ROBOTS: From Imagination to Market

APRIL 17, 2014 • MIT TANG CENTER • 8:30 AM -6:30 PM

Excited to be here? Learn something new? Tweet it & make the social wall!

#ROBOTS14

WELCOME COFFEE + REGISTRATION

8:30 AM

INTRODUCTION

8:50 AM

SESSION 1: IMAGINATION

9:00 AM

swissnex Boston + Robohub + SwissLinkBoston

Robots in Science Fiction Michael A. Burstein

SESSION 2: RESEARCH

9:30 AM

Self-Organized Systems

Radhika Nagpal - Wyss Institute – Harvard

Soft/Biomimetic Robots Sangbae Kim - MIT

Soft/Wearable Robots

Zivthan Dubrovsky - Wyss Institute – Harvard

Personal Robots

Cynthia Breazeal - MIT Media Lab

Biomimetic Drones

Dario Floreano - LIS – EPFL

ROBOT DEMO LUNCH Presented by EPFL Alumni

12:30 PM

Gimball

VERSABALL

AERobot

Nao

TERMES Project

Jerry the Bear

Printable Robots

M-Blocks

Przemek Kornatowski, EPFL Mike Rubenstein , Wyss Institute - Harvard Kirstin Petersen, Wyss Institute - Harvard Mike Tolley, Wyss Institute - Harvard

Soft Sensors

Empire Robotics Aldebaran Sproutel

John Romanishin, MIT CSAIL

Daniel Vogt, Wyss Institute-Harvard

SESSION 3: BUSINESS

1:30 PM

STARTUP PITCHES:

Empire Robotics, Inc., John Amend

Rise Robotics, Arron Acosta

Gimball, Adrien Briod

Sproutel, Aaron Horowitz

TALKS:

Near-Term Ethical Questions In Social Robot Design & Human-Robot Interaction Kate Darling - MIT Media Lab

ROBOTS: From Market to Imagination Matt Beane - MIT Sloan

Hardware Accelerators & the VC Perspective Ben Einstein - Bolt

SUCCESS STORIES:

Kiva Systems

Parris S. Wellman, Senior Director Of Engineering

PANEL: LAUNCHING YOUR ROBOT

5:30 PM

Matt Beane - MIT Sloan Christina Chase - Martin Trust Center - MIT Elaine Chen - Martin Trust Center - MIT Kate Darling - Media Lab - MIT Chris Moehle - National Robotics Engineering Center – CMU Miriam Bekouche - Indiegogo

Moderated by: Sabine Hauert - Robohub

ROBOTS HAPPY HOUR

KIKA, Third St, Cambridge, MA 02142

7:00 PM

Celebrate a great day of ROBOTS with a closing apero! Appetizers and sangria to be provided. All other drinks can be purchased at the cash bar. 21+ only.

MATT BEANE, MIT SLOAN

Matt Beane is a doctoral candidate in the Information Technology department at the Sloan School of Management. He studies real-world use of robotics in skilled, collective work. He asks questions like: how are robots actually used at work? What can we do with them that we couldn't before? What might we lose? His field-based, multi-sited dissertation research is focused on the practice of robotic surgery. Beane has also written in the public press about robotics in the workplace, notably contributing an article to MIT Technology Review, “The Avatar Economy,” in which he explores the potential for robots one day to enable manual labor to be outsourced around the world.

MIRIAM BEKKOUCHE, INDIEGOGO

Miriam Bekkouche is the Vertical Development Director for Design, Technology and Hardware at Indiegogo. Based in NYC, her role is to educate & empower the maker community to harness the power of crowdfunding to reach fundraising and marketing goals. Indiegogo campaigners include Robot Dragonfly, Canary, Scanadu, Misfit Shine and the recently launched TinkerBot.

CYNTHIA BREAZEAL, MIT MEDIA LAB

Cynthia Breazeal is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at the Media Lab. She is a pioneer of social robotics and Human Robot Interaction. She has authored the book “Designing Sociable Robots”, has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles in journals and conferences on the topics of autonomous robotics, artificial intelligence, human robot interaction, and robot learning. She serves on several editorial boards in the areas of autonomous robots, affective computing, entertainment technology and multi-agent systems. She is also a member of the advisory board for the Science Channel and an Overseer at the Museum of Science, Boston.

