Insider Info

Kjerstin Williams is a robotics engineer at a small research and development company in California. The company develops robotic systems for both industry and government.

"I was planning to be a doctor, and biology was all right -- until I took physics. I fell totally in love with physics," she says.

"It was really the underlying understanding of how things work that I found so enchanting. So that was what set me on the path toward engineering -- the nature of applying your understanding of how things work to solving interesting problems. Well, that and I'd always loved robots."

Williams studied electrical engineering as an undergrad. But it wasn't until her senior of college that she realized she was going to become a roboticist.

"I was looking around and seeing the kinds of jobs my peers were getting and thinking, 'You know, that’s all well and good but I don't really want to design the guts of the next cell phone,'" Williams recalls. "It wasn’t something that would make me spring out of bed in the morning and want to run into work. I wanted to do something I could feel passionate about.

"I'd always been interested in the things that straddled the edge of science fact and science fiction -- space exploration and satellites and the like. But I had filed most robotics pretty solidly in the science fiction category -- my perception was that there wasn't really a lot of demand for somebody who specialized in robotics."

But Williams did some looking around. And she discovered that it was, in fact, realistic to specialize in robotics.

"Roboticists are in so many disciplines at so many universities, they're sort of hidden in plain sight," says Williams. "At some universities they're in electrical engineering, at some they're in mechanical engineering, some they're in control systems [and] some they're in applied math. It's such an interdisciplinary field that if you didn't know what you were looking for you wouldn't find it.

"And if you didn't have the right buzzwords you might not stumble upon the right resources, but I was lucky enough to be at a place where I had some good mentors who could tell me what the right buzzwords were and introduce me to the right people and get me on the right path."

Williams went on to earn a master's as well as a PhD in electrical engineering. She ended up on the right path for her because she focused on what most interested her.

"I was facing the looming specter of graduation and realizing that at heart I was an engineer but I wasn't that excited about the stuff I was being trained to do," says Willams.

"And so I started thinking hard about what it was that really interested me and really sounded like fun. I started thinking back to my childhood interest in robotics and artificial intelligence...

"At first I thought it would be a huge shift for me and that maybe I should have gone into software engineering instead or control and dynamical systems. But I soon realized that it wasn't as much of a shift, as I needed to accrue expertise in those other fields anyway. I just got electrical engineering out of the way first."

Like many other robotics engineers, Richard Hooper is someone who enjoyed taking things apart and figuring how they worked, and then putting them back together.

"I started off by building a little robotic hand that was kind of a remote controlled hand when I was a senior in high school," says Hooper. "Then in college I did electrical engineering. And since robotics is multiple disciplinary, I did a mechanical engineering degree and a PhD in robotics."

Hooper is now a senior robotics engineer at a company that makes drones for the military. These robotic aircraft can be told where to fly, what to do when they get there and then fly back to where they started.

"When you're a young engineer starting in your first few jobs you have, you start off designing simple things," says Hooper.

"Maybe in your first job as an engineer you're designing brackets, and then maybe after you've designed brackets successfully for a few years you can move on to designing brackets that work together. And then if you get that right you can move on to designing, say, machines with moving parts. And if you do well at that, then you might be able to design machines with lots of moving parts, like robotic systems.

"Typically... as you progress in your career you grow from being an individual contributor to leveraging the work of others," Hooper adds. "So now I've got a team of at least 25 engineers that work for me, doing the design work, and my job is more very high-level architecture and coordinating the people on my team so that... the team as a whole produces at the highest efficiency."

Jurek Sasiadek has been teaching robotics since the early 1990s. Back then very few universities were offering courses on the topic.

"I was really interested in robotics because of its interdisciplinary nature, but also... in the '80s and '90s that was a completely new field... so a relatively novel contribution was relatively easy to achieve because nobody was really working on it," says Sasiadek.

Sasiadek's interest in robots had been stimulated by science fiction books, especially those by Isaac Asimov and Karel Capek. (A play written by Capek is the origin of the word robot.)

The medical field is a growing area for robotics. Robotic systems allow surgeons to perform procedures on a tiny scale that wouldn't otherwise be possible. These systems translate the surgeon's relatively large motions into incredibly small motions.

"Certainly medical robotics has a great future," says Sasiadek. "This is the area that has lots of funding and is growing exponentially.

"[Robotic systems] are being used for surgery like brain surgery, heart surgery like bypass, prostate surgery... so many possibilities," Sasiadek adds. "And when we say medical robotics, they have a variety of forms. Not only robotics like this for doing surgery, but also robotics like a variety of rovers for disabled people, for people that don't have sight -- those kinds of things as well."

Robots and robotic systems are in so many areas of our lives it might lead you to wonder if robots going to end up doing everything. Here's what Williams foresees: "I believe that humans and robots are destined to work together, and that robots will be used to extend human capabilities rather than to replace humans."