I was invited to speak at the Pebble Beach Authors & Ideas Festival (PBAIF) in Pebble Beach.  What a stunning part of the world!  Most other speakers there are published authors - which I am not.  I spoke about my robots and how books influenced me to get into robotics.  I then ran a breakout session abut the future of robotics and the components required for a successful robotics company.  It was delightful to spend a few days in such a beautiful part of the world, sharing ideas!

We filmed some more videos of our Jevaroo robot arm in action!  Here it is demonstrating its load and lift capabilities. It can lift 2.32kg at the closest angle, and 1.32kg at full reach.

Lifting 1.32kg at full extension.

Lifting 2.32kg at the closest angle.

After a long pandemic hiatus from giving speeches in person, I was invited to be the in-person keynote speaker at The Right Place’s Manufacturing Leadership Summit, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I spoke about why it’s so difficult to start a robotics company and what’s needed to start a successful robotics company.

I spoke about the great work being done by companies including:

• Dusty Robotics (construction)
• Rapid Robotics (manufacturing)
• IronOx (agriculture)
• AMP Robotics (recycling)
• Icon Robotics (construction)
• Zipline (delivery)

Starting a successful robotics company is hard! You need to find a problem robots are capable of solving, make the right technical choices in order to scale, and get the business model right. It was so fantastic to share my knowledge about robotics and to travel and attend an actual conference with other people, after not traveling at all for work during the pandemic.

I was fortunate ArtPrize was happening while I was in Grand Rapids. ArtPrize is this annual huge art competition in Grand Rapids where participants compete to win over $450,000 in prize money. I got to see some of the 1700+ art pieces that were competing. It was also really cool that not all the artwork was in one place, but was scattered all over the city, for everyone to enjoy in a distributed, parallel way. Also, it rained while I was there, and the artwork outdoors had to withstand that as well! The art pieces were so big and creative! Grand Rapids was a fun city!  Here are some of the pieces of artwork I saw being proudly displayed.

This AI named me the 29th most influential woman in engineering from 2000-2020! It looked up frequency of my name being mentioned alongside an engineering discipline - so I suppose “Marita” and “robotics” for me. Very cool to be on a list alongside Helen Greiner, Mae C. Jemison, Anousheh Ansari, and Australia’s own Rose Amal.

From this Engineers Australia article:

the list [was] devised by machine-learning technology developed with funding from the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The algorithm accessed open-source data from billions of continuously updated data points in sources including Wikipedia and CrossRef, which reference papers, chapters, books and citations to the work of individual researchers around the world.

According to those behind Academic Influence, the method is not simply a popularity contest. It focuses on the intersection of name mentions and discipline mentions, so individuals are credited with “hits” only when their names also intersect with mentions of their field. Combined with other data, including the reach of their institution, the algorithm calculates an influence “score” for the researchers which determines their ranking.

You can see the full list here:  https://academicinfluence.com/rankings/people/influential-women-engineers#marita-cheng 

Here is our 8-degree-of-freedom robotic arm Jevaroo, pouring a glass of water and then moving around to show its range of movements!