As a University of Texas Alumnus, Dr. Nick Fey is driven by a passion for changing the world through engineering. He graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering. He pursued postdoctoral research in the Center for Bionic Medicine at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab (formerly the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago) and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. 

Amanda Adkins is a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas focusing on robotics. She works in the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Lab with Professor Joydeep Biswas. After getting her undergraduate degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a double major in Computer Science and Robotic Engineering, she went to work for Amazon Robotics as a software developer. There, she completed work highlighting problems within localization and mapping. She was drawn to UT Austin for her Ph.D. because of the increasing focus on robotics at UT and her advisor’s work. 

Elena Soto is a graduate student at the University of Texas pursuing a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering, and she is also a member of the Texas Robotics Graduate Portfolio Program. Her research work is focused on developing a system that enables robots to understand human movement and translate it into robotic movement. 

Joydeep Biswas, a core faculty member at Texas Robotics since Fall 2019, is leading groundbreaking research for his lab, the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory (AMRL) in support of long-term urban-scale autonomy. The focus of one recent project in his lab is on terrain adaptive navigation, a field that aims to enable robots to navigate and reason about different terrains in the same way humans do. 

Dr. Kuipers has worked on the representation and learning of commonsense knowledge of space for many years, including building robots to explore environments and create their own cognitive maps.  This capability seems foundational for many kinds of intelligent behavior, and the Vulcan 1 served as a project for exploring and demonstrating genuine value.

Girl Day was held February 25, with Texas Robotics activities hosted in AHG and the AHG courtyard. With an estimated attendance of over 800 people to our activities, Texas Robotics hopes to have inspired many future roboticists.