Her research focuses on developing the principles, techniques, and technologies for personal robots that are socially intelligent, interact and communicate with people in human-centric terms, work with humans as peers, and learn from people as an apprentice. She has developed some of the world’s most famous robotic creatures ranging from small hexapod robots, to embedding robotic technologies into familiar everyday artifacts, to creating highly expressive humanoid robots and robot characters.

Dr. Breazeal is recognized as a prominent young innovator. She is a recipient of the National Academy of Engineering’s Gilbreth Lecture Award, Technology Review’s TR35 Award, and TIME magazine’s Best Inventions of 2008. She has also been awarded an ONR Young Investigator Award, and was honored as finalist in the National Design Awards in Communication.

MICHAEL A. BURSTEIN

Michael A. Burstein, winner of the 1997 Campbell Award for Best New Writer, has earned ten Hugo nominations and four Nebula nominations for his short fiction, collected in I Remember the Future. Burstein lives with his wife Nomi and their twin daughters in the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is an elected Town Meeting Member and Library Trustee. When not writing, he edits middle and high school Science curricular materials. He has two degrees in Physics and attended the Clarion Workshop.

His short story "I Remember the Future" has been made into a short film that had its US premiere at the Wordfest Houston Film Festival this month. More information on Burstein and his work can be found on his webpage. www.mabfan.com.

CHRISTINA CHASE, MARTIN TRUST CENTER FOR MIT ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Christina Chase is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at MIT in the Martin Trust Center, where she helps MIT students launch successful startups. She has helped hundreds of teams go from concept to company and was recently named by Mashable as one of the 15 People Shaping Boston’s Tech Scene.

Christina is an entrepreneur with a track record of success in several industries, starting her first company when she was 18 years old. Most recently she was the CEO and co-founder of Firehoze, an education technology company that focused on online education. Christina is a TechStars mentor and serves on the Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum, SXSW Accelerator Advisory Board and SXSW V2V Advisory Board. In 2013, she was named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the Boston Tech Community.

ELAINE CHEN, MARTIN TRUST CENTER FOR MIT ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Elaine Chen is a Senior Lecturer in the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Elaine is a seasoned entrepreneurial executive with a unique background spanning product development and product management.

She brings practical techniques for entrepreneurial product development and marketing to engineering, MBA, and EMBA students. Specific areas of focus include: lean startup, customer development, user and buyer persona development, and the application of ethnographic techniques for planning and conducting primary market research.

Elaine has served at the VP level in engineering and product management at several startups, including Rethink Robotics, Zeo, Zeemote, and SensAble Technologies. She is also the Founder and President at ConceptSpring, where she provides strategic engineering and product development consulting services to help CEO's and leaders of product teams build great teams and develop disruptive products with hardware and software components.

Elaine is an active member of the MIT community, and is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT entrepreneurship.

KATE DARLING, MIT MEDIA LAB

Kate Darling is a Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Yale Information Society Project. While completing her Ph.D. in Intellectual Property and Law & Economics (ETH Zurich), she has increasingly moved into the field of law and robots. She writes and speaks about the near-term social effects of robotic technology, with a particular interest in legal and ethical issues.

ZIVTHAN DUBROVSKY, WYSS INSTITUTE HARVARD

Zivthan Dubrovsky has an extensive product development background across many industries. His work has translated products from ideation and invention through manufacturing, sales, and marketing. Prior to joining the Wyss, he led a product creation team for Sonos to commercialize a mesh network speaker able to be controlled wirelessly from any smartphone. He also served as Program Manager and Product Marketing Manager at iRobot Corporation, where he managed the development and transfer of iRobot’s leading technologies into saleable consumer robots. His interests and prior experience include: robotic lawn mowing, robotic vacuuming, robotic telepresence, human-robot interaction, user experience, industrial design, smartphone accessories and high volume production. Dubrovsky received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. in Management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

BEN EINSTEIN, BOLT

Ben Einstein is an experienced product designer and entrepreneur. Ben is currently the Managing Director of Bolt, a seed-stage fund that invests capital, personnel, equipment, and expertise in hardware startups. Bolt provides companies with capital, staff, shop equipment, and extensive expertise with manufacturing and commercialization. Prior to starting Bolt, Ben ran Brainstream Design, a product design and development consultancy in Massachusetts. Ben has been directly responsible for bringing a long list of products to market covering diverse sectors including consumer electronics, high-performance audio, sporting goods and green energy.

