All posts by Black In Robotics

Before droves of people descend on a convention center for a trade show or conference, the hall must be carefully divided up to accommodate corporate show booths, walkways for attendees, spaces for administrators/security and much more. The process of defining the layout and marking it up for construction crews is often done with humans laboriously measuring and marking distances, but Lionel can do all of this for you. Once given a plan, it zooms along empty convention halls while precisely marking all of the dimensions for the schematics that you have in mind.

Lionel, the floor-marking robot, was made specifically for the organizers of trade shows and conferences.

Lionel isn’t a robot that you’d typically think of when you imagine new applications of technology, but it fills a niche that there is strong demand for. Identifying use cases like Lionel’s and showing that there is a robotic solution for them is part of the responsibility of business strategy managers like Vuyo Makhuvha.

Vuyo works in building August Robotics mobile robotics portfolio which at the moment comprises 2 robots. Their latest robot Diego, Disinfection on the Go! Is a mobile UV-C robot design which was released in March 2021. Diego provides hospital-grade disinfection for hotel rooms and public spaces in a way that is safe and easy to use and allows establishments to increase safety and differentiate their hygiene programmes.

Identifying use cases like Lionel’s or Diego’s, and showing that there is a robotic solution for them is part of the responsibility of business strategy managers like Vuyo Makhuvha. Keep reading to see her explanation of how a non-engineer can have a significant impact on robot design, how she managed the experience of leaving her home in South Africa for her new home of Hong Kong, and much more.

Vuyo’s trajectory

Vuyo is a bright mathematical mind from South Africa that had narrowed down her area of study to two subjects when preparing to enter the University of Cape Town (UCT): Engineering and Actuarial Science. In what felt like a gut-wrenching decision, she chose to study Actuarial Science. Unbeknownst to her, she would eventually return to working with engineers in good time.

Vuyo excelled at UCT, eventually earning both a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s Degree (with a Master’s Thesis)! All the while, her education was enriched by the prestigious Allan Gray Orbis Fellowship, which she had been awarded after graduating high school. The fellowship not only covered her tuition, but also taught her about entrepreneurial thinking as well as placed her amongst a community of like-minded individuals.

And the Fellowship’s support doesn’t end there! “After those four years [with the Allan Gray Orbis Fellowship] you can tap into additional support. For example, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you basically say ‘Hey I want to start a business; Can you help me?” And they’ll have different programs [to support you].’ “

“It’s amazing. It’s one of the experiences that I’ve had that has really encouraged me.”

While getting her Master’s Degree, Vuyo had gotten a taste of the broader world outside of Actuarial Science and decided that she wanted to see more of it by working for a consulting company after she graduated: McKinsey & Company. There, her intention was to “gain exposure to [the] questions that businesses are answering for themselves” and McKinsey was able to give her that exposure. She was placed onto teams where they established “strategies that would grow their revenue by X [or something similarly] for big name companies that you’ve heard of all of your life” or “made certain that a merger went [the way it should have].” This diverse set of experiences was helpful for narrowing down her interests and for increasing her confidence.

“.. What I really took away from [all of that] was that I can do anything. There are a lot of specialized fields … but I can be quite involved in them by answering questions like ‘How do we commercialize this?’ or ‘What features do we need?’”

Her bolstered confidence and passion for commercialization would then carry her across a continent and into her current role at August Robotics. After 2 years at McKinsey, one of which was spent as a consultant in Asia, Vuyo decided she wanted to experience working at an early stage start-up in emerging tech and she happened to find a role on the Alumni network job board.

At that startup, August Robotics, she ended up becoming a Business Strategy Manager, working with a team of highly-experienced engineers and scientists to develop new robotics-based solutions. To describe her role simply, Vuyo explains that “My job every day is to make sure that we’re designing a robot that fulfills our clients’ needs.” This can lead to tension at times, as Vuyo challenges experienced technical experts in their fields.

“I always say that my job as a commercial person is to dream really, really big. Your job as an engineering team is to tell me ‘Woah! Slow down. This is what we can do.’

