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.

Amidst a global pandemic, Yuke Zhu and Joydeep Biswas spearheaded their idea to create a research symposium for academics across the state of Texas. Following the example of established regional conferences TEROS recruited graduate students, Josh Hoffman and Yifeng Zhu, for the symposium committee. The committee chairs designed a robust schedule of speakers and networking opportunities to welcome visitors from across nine academic institutions. After months of planning, 100 in-person attendees, as well as dozens of virtual attendees took part in TEROS 2022.

The Texas Robotics Symposium was held November 3rd and 4th in partnership with Good Systems. With over 24 poster presentations, 22 talks, and 11 robot demonstrations there was plenty for the over 200 attendees to enjoy!

The talks featured topics in all sectors of robotics from a multidisciplinary approach. There were notable talks from guests like Amir Husain from Spark Cognition and Peter Stone, the director of Texas Robotics.

Tenure-track positions require a Ph.D. or equivalent degree in a relevant area at the time of employment.  Successful candidates are expected to pursue an active research program, to teach both graduate and undergraduate courses, and to supervise students in research. The University is fully committed to building a diverse faculty. We welcome candidates who will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education through their teaching, research, and service.