Live demos

The afternoon teleop first ran on the robot, I led a demo for twenty to thirty executives from Winbond, the memory chip maker, shortly before Winbond's $12 million gift to the UW College of Engineering. I prepared and ran it: the robot drove around the room while I teleoperated both arms and explained how it works.

Two days earlier, Fauna Robotics' team visited the lab, and I gave them the same tour: driving the robot around and talking through how it works.

On October 17, OpenDubs went downtown for the ARCS Foundation's Night to Ignite Science, a fundraiser for STEM PhD fellowships at the UW and Washington State that raised over $900,000. Four of us from the lab presented it to donors. The robot danced and moved its arms to the Monster Mash: a routine others in the lab put together, running on the arm infrastructure I built.

I really enjoyed the chance to talk with and give back a little to the people who make my research at UW possible. I talked the visitors through the motivation behind OpenDubs, my work on the project, and my passion for robotics. It was great to practice pitching my work to people with an interest in the field, but without intense technical depth.

The trip's main event was Culture Meets Code, which Dare to Dream hosted with Swerve Robotics and the U.S. Embassy in Gaborone. There we advocated with government ministers and business leaders for more STEM funding in schools, funding for robotics clubs, and lower tariffs on educational STEM goods. I was one of the four who gave the "Introduction to FIRST and FLL" speech, which we wrote and memorized within a day of meeting: FIRST's technical side, its core values, and what it had done for each of us. After a panel, the dignitaries who had to leave early saw a quick robot demo, and the guests went round the stations, where the coding and robot demos drew the most interest.