And if we’re not having that kind of tension, then I’m not doing my job right. Because I need to be the person who can imagine this amazing product for our customers, especially in the first couple of weeks when we’re coming together with the concept.

You’re supposed to say “Woah! We can’t do this right now, let’s pull it back and do this” “Do you really need that feature right now. Isn’t that something we can do far later in the future?”

It’s your job to hold me back.

Otherwise, we’re not going to be able to make new things that our customers never thought of. The tension is there, but it’s a necessary tension. And as long as it’s done in a way that’s professional and respectful, I think it’s good.”

August Robotics has fostered a culture where this tension can be expressed in such a professional and respectful way. It’s one of the reasons that Vuyo loves it there and recommends more passionate Black roboticists join her at August, if possible.

She plans to stay there as long as the culture remains one in which she can freely explore and challenge her peers and herself as they continue to seek out the unique use cases that only a robot can solve in the world. The call of entrepreneurship still lingers in her ear, however, and she plans to one day use the lessons she has learned as an Allan Gray Orbis Fellow to make an impactful business.

Vuyo’s challenges

While she is still relatively new in her current role at August Robotics, Vuyo has overcome several challenges that she thinks others could learn from. Her transition from McKinsey and Company to August Robotics required a transition from her native Africa to Hong Kong. There she went from being in a majority South African context to being in a majority Asian context.

“I think being a Black person in any place that is not predominantly black is always going to be different. Especially in a place like Asia, where there’s so few of us. Yeah, I get stared at [but] it’s not a malicious thing most of the time. I think that most of the time it’s just like: ‘Hm. Why are you here?’”

To overcome the challenge of feeling isolated, she learned to embrace the feeling of benign curiosity coming from her new neighbors. The feeling inspired Vuyo to make an unwritten rule: “Every time I see a black person, I always say hi to them…. I can go through a whole day without seeing another black person. It’s weird. So, [I] just have to acknowledge that we’re both in this whenever I see them.”

Vuyo’s words of wisdom

Vuyo repeatedly expressed how valuable it is to work in an environment as supportive as the one that she has found in August Robotics and recommends that you look for:

“[a place] where you trust the people that you work with, you feel like people respect and trust you, and … you never feel weird about not knowing something. Because then you operate from a place of stability or comfort. Of course, I’m going to work really really hard; I don’t want to do anything wrong and I’m going to be really really careful.

I do it not because I’m in fear about what the repercussions will be. I do it because I’m comfortable enough that I can contribute to what our team is doing, and that I feel that responsibility to contribute and to make our team successful. And so I don’t spend time worrying about things that I don’t need to be worrying about. I spend time worrying about the [robotics] problems that we have.”

Finding and contributing to an environment like that is what has allowed Vuyo to thrive and is what she plans to foster in every organization she works at (or starts!) in the future.

Finally, Vuyo’s advice to young people interested in robotics (from the commercial side or not) is:

“To continue to be driven by what [you] think is interesting and exciting and stimulating, and to not for a second think that [you’re] not capable or not worthy.

Because [you] have to try stuff and not get in your own way. Just believe that you’re good. That you have creative and exciting ideas and then go and apply that creativity to things that you find interesting and exciting.”

More from Vuyo

Feel free to follow August Robotics to find out more about the products Vuyo is helping to launch!

Feel free to connect to Vuyo via LinkedIn.

Acknowledgements

Drafts of this article were corrected and improved by Vuyo Makhuvha, Sophia Williams, and Nailah Seale. All current errors are the fault of Kwesi Rutledge. Please reach out to him if you spot any!

Inside of the development studios of San Francisco-based Dexterity, Inc. there is a robot arm that stands as tall as a human. It is placed between a conveyor belt and several wooden pallets, all of which are typical of most warehouse packing facilities. But this is no typical warehouse facility.

This is the location where most warehouse packing facilities would have teams of people manually picking up boxes from the conveyor belt and carefully placing them onto the pallets for wrapping and shipping, but there are no such people here. Instead, as the packages come down the belt, this robot recognizes them, picks them up, and then deposits them onto the target pallet with a gentle touch. It can do all of this on its own, and when a human does enter its vicinity, the robot knows to avoid the human’s area thanks to a “light curtain” sensor.

