I, Robot

Marita Cheng is in a hurry. That becomes abundantly clear after speaking with her for just a few minutes. She has a lot on her impressive mind and she’s obviously intent on seeing as much of it come to reality as possible – and as quickly as possible.

Last year’s winner of the Audi scholarship at the InStyle and Audi Women of Style Awards has not been idle since accepting the $10,000 bursary to help her continue her work in robotics. But with her telepresence robot now tantalisingly close to series production, she is torn between excitement and frustration.

“I want to get a lot done and you don’t have much time,” says 27-year-old Marita Cheng, who has lived by those very words since graduating from high school in the top 0.2 percent of the country before going on to graduate from Melbourne University with degrees in both mechatronics and computer science. 

Cheng is not one to standstill for even a second, and her ever-expanding list of achievements is evidence of that. Named Young Australian of the Year in 2012, to starting her own company, 2Mar Robotics or founding Robogals, an innovative to encourage more young women to go into engineering – now a global concern that has taught more than 50,000 girls from nine countries and has been recognised internationally and awarded for its groundbreaking work. 

Her list of awards both nationally and internationally are as impressive as they are numerous and still there is no evidence of her slowing up for even a moment.

“I want to get things done as quickly as possible,” she says “and when you get something done, you learn so much from the whole process that you acquire new skills and experience that allows you to go on to the next project.”

“It’s kind of like exponential learning and exponential growing,” she says. “So rather than relying on the skills you learned 10 years ago, it’s a matter of asking ‘what skills am I learning now. What skills am I learning in the next two months that I can use in the next three months after that.”

Those skills and that vision were what brought her to the attention of the judging panel at last year’s InStyle and Audi Women of Style awards. Her work developing robotic arms was extraordinary, but that was just the beginning for Marita.

The past 12 months have been characteristically busy for Cheng.

“After (Audi and InStyle Women of Style Awards) I went to Singularity University (Silicon Valley), which was a 10 week course at NASA in the States sponsored by Google. I joined a group of 80 students from 44 countries and learnt about technologies to help change the lives of a billion people in the next 10 years,” says Marita.

“We learnt about artificial intelligence and robotics and bio-med and medicine… the latest in all of this kind of technology.

“While I was there I had a team of people back in Melbourne who were working on the robot, particularly the software side of it. And when I got back from the states in September last year I recruited 20 students (from 200 applicants) to help me work on the robot and we built another two prototypes over the summer.”

The new robot – originally called the Teleroo robot – is far simpler than the robotic prosthetics she had been developing, but its applications just as exciting.

“I wasn’t inspired by making very expensive robots. I wanted to build robots that were cheap enough that people could actually afford to buy them and benefit from on a large scale.

“Let’s start by building something that’s really simple and work up from there,” she said of the rationale behind Teleroo.

Since early prototypes a year ago, the Teleroo robot has gone through numerous changes, including a name change to Teleport which more accurately describes its primary function. It’s now only a matter of months away from series production and the waiting is excruciating for Cheng.

“I thought of my success with Robogals and how I got that up and running so quickly. Within three weeks I had 80 students volunteering to work with me, within two months we taught our first class, within three months we taught 120 students from four Melbourne schools.”

“I’ve found that since I’ve created this robot, that people really want it and they want it now.”

As the name suggest, the Telepresence Robot not only allows parties to communicate in real time, but literally become a part of their surroundings at the ‘other end’ through the robot’s ability to move around. Unlike say Skype or video conferencing, you are able to navigate around your remote location, looking at what you want, vary the volume of your speech at the other end to speak privately to a colleague in a meeting for example  – indeed even though you are not physically there, you can move around the room speaking to whomever you want thanks to your robotic avatar.

“People who telecommute don’t even have to get dressed, they can just teleport in,” she laughs, but the possibilities go way beyond say an errant journalist who doesn’t want to have to front the office in person.

It’s all about making the best use of people’s time and as Marita says, it may be that your time is not best spent at a desk in an office for eight hours a day, but out in the field or working remotely, but still able to ‘teleport in’ when required to update the team and remain up-to-date with what other parties are up to.

Even companies that have two offices in the same city, will find it easier for employees to teleport between the offices for meetings rather than jumping in the car and travelling between the two. It’s not just a time saving but it is environmentally friendly.

The far reaching applications are incredible, from educational to medical to retail and tourism. Patients in hospital will be able to stay in touch with loved ones even when distances between hospital and home are vast. 

“A child in hospital with cancer for example, could receive a robot and not only stay in touch with their family and friends but also keep up to date with their school work, so that long spells in hospital would not find them socially isolated.”

“We could instill a sense of ownership in them, by bringing the robot to them and have them learn about how the robot is made.”

“It’s a very immersive experience,” she says.

But first, the initial ‘wave’ of 100 robots need to be built and shipped out to customers, many of whom have already paid deposits. Marita and her team have been searching both locally and overseas to find the very best quality in terms of manufacture, so the end, or to be more precise, the beginning is in sight, and once the manufacturing side is under control, it’ll be all steam ahead.

“We’ve actually bought all of our off-shelf parts,” says Marita. “We’ve bought all of our batteries, all of our motors, our actuators, our on/off switches, our wheels and we’re just working on our pre-production parts before we can hit go and ship out our robots, which is very exciting, but also very frustrating because of the wait.”

“After your very first prototype, it usually takes two years to go to market, so that would mean that by this December my robot should go to market,” she says, almost willing December to come sooner.

For those who have already expressed interest in the telepresence robot – from museums to businesses and individuals – those first deliveries likewise can’t come soon enough. But for now it’s more important to do it right.

Not surprisingly for someone as driven as Marita, she already has a new project in the wings, but is not saying what it is. Given she was more than a little inspired by Isaac Asimov’s classic novel I, Robot and the film adaptation starring Will Smith and Audi – which showed a future where robots do a vast amount of the manual work –  it’s a fair bet her plans are not small.

“There’s so much to do and I just feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. I just feel like a beginner. It’s an adventure.”

Find out more at http://2mar.com