Top 10 Heroes of Robotics! Researchers Doing Out-of-The-Box Innovation

Robotics is thriving in different kinds of industries in recent years, especially in Industry 4.0. The combination of cutting-edge technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, IoT, and many more have developed multiple robots for different purposes. The education and research in robotics are increasing at an increasing rate owing to several pioneers in robotics. Their expertise in robotics is largely contributing to the robotics domain for more improvements and advancements in robots. Here are the top 10 heroes of robotics, who are building innovative models.

John J. Leonard

John J. Leonard is an American roboticist and professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His robotic research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous mobile robots. Leonard was a pioneer in formulating the problem of Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) in the mobile robotics research community. With the help of his students and collaborators, he has developed several state-of-the-art robot navigation and mapping systems for robots operating in underwater and terrestrial environments. 

Melonee Wise

Melonee Wise is the CEO of Fetch Robotics, which provides collaborative robots for the warehouse and logistics industry. Wise was the second employee at Willow Garage, a research and development laboratory specializing in robotics. While she was there, she led a team of engineers developing next-generation robot hardware and software. Wise is also one of the co-founders of Unbounded Robotics, which was a spin-off of sorts from Willow Garage. Based on her previous experience, Wise has stated that finding sufficient funding is a serious problem for companies in the field of robotics. 

Steve Cousins

Steve Cousins is the Founder and CEO of Savioke, the leader in developing and deploying autonomous robots that work in human environments to improve people's lives. Before founding Savioke, Cousins worked as the President and CEO of robotics incubator Willow Garage, where he oversaw the creation of the robot operating system (ROS), an open-source software suite that has become the standard tool among robotics researchers, and the PR2 robot, and the open-source TurtleBot. Cousins is passionate about building robotic technology to help people and he is an active participant in the Robots for Humanity project.

Cynthia Breazeal

Cynthia Breazeal is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots group at the Media Lab. Armed with electronic gadgets, software programs, and her endless imagination, Breazeal creates life-like machines that can respond to the world around them. Breazeal is a roboticist, a scientist who designs, builds, and experiments with robots. As a child, she relied on movies to see robots in action, and today, robots are a part of her daily life at the MIT Media Lab. Breazeal's seminal book 'Designing Sociable Robots' is recognized as a landmark in launching the field of social robotics and human-robot interaction. 

Takeo Kanade

Takeo Kanade is a Japanese computer scientist and one of the world's foremost researchers in computer science and robotics. He is U.A and Helen Whitaker Professor at Carnegie Mello University. Kanade works in multiple areas of robotics like computer vision, multi-media, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, medical robots, and sensors. He has written more than 400 technical papers and reports in these areas and holds more than 20 patents. Kanade designed the world's first robotics arm in 1981. The arm contained all of its motors within the robot assembly itself and this eliminated long transmissions. 

Marc Raibert

Marc Raibert is the Founder and former CEO, and now Chairman of Boston Dynamics, a robotics company known for creating BigDog, Atlas, Spot, and Handle. These robots are inspired by the remarkable ability of animals to move with agility, dexterity, perception, and intelligence. Raibert worked as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1986 to 1995. 

Dieter Fox

Dieter Fox is a Senior Director of Robotics Research at Nvidia. Fox is also a professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. He is currently sharing his time between Nvidia and UW, while also leading the Robotics Research Lab in Seattle. Fox is the head of the UW Robotics and State Estimation Lab RSE-Lab. His research is in robotics, with strong connections to artificial intelligence, computer vision, and machine learning. 

Hiroshi Ishiguro

Hiroshi Ishiguro is the Director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, a part of the Department of Systems Innovation in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University, Japan. Ishiguro constructs his mechanical doppelganger using silicone rubber, pneumatic actuators, powerful electronics, and hair from his own scalp. He controls this robot remotely through his computer using a microphone to capture his voice and a camera to track his face and head movements. 

Sachin Chitta

Sachin Chitta is the Director of Robotics Research at Autodesk to lead a team of robotics researchers in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. He was the Founder and CEO of Kinema Systems which was focused on the world's first deep-learning-based solutions for robotic depalletizing for logistics. He sold the company to Boston Dynamics, a pioneer company in robotics for its wide range of robotics. Sachin is one of the robotics experts to watch out for in 2022 through the services of Autodesk for multiple robots. 

David Hanson

David Hanson is an American roboticist and the Founder and CEO of Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based robotics company founded in 2013. Hanson develops robots that are widely regarded as the world's most human-like appearance, in a lifelong quest to create true living, caring machines. To accomplish this goal, he integrates figurative arts with cognitive science and robotics engineering, inventions of novel skin material, facial expressions mechanism, etc.