Andrew Dupree is one of the product managers developing technology like this at Dexterity (p.s. they are hiring!) and, in this ‘Meet the Members’ post, we will look at his journey from pure engineering and working with nonprofits in Haiti to doing product development in the bay area for several budding hardware startups.

Andrew’s trajectory

Andrew described his early childhood as that of a typical “blerd” (aka a black nerd). His father was an early adopter of things like personal computers and Andrew vividly remembers his first computer, a Gateway machine, being delivered to the house.

He spent tons of time poring over the device and creating websites with his brother using Angelfire and HTML. This passion for technology later be combined with a drive to have a social impact at the University of Maryland – College Park. The plan was to do “a Computer Engineering degree focusing on low-cost computers”, but while Andrew worked through courses like Signal Theory, he noted that something seemed to be missing from his experience.

His first attempt to find that “missing piece” was to join a laboratory at UC Berkeley for an internship at their TIER Lab. When the internship was finished and he returned to the East Coast, he remained connected to the local Information and Communications Technology for Developing Countries (ICT4D) community. It was at one of the community’s meetups that he was introduced to a nonprofit working in Haiti and “they actually knew the professor that I’d worked with in Berkeley because it’s a small scene.”

Andrew leveraged this connection to reach out to them with an offer:

I reached out to them and said “Look, I’ve done this internship and I’ve done this work. Are you hiring?”

And they were like “No.”

Then I said, “Are you sure?”

And they said “We’re sure.”

Then I asked “What if I volunteer?”

And they responded “Let’s talk.”

And thus, he had locked in an eight month experience with the nonprofit Inveneo focusing on setting up computer labs and implementing computer literacy programs in Haiti. There was only one detail that he needed to work out: Figuring out what to do with the graduate school admissions offers that had begun to come in. He began to ask around about deferring his admission for a year with surprising results.

“All of the other grad schools that I asked about deferring [said “No”, but] Stanford actually really bent over backwards to help me defer. They don’t have a proper deferral, but they [found a way] and really hooked me up.”

— Andrew

While Stanford’s graduate school offer was being worked out, he dove into the world of Haiti’s Inveneo which was filled with ups and downs. Andrew humbly summarizes his emotions with “Fixing the world is really hard. I had good days where I felt like ‘I’m really making an impact’ and I had bad days where I felt like ‘My work is doing nothing here. This is a tough challenge.’” When he eventually returned to the United States for his Master’s at Stanford, he decided to focus more on the engineering skills that he had not had the time to focus on while working at the nonprofit. In his engineering classes again, he felt like he was missing something, not accessing a part of himself that he really wanted to.

“… I ended up doing a bunch of design classes. And [specifically the] business management for engineers class, that last one was a huge eye opener for me. Because I realized we were doing case studies, and analyzing business strategies [and more]. I really enjoyed that material.”

— Andrew

Andrew did so well in the class that the professor strong-armed him into TA’ing it the following year. Curious about how he could combine his love for business management with his engineering expertise, Andrew asked this professor what careers would best mix these two worlds. “That’s easy,” the professor explained. “You become a product manager.”

So, as Andrew began his career, he sought out experiences to work with or become a product manager. After working on several important hardware engineering teams, he was able to successfully make the jump and has held the title of product manager (in some form) at multiple Silicon Valley hardware-focused tech companies.

He is currently thrilled to be a product manager at the high growth start-up Dexterity, Inc. which develops “full-stack, end-to-end systems for kitting, picking, packing, counting, sorting, palletizing, and order fulfillment.”

“… Working at a small, high-growth startup is a lot of fun … and I think that robotics in Supply Chain/Logistics is huge. It’s going to be even bigger. … I’ve worked in a bunch of different industries at this point and this is my first experience working in an industry where customers truly have a huge problem and they need you to help them solve it.”

