Building a Robotics Ecosystem: Q&A with UC San Diego’s Al Pisano

Albert "Al" Pisano (UC San Diego image used with permission)

It’s been almost a year since UC San Diego and Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) confirmed an initiative was underway to create an ambitious robotics institute that would include a new incubator for robotics startups.

The effort was conceived as a way to put San Diego on the map as an up-and-coming innovation hub in robotics, create inroads for Qualcomm’s wireless technologies, and enable UC San Diego to join the ranks of elite universities already leading the nation in robotics R&D. But it’s hard to measure how far the initiative has progressed since last year’s splash. Both UC San Diego and Qualcomm have maintained radio silence.

Among some insiders, though, there are don’t-attribute-this-to-me reports that Qualcomm intends to house the robotics incubator itself, with the curriculum and mentoring services provided by Techstars, the Boulder, CO-based accelerator that already operates a half-dozen accelerator programs on behalf of such companies as Microsoft, Sprint, and Disney. Many details are still being worked out, however, and neither Qualcomm nor Techstars founder David Cohen would comment.

Leaders at UC San Diego also declined to say much, although they seem closer to raising the curtain on at least some aspects of their efforts at the Jacobs School of Engineering. For one thing, an international forum on “contextual robotics” to be held at UC San Diego on Oct. 10 includes a veritable Who’s Who of innovation leaders in robotics. Albert “Al” Pisano, dean of the engineering school, said in a recent interview (our Q&A is below) that the robotics forum “is a key part of our effort to reach out to technologists and thought leaders” as part of the effort to build the new robotics institute and “catalyze” a robotics ecosystem, including manufacturing.

DARPA Robotics Challenge (artist's concept courtesy of DARPA)
DARPA Robotics Challenge (artist’s concept courtesy of DARPA)

The featured speakers include Segway creator Dean Kamen of New Hampshire’s DEKA Research & Development Corp; Gill Pratt, program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) who oversees the Robotics Challenge, a $2-million prize competition; Rod Brooks, co-founder, chairman, and CTO of Boston-based Rethink Robotics; Vijay Kumar, a leading roboticist at the University of Pennsylvania who is best known for his work in controlling robot swarms; and Matt Grob, CTO and executive vice president for Qualcomm Technologies, and a key player in Qualcomm’s strategy to develop new markets in robotics.

In anticipation of the event, I submitted some questions to Pisano about the robotics initiative and related matters. His lightly edited answers are below:

Xconomy: Has UCSD launched its proposed robotics institute yet?

Al Pisano: No, not yet. We are in both a listening phase and a capacity-building phase for our future institute for contextual robotics systems.

X: What does contextual robotics mean?

AP: Contextual robotics is the middle of the “three Cs of robotics” as described by Vijay Kumar. The three Cs are communication, context, and contact. My feeling is that research related to

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.