The 2024 INTEGRATE Symposium was held on on Tuesday, May 28 from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm in the H.F. DeLuca Forum on the first floor of the Discovery Building.
Faculty and graduate students from across campus attended, sharing their current research at the intersection of robotics and the future of work.
Keynote Speaker
Evan Drumwright is CEO and co-founder of Limber Robotics, but being an entrepreneur is his third career. Evan received his Ph. D. in Computer Science (CS) from the University of Southern California with a focus on humanoid and mobile manipulator robots. He then went on to be a professor in CS at George Washington University in DC (first career), where he switched his research focus to dynamic robotic simulation. His second career was as an industrial researcher at Toyota Research Institute in Silicon Valley, where he co-developed the hydroelastic contact model for Drake’s simulator and led its implementation. Evan discovered his passion for building deep-tech organizations that solve problems with deep societal impact (third career) when he built Dextrous Robotics, a company that focused on automating the dirty and dangerous task of unloading semi trailers and shipping containers.
“Chasing a Moonshot: Building a Robotics Company for High Speed Dexterous Manipulation in Partially Structured Environments”
Evan spent the past four years building Dextrous Robotics, a company that built chopstick-inspired manipulation robots for moving boxes and other items loaded into trucks, only for us to shut it down in 2023 for lack of continued funding. This talk will tell you how Evan found this problem; about the foundational theses of Dextrous Robotics; how Evan acquired money to solve it; how the Dextrous team designed, built, and controlled a specialized robot to solve truck unloading; and how Dextrous sold customers on using it. Of course that’s not the end of the story. This talk will conclude by talking about why the company failed and give Evan’s thoughts for the near future of high growth robotics startups.
UW-Madison Speaker
Mahka Moeen is the Skillrud Family Chair in Business and an Associate Professor in the Management and Human Resources Department at the Wisconsin School of Business. Her research focuses on how firms and entrepreneurs create and enter nascent industries. In studying the co-evolution of entrepreneurial firms and nascent industries, she examines strategies that firms undertake during the incubation industry stage. She has studied these questions in the contexts of life sciences, medical devices, and commercial drones, among others. Her research has been published in Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Strategy Science, and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. This research program has been recognized by awards from the Kauffman Foundation, Strategy Research Foundation, Academy of Management’s TIM Division, Industry Studies Association, and the Schulze Foundation. She is also a double Poets & Quants award winner.