 who were at ASU as first-generation college students, three had declared a STEM-related major. All attributed their success in part to CompuGirls.

“It helped them articulate their voices,” said Scott, whose work earned her recognition as a White House Champion of Change last year. “They could say, ‘I can do this. I belong in this setting.'”

Giving young women that sense of belonging is also an emphasis of Andrew Williams, who heads the Humanoid Engineering & Intelligent Robotics (HEIR) Lab at Marquette University. Indeed, this is a theme of Williams’ recent TEDx talk, Belonging in Technology: What I learned from Steve Jobs. Prior to his appointment at Marquette, among his accomplishments was leading Spelman College’s SpelBots robotic soccer team to competing successfully at several international competitions.

A recent NSF-funded STEM for All meeting co-led by Scott was a chance to talk about the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), which he saw as a great opportunity for an intersection between Scott’s work and robotics for young African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students in grades K-12.

“I already had a lot of experience with robots,” said Williams. “We decided to write a proposal to integrate humanoid robots with CompuGirls.”

NSF funded the project. With NRI’s focus on developing robots that can closely interact with people, Williams and Scott saw the opportunity to have young women study robotics in conjunction with the social sciences, computer science and engineering in a culturally sensitive way.

Humanoid robots have the ability to interact with people–to see them, talk to them and respond to them. Among their anticipated uses is helping the elderly and people with disabilities safely interact with their environment.

“A humanoid robot is like the iPhone of robots,” said Williams. “You don’t have to explain it. It’s intuitive.”

The robotics project has built on Scott’s work in teaching digital literacy in the context of social justice, identity and gender issues. CompuGirls participants will learn how to program the robots as well as study social aspects of human-to-robot interactions. They’ll look at questions such as how robots should interact with different kinds of people, and whether there’s a way for the robots to express emotions.

“In this project we’re communicating to the girls that we’re going to teach you how to use these technology tools with robotics to advance your community, better understand yourself and show that you do belong in technology and you have some valuable contributions you can make,” said Williams.

In a world where humanoid robots will be part of our future, engaging these young women now gives them a role in shaping that future.

In Williams’ research lab at Marquette, students are already using a 3-D printer to produce parts of humanoid robots, and the robots have played robo-soccer in Brazil. They are also developing a smartphone-type interface with the robots.

Williams has also recently been awarded an NSF I-Corps for Learning grant investigating the scalable sustainability of creating humanoid robot kits–using the 3-D printed robots–to teach STEM.

Williams has a message for young women on the occasion of Computer Science Education Week.

“They should know that they belong in this technology field of computer science,” said Williams. “They can belong and they can really achieve. They can have a vision of computer science or robotics and can someday apply it at a place like Google.”

Earlier this year, the Robots Podcast team came across a story about two 17 year old twin sisters who started their own robotics outreach group. The story about the Tipperman sisters got us curious. What kind of robotics outreach activities are out there to inspire children? Do any of these activities make a difference in getting more girls interested in robotics?

In this episode, AJung Moon conducted a series of three interviews. She spoke to the Tipperman sisters to find out more about their activities, and with Ross Mead, a PhD student who has years of experience organizing robotics events and inspiring young minds. She then talks with Professor Elizabeth Croft, a roboticist who also studies the topic of women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Hannah and Rachael Tipperman

Hannah and Rachael Tipperman are high school seniors. They became interested in robotics almost “accidentally” when Hannah participated in a one-time robotics workshop for middle school girls. Since then, they have participated in the FIRST Lego League, FIRST Tech Challenge, FIRST Robotics Challenge, and they founded and captain their school’s Vex Robotics Team. They developed Robot Springboard in the summer between 9th and 10th grade as a way of “paying it forward” and helping other children and communities learn more about, and become involved in, robotics. They run week-long programs in robotics and computing for communities as diverse as Homer, Alaska and Monteverde, Costa Rica. They have also run a week-long “Robot Springboard Technology Camp @ Drexel University” for middle school girls with the help and support of the National Center for Women and Information Technology and Drexel University.

This past year, they launched BrightStart Robotics, a program tailored to younger children (kindergarten through 3rd grade) and their parents. The BrightStart program has been remarkably successful and has hosted over 100 parents and 100 children in the past year. They are presently training other high school students to help run these programs. Hannah and Rachael Tipperman plan to pursue studies in Computer Science in college.

Ross Mead

Ross Mead is a Computer Science PhD student, former NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and former fellow of the USC Body Engineering Los Angeles program (part of the NSF GK-12 initiative). His research focuses on the principled design and modeling of fundamental social behaviors (such as social spacing, eye gaze, gesturing, turn-taking, and other nonverbal social cues) that serve as building blocks to facilitate natural face-to-face human-robot interactions. For over a decade, Ross has been involved with robotics outreach programs, such as Botball and FIRST, serving as an international program instructor, regional coordinator, competition designer, event host, technical mentor, and seasoned competitor. His Master Thesis was designed and implemented using hardware and software platforms used in these outreach programs, demonstrating the applicability of inexpensive and accessible technologies in real-world scenarios. Over the years, Ross has worked directly with thousands of K-12 and higher-education students, in an effort to improve the understanding of STEM principles and promote the pursuit of STEM studies and careers. Ross is the first to have formally introduced sociable robotics into the standard K-12 curriculum; this distinguishes itself from traditional robotics activities, which tend to focus on tasks that are “dirty, dangerous, and dull” for a human to perform. His goal is to use sociable robotics topics to increase interest and self-efficacy of K-12 students underrepresented in STEM, such as females, African-Americans, Latinos/Latinas, and Native Americans.

