IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2017 - 16

WOMEN IN ENGINEERING

Scientific Communication, Networking,
and Women in Robotics Initiative
By Laura Margheri

S

cientif ic communication,
dissemination, and making
research transparent and ac-
cessible are powerful tools to
inspire future researchers and give
incentive to innovation. Encouraging
networking and discussion among
people with different backgrounds
leads to exploring new challenges and
frontiers and promotes collaboration
and joint initiatives. These ideas are
behind the organization of several
initiatives during scientific conferences
and public events. In the last few years,
there has been an incremental use of
social networks and online tools to
support scientific and technological
dissemination and in-person meetings.
Using different channels and methods
for scientific com munication, dis -
semination, and networking opens
various ways to
reach a broader
audience.
Robohub is
I recently
a nonprofit
m e t Sabine
Hauert (http://
organization
sabinehauert
dedicated to
.com), a roboti-
cist with a great
connecting the
p a s s i o n for
robotics community
science com-
munication and
to the public.
one of the wom-
en behind of
the Women in Robotics initiative.
Hauert is a lecturer at the Bristol
Robotics Laboratory and University of
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2017.2649318
Date of publication: 29 March 2017

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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Bristol, where she designs swarms of
nanobots for biomedical applications.
Before joining the University of Bristol,
she was a Human Frontier Science
Program Cross-Disciplinary fellow in
the laboratory of Sangeeta Bhatia at the
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer
Research at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT), where she de-
signed cooperative nanoparticles for
cancer treatment. Her passion for
swarm engineering started in 2006
as a Ph.D. student at École polytech-
nique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)-
Switzerland, making swarms of flying
robots for rescue operations.
In swarm engineering, the challenge
is to figure out how to design the
individual rules that will give rise to
desired swarm behaviors. In Hauert's
work, swarm strategies are either
inspired from nature (ant colonies and
bird flocks) or are automatically dis-
covered in simulation using machine
learning and crowdsourcing. Demon-
strated applications include the de-
ployment of swarms of flying robots
to create outdoor communication net-
works at EPFL or the design of nano-
systems for biomedical applications at
MIT. Her current work focuses on the
design of swarming nanoparticles for
cancer treatment in simulation and
under the microscope on tissue-on-
a-chip devices. At the Bristol Robot-
ics Laboratory, her group also has
1,000 kilobots that are used to investi-
gate how to engineer swarm dynamics
for robotics applications.
Passionate about science commu-
nication, Hauert is the cofounder and

March 2017

president of the Robots Association,
president and cofounder of Robohub
(http://robohub.org), and cofounder of the
ROBOTS Podcast (http://robotspodcast
.com), as well as media editor of Auto-
nomous Robots.
Robohub is a nonprofit organization
dedicated to connecting the robotics
community to the public. "As a re-
searcher in robotics, you quickly realize
that there is a gap between what your
robots are doing in the laboratory and
how the public perceives them," says
Hauert. "Robohub has been launched as
a way to bring all the best robotics con-
tent together in one place and make it
easy for the public to learn about real
robots from the people who make
them." By enabling roboticists to share
their stories in their own words and by
making research transparent and acces-
sible, Robohub aims to fill the gap
between researchers and the public,
inspire future roboticists, spur innova-
tion, and drive discussion.
Hauert is also proactive for support-
ing women in robotics and promoting
their visibility. She has participated in
several events organized by the IEEE
Robotics and Automation Society (RAS)
Women in Engineering Committee at
the International Conference on Robot-
ics and Automation and the Interna-
tional Conference on Intelligent Robots
and Systems, considering them tremen-
dously helpful, especially as she was just
starting out in her career.
The Women in Robotics initiative, in
which she is involved, started with the
same spirit: a professional network for
women working in the field of robotics
http://http:// http://www.robohub.org http://robotspodcast http://http://
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2017