DARIO FLOREANO, LIS EPFL

Prof. Dario Floreano is Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL and Director of the Swiss National Center of Robotics, a national strategic initiative bringing together all major robotics labs in Switzerland.

His research focuses on the convergence of biology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. He published more than 300 articles, which have been cited more than 10K times, and four books on evolutionary robotics, bio-inspired artificial intelligence, and bio-mimetic flying robots with MIT Press and Springer Verlag. He is member of the World Economic Forum Council on robotics and smart devices, co-founder of the International Society of Artificial Life, Inc. (USA), co-founder of the drone company senseFly Ltd (now member of the Parrot Group), member of the editorial board of 10 professional journals, and board member of numerous professional societies in robotics and artificial intelligence. He is also active in the public understanding of robotics and artificial intelligence, delivered almost 150 invited talks worldwide, started the popular robotics podcast Talking Robots (now The RobotsPodcast), and has been listed twice as one of the 300 most influential persons in Switzerland by the finance magazine "Bilan".

SABINE HAUERT, UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

Sabine Hauert is Lecturer at the University of Bristol where she designs swarms of nanobots for biomedical applications. Her passion for swarm engineering started in 2006 as a PhD student at EPFL- Switzerland making swarms of flying robots for rescue operations.

Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine was a Human Frontier Science Program Cross-Disciplinary Fellow in the Laboratory of Sangeeta Bhatia at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT where she designed cooperative nanoparticles for cancer treatment.

Passionate about science communication, Sabine is the Co-founder and President of the Robots Association, Co-founder of the ROBOTS Podcast (http:// robotspodcast.com) and Robohub (http://robohub.org), as well as Media Editor for the journal Autonomous Robots.

SANGBAE KIM, MIT

Sangbae Kim received the B.S. degree from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 2001 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, in 2004 and 2008, respectively, all in mechanical engineering.

Sangbae is currently the Director with the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory and an Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. He is involved in the convergence of mechanical engineering, control, biology, and material science. His achievement on bioinspired technology development includes the world’s first directional adhesive based on gecko lizards and a climbing robot, called Stickybot, that utilizes the directional adhesives to climb smooth surfaces. Stickybot was featured as one of the best inventions of 2006 by TIME magazine. His research focuses on design process extracting principles from complex biological systems to achieve legged locomotion in engineering. He is currently focusing on a cheetah-inspired robotic platform capable of high-speed gallop, employing principles from quadrupedal runners. Sangbae is also the recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award 2013 and NSF Career Award 2014.

CHRISTOPHER MOEHLE, CMU - RI

Chris Moehle is the Associate Director for New Ventures at the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC).

He came to NREC after 10 years spanning technology development, entrepreneurship, licensing and ventures, and consulting. He works to bring technologists, businesspeople, and end users together to identify and solve pressing real-world needs via robotics. This starts with the initial assembly of research partnerships and progresses to the formation of the entities and channels necessary to bring emerging technologies to real world fruition.

RADHIKA NAGPAL, WYSS INSTITUTE - HARVARD

Radhika Nagpal is Professor in Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Director of the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group which aims to engineer and understand self-organizing collective systems. She is also a core faculty member of the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where she co-leads the biorobotics platform. Before becoming faculty, Radhika spent a year as a research fellow in the department of systems biology at Harvard Medical School, where she is still affiliated. Radhika was a graduate student and postdoc lecturer at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and a member of the Amorphous Computing Group and the Bell Labs GRPW graduate fellowship program. Radhika received the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship (2005), NSF Career Award (2007), Thomas D. Cabot associate professor chair (2009), Borg Early Career Award (2010), and Radcliffe Fellowship (2012).

PARRIS S. WELLMAN, KIVA SYSTEMS

Parris has been at Kiva Systems since September, 2013. He first started building robots more than 20 years ago and is excited to be at Kiva where he gets to work with robots every day and where he leads hardware engineering. His team designs and engineers the robots, firmware and other equipment used in the Kiva robotic fulfillment solution and we are having fun helping to rapidly grow the business.

GIMBALL is a game-changing flying robot which can be flown indoors and in complex environments: it can stay stable after collisions with obstacles and can thus go where other robots can't. Furthermore, it is safe to fly close to humans. This innovation turns robot into real partners for humans and truly unleashes the potential of flying robots by enabling countless new applications.

Š Eliza Grinnell, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

TERMES PROJECT, WYSS INSTITUTE - HARVARD , is a system of robots which, inspired by mound building African termites, are able to autonomously construct a large variety of three-dimensional user-specified structures. As with the insects that inspired their design, the robots are on the scale of the building material they manipulate, have only localized sensing, and work independently of others. We present the algorithmic framework which guarantees a successful construction process, as well as a physical implementation with three robots.

EMPIRE ROBOTICS INC. was founded in 2012 to commercialize the jamming-based robotic gripper technology developed at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. We provide highly capable and cost effective grippers to robot manufacturers, integrators, and end users that enable versatile and adaptive gripping operations with a single inexpensive tool. Our jamming-based VERSABALLÂŽ grippers are setting the new standard for agile manufacturing.

M - BLOCKS, MIT CSAIL, introduces a novel self-assembling, self-reconfiguring cubic robot that uses pivoting motions to change its intended geometry.

The modules achieve movement by quickly transferring angular momentum accumulated in a self-contained flywheel to the body of the robot. The system provides a simplified realization of the modular actions required by the sliding cube model using pivoting, as well as allowing for individual module movements and group movements.

SOFT STRAIN SENSORS, WYSS INSTITUTE - HARVARD , a

hyperelastic strain sensor is fabricated by embedding silicone rubber with microchannels of conductive liquid eutectic gallium–indium. Applying strain on the sensor will increase the overall microchannel length and decrease its cross-section, thus change the electrical resistance from 2 Ohms to ~70 Ohms. As they are very soft and compliant, these sensors are typically used to measure joint angles on different parts of the body (e.g. legs, arms, fingers) for motion tracking.

SPROUTEL At Sproutel we use empathetic robots to make patient education friendly for children diagnosed with a chronic illness. Our first product Jerry the Bear, is a completely interactive teddy bear that enables kids with type 1 diabetes to master their medical procedures, ultimately resulting in smiling faces and improved healthcare outcomes.

ALDEBARAN is the result of a vision Bruno Maisonnier fostered since he was a child: build humanoid robots, a new humane species for the benefit of humankind. To integrate robots into our daily lives, Aldebaran set out to create a family of companion robots.Interaction would be the key to success.

Regardless of the intended use, Aldebaran robots must positively influence our daily lives. They are also for reception, assistance, home care, entertainment, and even autism therapy. Today, more than 400 "Aldebaranians" contribute, with expertise and passion, to making this shared vision possible and tangible by creating applications that make the adoption of robots possible for all.

PRINTABLE ROBOTS , WYSS INSTITUTE - HARVARD, use origami-inspired design for the fabrication of robot components such as the gripper seen in the picture above. The final aim is to develop a desktop technology that prints fully-functioning programmable robots on demand.

AEROBOTS (Affordable Education Robot) is a low-cost robot designed to introduce students to the fundamentals of programming and control of robots, inspiring them to further pursue studies in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). We hope AERobot’s low cost ($10.70 including assembly) will enable more students to gain hands-on robotics experience. We also created a software suite for the robot by modifying minibloqs and created curriculum for students to learn the basics of programming flow and logic, the use of sensors and actuators, and to create robot behaviors.

Presence Switzerland is competent for the image of Switzerland abroad, and implements the strategy of the Federal Council on Switzerland’s communication abroad. Presence Switzerland supports the protection of Switzerland’s interests by using various public relations tools. Its tasks include transmitting general knowledge about Switzerland, the forging of understanding for Switzerland, as well as a portrayal of Switzerland’s diversity and attractiveness. The strategic thrusts of Switzerland’s communication abroad are regularly reviewed and set down by the Federal Council anew for four-year periods. presence.ch

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Robohub is a non-profit online news platform that brings together leading communicators in robotics research, start-ups, business, and education to provide high quality information to the robotics community and to the general public. We have an international readership of 50K unique visitors each month (and growing!), most of whom are highly-engaged in the robotics community (Masters, PhDs, postdocs, startups, leaders from academia and industry). We also have an active social media presence, including more than 600K Google+ followers.

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A note from the organizers:

A BIG thank you to all the speakers, startups, companies, presenters and attendees who collaborated with us throughout the planning and execution processes!

A special thanks to Presence Switzerland, EPFL Alumni New England Chapter and Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship; without your support, this event could not have been possible!

We hope you all make contacts, learn new methods and discover exciting innovations that will last a lifetime! Enjoy #ROBOTS14!

Sincerely, Sophie, Lia, Sabine, Aron & Bernhard