Elizabeth Croft

Elizabeth A. Croft is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Associate Dean, Education and Professional Development for the Faculty of Applied Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She holds the NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering, BC/Yukon at UBC and leads the Westcoast Women in Engineering, Science, and Technology (WWEST) program.

Elizabeth founded WWEST in order to attract, recruit, and retain women in engineering and science careers. WWEST works at national, regional, and local levels with organizations engaged in increasing the number of women in science, engineering, and technology (SET) disciplines through multilateral partnerships spanning community, academic, and private sector partners. Elizabeth frequently gives talks and runs educational sessions to promote women in engineering from elementary school through graduate studies, academe and industry careers. She has received numerous awards for her activities promoting women in engineering.

She is also the director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at UBC. Her research investigates how robotic systems interact with people, and be perceived to behave, in a safe, predictable, and helpful manner.

Links:

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• Robot Springboard
• Ross Mead
• Elizabeth Croft

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)

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

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

• 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.

As a pure coincidence, Robohub’s main news pieces today include a thought provoking all-women podcast episode about giving rights to robots, and a news piece prepared by an all-girls FIRST team. Over the years, through our efforts at the ROBOTS Association, we have interviewed many amazing women — not because they are women — but because they are at the frontiers of their field. You might want to check out recent posts with Radhika Nagpal, Jamie Paik, Mary-Anne Williams, Erin Rapacki, Andra Keay, Maarja Kruusmaa and Diana Saarva. Nearly half of our own Robohub team is powered by women. Our 12 Robohub Gals are students and experts in law, startups, research and science communication, and span 5 countries.

We can do better, however. Our Robotics By Invitation panel for example, doesn’t yet include enough women. News and interviews that feature women in robotics are still rare and far apart, and the number of women that make it to the top of the field is currently low. There are many parts of the world where it is still impossible for women to get an education, let alone become roboticists.

I’m an eternal optimist. I studied Computer Science, did a PhD in Aerial Swarm Robotics and am now doing a postdoc in Nanomedicine at MIT. I love my job, which involves crowdsourcing the design of swarming nanoparticles to treat cancer. Sounds cool right? The lab where I work is lead by a wonderful female professor and many of the women who work there are mothers with successful careers. It’s not easy, but the doors are opening. I’ve personally never seen one close just because I am a woman.

Below some of the Robohub Gals tell us why they got into robotics and why their job is so cool. We hope this inspires current and future generations to go through these open doors, and to keep pushing against those that are still closed. We shouldn’t be doing the pushing alone — and we aren’t, thanks to all the guys out there helping.

Let’s make this a year-long effort.

From Kate Darling

When I was a little girl, I read all of the science fiction novels my dad had lying around the house. I think that’s what opened my mind to concepts of technology shaping and changing society, and trying to think ahead. Right now I’m particularly fascinated by the ways we’re beginning to interact with robots on a social level. Does this differ in any meaningful way from our interactions with other objects? And if yes, are there social, ethical, or even legal implications we need to consider?

From Ajung Moon

When I was about ten years old my father brought home a 386 model computer. Having a computer at home was a big deal back then and I instantly fell in love with it. Soon, I learned that computers and programming languages are like magic wands you can use to make your ideas a reality on a computer screen. I eventually got my undergraduate degree in Mechatronics engineering to get a new set of wands I can use to make things happen outside computer screens. Now I am working on making robots move and interact with people in ways that are not only useful and human-friendly, but also designed with societal, legal, and ethical issues of robotics in mind. Because with great power comes great responsibility.

From Maja Varga

Since I was a kid, I was amazed by group behaviors of animals. I was always asking myself, how can birds flock together so perfectly synchronized, how can these tiny ants carry a big chunk of bread together, how do these intelligent species perceive their environment. Since I was more interested in engineering sciences than biology, it was natural for me to decide to do the research in a bio-inspired robotics. My research focus is oriented on collaboration between flying robots, humans and dogs in search and rescue missions. I am trying to develop adaptation mechanisms to allow flying robots to work together with human rescuers and even to establish interaction with dogs to attract their attention and guide them in a search mission.

Finally, I wanted to thank Hallie for her help in preparing this post. I hope you all join the discussion in the comment section below!

A high school student by day and a power-tool-toting Maker by night, Lynn Urbina is a member of the Girls of Steel – an all-girl competitive robotics team located in Pittsburg, PA that’s on a mission to draw young women into engineering.

Next week the Girls of Steel will compete in a robot frisbee match in the FIRST regionals in Pittsburg. Each year FIRST competitors face a different challenge: last year it was basketball.  Short for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,” FIRST was founded in 1989 to inspire young people’s interest and participation in science and technology. And these girls are clearly inspired: despite having only arrived on the competition scene in 2010, they have already made it to the FIRST World Championships twice, have won a pile of awards (including the Rookie All-Star and the Engineering Inspiration Award) and are hoping to make it to the finals again this year.

Lynn shares her experience with the FIRST competition, the Girls of Steel team, what it was like to build their 2012 robot (affectionately called “Watson”) in a series of drawings she made …

(You can also download the full comic as a PDF here.) 

(The real Watson) 

(The Girls of Steel)

Key Info:
Competition: FIRST, founded 1989
Team: 3504 The Girls of Steel, Pittsburgh, PA, founded 2010
Mentorship: Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute