From 4-8 May, a VUB delegation along with some CEOs spent time in Californiaâs Bay Area and Los Angeles to meet with a series of research institutes, universities and companies focusing on robotics. The packed programme saw VUBâs Vice-rector Innovation & Valorisation Peter Schelkens with representatives from the Brubotics research group and imec meet with people (and often the founders) from Stanford University, Nvidia, Saildrone, Blue River, Caltech, Coco Robotics, Intrinsic, and Silicon Valley Roboticsâ Andra Keay, to name a few. The VUB delegation was accompanied by two CEOs: Pablo Lopez Garcia from Ailos Robotics, and Constantin Scholz from Coera.
Robotics to improve life and work
Robotics has become fundamental to solving big societal challenges such as aging populations, healthcare, and labour shortages in key industries. VUB wants to structurally support this fast-developing robotics ecosystem, and that automatically leads to Silicon Valley, the home of not only big tech, but a breeding ground for many robotic start-ups and budding entrepreneurs.
The overall goal of the VUBâs Brubotics research team is to improve peopleâs quality of life and work. But the research groupâs ambition was always to move beyond âjustâ papers and prototypes, and rather to translate deep tech into economic, societal and planetary impact by working closely with industry, creating spin-offs, and using robotics in the real world. The Brubotics work is multidisciplinary, combining materials, sensors, actuators, AI and real-time coding with social sciences, medical sciences, and human movement sciences. Theyâve developed a number of strong partnerships across Brussels and Flanders, as well as Europe, and coordinated several high-profile European research programmes, became part of Flanders Make, and for the past five years theyâve been affiliated with imec. In addition, they work with partners such as Audi, Volvo, Volkswagen, Pfizer and a whole series of SMEs.
Investigating opportunities in this area with well-known and well-established players (education, research, investment and business) in California makes total sense. âSilicon Valleyâs robotics ecosystem thrives on the seamless flow of ideas, talent, and capital between top universities, start-ups and tech giants, thereby creating the ideal conditions for rapid AI-hardware innovation. From this point of view, it is logical that we would reach out and investigate how we can connect to our mutual benefit,â explains Peter Schelkens, Vice-rector of Innovation and Valorisation at VUB.
Professor Bram Vanderborght also gave a seminar at Stanford Robotics Center â this and the overall visit to Silicon Valley gave VUB and Brubotics a chance to showcase the Robotics Hub in the Research Park Zellik. The intention is to use it as a landing space for international scale-ups which are envisioning expansion in Europe. The visit to California provided valuable insights on what the success factors are in the development of such a tech hub.
The visit also presented an opportunity to connect with local VUB alumni. With their support, the delegation met with 30 VUB graduates of different generations showed up for a lovely dinner hosted by the Consul General Sophie Hottat at the Residence of Belgium.
Itâs clear that the foundations have been laid for long-term relationships between VUB and Silicon Valley. The idea is to look at the potential to make this a recurrent trip, to further strengthen ties between VUB and the universities and companies based in the California Bay Area.
More information on VUB TechTransfer:
More information on Brubotics:
- https://www.brubotics.eu/
- https://www.facebook.com/brubotics
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/brubotics
The trip was prepared with the help of the Flanders Investment & Trade office based in California.
