THE START-UP BUSINESS AUBOT

IN 2008, as a student at The University of Melbourne, she co-founded Robogals, a group that encourages young women to get into engineering. In 2012, she was Young Australian of the Year. In 2013, she started 2Mar Robotics. In October 2016, several months shy of her 28th birthday, she accepted an Asia Game Changer award at the United Nations in New York City. And, for her next act, Marita Cheng presents Teleport, an Australian-made telepresence robot.

To the casual observer, Cheng seems to be rocket-boosted. But, in reality, it’s been a lot of hard slog, grant-application writing and pure passion for her dream.

“I’d always wanted to start a robotics company,” she says, “to do something technical that challenged me.”

But in the final years of her engineering degree, she had some doubts: “Looking at robotics companies all over the world... the robots were very expensive – $200,000 or more – with teams of 80 people and everyone had PhDs.” But she got her mojo back when she heard about a trio of American university dropouts who’d raised more than $100,000 for a very simple robotics project. After touring the country for 12 months as Young Australian of the Year, Cheng started 2Mar Robotics in April 2013, rebranding the company as Aubot in 2016.

“I wanted to do something useful so I decided to build a robot arm,” she explains. She began by asking people with disabilities what they’d want from a robot-helper limb, which she named Jeva.

It was a complex, costly project but, says Cheng, “Robogals gave me a lot of soft skills. It taught me resilience and perseverance. You have to really develop that muscle.” And it was some workout: Robogals is now in more than 10 countries, with chapters in over 30 universities, reaching 55,000plus schoolgirls.

For two years, Cheng toiled on Jeva, garnering grants and accolades and conducting usability trials. The pivot point to the more scalable Teleport project came after she suggested some telepresence robots to a friend, who responded by saying he didn’t like any of them and they were all way too expensive. Around the same time, a mentor challenged her to build one.

There have been many Teleport prototypes but cheaper components and easier design modifications meant its evolution was much faster than Jeva’s (which remains in development “and will be awesome”, says Cheng). Two years later, working with coders, engineers and others recruited as the project required, Aubot has a robot and its proprietary interface on the market for $3800. The nearest competitor sells for upwards of $5000.

If you’re thinking R2-D2 from Star Wars or the B9 robot from Lost in Space, we’re not quite there yet. Teleport is basically a Lenovo-tablet head on a wheeled stand that telescopes up and down and roams about as directed by the remote user, who connects via wi-fi from a computer anywhere in the world. The user can interact with anyone who’s with the robot. Applications range from health care to education and business, including cases of “home sick but have a meeting”. Virtual-reality control and autonomous navigation are future options. When asked about start-up stress, Cheng doesn’t mention money or the hours. She’s all about the quality of the robot: “I just hope my technology’s good and my customers really like it.”