— Andrew

In addition to his work at Dexterity, Andrew is excited to return to his passion for social impact. After reading and reflecting on his multiple experiences (both in industry and with ICT4D), he wants “to continue to think about tangibly [making] steps towards social impact and making the world a better place. I’m not sure what that looks like yet, but I’m excited to figure that out.”

Andrew’s challenges

Discovering Andrew’s inner “product manager” might have been accelerated if he had been more receptive to the idea earlier on. He recalls colleagues teasing him while at the University of Maryland with “Oh, you’re just gonna be a business manager at some point.” The culture of valuing technical expertise above all else encouraged people like him to reject the idea of becoming a business manager or leader. It’s a problem that still exists today and that Andrew would like to counter:

“I think what I would’ve internalized earlier is that there are a lot of ways to contribute in technical areas/technical disciplines [like robotics]. For example, it’s critical to understand the problem that you’re trying to solve, to define that clearly, to communicate that clearly and also to keep engineering efforts focused on an impactful outcome.”

— Andrew

Another challenge that Andrew encountered was attempting to get a Product Manager position with only engineering experience on his resumé. Realizing that he needed to convince potential recruiters of his capabilities, he:

1. Showcased his understanding of hardware and business via blog posts on his website,
2. Discussed relevant product management events and ideas with others on Twitter, and
3. Moonlit as a product manager while also performing his current role (as a project manager)

Feel free to check out his website, where he has authored dozens of blog posts on topics ranging from circular buffers to conducting user research to understanding the options for hardware housings. Using this approach, Andrew successfully showcased an understanding of product management that won him the attention of several interesting hardware teams.

Andrew’s words of wisdom

We asked Andrew to share some of the intangible lessons he has learned through the challenges mentioned above and he had many. Some of the important ones are described below.

One of the lessons that has served Andrew well is the importance of self-help books. As he puts it: “A lot of people have been doing this `human` thing for a while. There’s probably no need to reinvent the wheel.” He specifically picks up books that are pervasive or challenge his current ideas about the world. Some examples of books that have previously landed on his reading list are:

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey
• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giridharadas

“You’ve got to separate out some of the nonsense, but being proactive about your personal growth … is something that I’ve been intentional about.”

— Andrew

His plan for becoming a Product Manager was one of the things that he had been intentional about and he established a strategy that was able to get him into the career of his choice!

Andrew also advises against pressuring yourself to always be in a rush, whether it be in robotics or in life.

“One of the things that’s surprised me in hindsight is that there’s a lot of time. There’s no huge rush. It feels like if you have turned twenty-six and haven’t made a certain impact, then [there’s a problem.] But looking back, I see that I’ve worked across a bunch of different industries from Academic Research to Consumer Tech. A couple of different flavors of industrial stuff. And I have had at least three or four different job functions entirely. There really doesn’t need to be a rush.”

— Andrew

More from Andrew

To see more from Andrew, please feel free to go to his website.

Also, Dexterity is growing and might need a Black roboticist like you! Reach out to Andrew on our Slack (or through his contact info above) if you’re interested in a role there!

Acknowledgements

Drafts of this article were corrected and improved by Andrew Dupree, Nosa Edoimioya, and Nailah Seale. All current errors are the fault of Kwesi Rutledge. Please reach out to him if you spot any!

The DONUts platform may look like a collection of bronze-colored, futuristic coffee cups, but everything becomes clearer as they begin to move. The group of modular robots dance in a well-choreographed symphony as magnets turn on and off allowing the modules to pull or push their neighbors. Using these simple interactions, the modular robots can achieve complex tasks such as energy harvesting [1].

Nialah Wilson is one of the key roboticists who helped bring these modular robots to life. Her team at the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab from Cornell University needed to:

• Design the hardware using flexible printed circuit boards,
• Characterize the behavior of each module when the magnets were applied,
• Create the motion planning algorithms, and
• Implement the communication scheme which passes messages to neighbors saying to “turn on” or “turn off” their magnets and thus attract or repel one another.

Taking advantage of the right message, passed at the right time, is also one of the things that led to Nialah’s career in robotics.

One of the competitions that I did in high school was through the NAACP, and I only heard about that because of someone in my church, and I only knew about that because I talked to them.

— Nialah

We are excited to highlight Nialah’s robotics journey as well as the lessons she learned along the way in this ‘Meet the Members’ post for Black In Robotics.

Nialah’s trajectory

Nialah is from rural, Southwestern Virginia. A place that she is sure to remind you is the South. Despite the rural setting, Nialah had a plethora of opportunities to keep her curious mind busy.

I was always interested in taking stuff apart. My mom would always find different things like pens … destroyed around the house.

— Nialah

Her mom was wise enough to channel young Nialah’s knack for constructing and deconstructing devices into a competitive arena: robotics competitions.

“I was all-in” Nialah recalls when she talks about this time in her life. Initially, she was doing FIRST Lego Robotics League competitions in middle school and, later on, she was participating in whatever competitions she could find in high school (one of them being the longstanding tradition hosted by Virginia Western). Nialah’s experience made it a no-brainer for her to decide upon a degree in Mechanical Engineering when she arrived at Howard University.

She leveraged Howard’s powerful connections across the country to obtain a summer position at Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia had a lasting impact on Nialah; not only did she produce great work characterizing bellows systems that was later published [2], but she also found an interest in attending graduate school.

I was interested in grad school before [my internship at Sandia], but after that I was like ‘I gotta do a PhD.’ … I saw that the people doing the leading and pushing stuff forward all had PhDs and so I was like ‘Oh!’ if I get a PhD, then this can be my life…

— Nialah

When the time came to apply to graduate school, her mentor from Sandia was one of the key recommendation letters that supported her strong application.

Ultimately, Nialah picked the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab at Cornell University for her PhD studies. There, she has moved away from working with experimental fluid theory and now works on many aspects of modular robots like the ones discussed above. To make groups of these robots achieve tasks in unstructured environments, she studies how to plan the group’s movement using gradient-based methods as well as how to make a group robust if an individual robot fails. In the future, she hopes to work more on how groups of such robots or drones interact with humans (i.e. Human Robot Interaction).

Nialah’s challenges

With the support of her strong Sandia mentor and others in her life, Nialah was well-prepared for many aspects of graduate school but highlighted a few challenges that she still had to overcome:

1. Developing the research skills beyond what was required of her in her undergraduate experience
2. Understanding how publications work and contribute to your progress in a PhD
3. Getting used to a new climate (both socially and geographically)

What makes these challenges difficult is that they’re typically all arising at the same time.

I was figuring out [all of this] while taking different courses.

— Nialah

She recommended that graduate students try the following to prevent or overcome these challenges as well:

1. Read as many research papers in your area as you can!
2. Ask your advisor, or find a mentor, who can explain what’s expected of you and the various milestones required to finish your PhD.
3. Step a little outside of your comfort zone to curate new friendships. Having a support system is key!

Nialah’s words of wisdom

Finally, Nialah offered the following words of wisdom for young roboticists:

One thing that I would say [to a younger version of myself] is: Look more into the different aspects of robotics, because robotics is a really big field. And I didn’t fully get [that] until I got to grad school…

— Nialah

And a few words for young people in general:

…that’s the biggest thing; finding people that are in the positions that I want to be in or are around those things and then reaching out to and talking to them. You learn new things and it opens doors for yourself as well.

— Nialah

If you would like to follow more of Nialah’s exploits, then feel free to follow her Google Scholar profile or her personal website.

Citations

[1] S. Ceron, N. Wilson, L. Horowitz and K. Petersen, “Comparative Analysis of Sensors in Rigid and Deformable Modular Robots for Shape Estimation,” 2019 International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems (MRS), New Brunswick, NJ, USA, 2019, pp. 252–258, doi: 10.1109/MRS.2019.8901072.

[2] Nialah Jenae Wilson, “Bellows Characterization for Dynamic Systems with Damping and Multiphase Flow..” United States: N. p., 2015. Web.

Acknowledgements

Drafts of this article were corrected and improved by Nialah Wilson, Sophia Williams, and Nailah Seale. All current errors are the fault of Kwesi Rutledge. Please reach out to him if you spot any!