Sky’s the limit
Vogue Codes celebrates women breaking ground in the world of tech. As this year’s campaign kicks into gear, we check in with two past participants who have recently taken their success global.
Grace Brown
In 2021, Grace Brown won Vogue’s first Future Innovators competition with her humanoid robot, Abi. Now, she’s the CEO and co-founder of a robotics and AI startup Andromeda Robotics.
Idid not expect us to win,” Grace Brown admits. The robotics engineer is disarmingly humble about her success in Vogue’s 2021 Future Innovators competition. “When we got into the top five, I remember going to my photo shoot thinking, ‘Oh my god, I wonder if I’m going to get to meet the winner.’”
It was while doing a Bachelor of Mechatronics, Robotics, and Automation Engineering at the University of Melbourne that Brown started toying with the idea of creating Abi, a humanoid robot with the capacity for socialisation, although she could never have anticipated where that “passion project” would end up.
“I always knew I wanted to be in the robotics space,” Brown recalls. “I just didn’t have that budget to pursue a robotics project like Abi.” Having entered Vogue’s first iteration of Future Innovators – a competition supported by Optus that seeks to uncover and support tech innovations through a mentorship program and a $10,000 grant for the winner – the rationale behind Brown’s entry was simple. “I was desperate for funding.”
A self-confessed Disney fanatic, Brown’s curiosity with the companion-type robots she saw in Pixar films like Big Hero 6 materialised as Abi – a simulated robot with human-like tendencies, such as the ability to respond to conversation, demonstrate empathy and even give hugs. It was a concept that won competition judges over.
“It was a very credible panel and so for women like that to believe in me, it made me take what I was doing a lot more seriously,” she says. Following her victory, Brown’s trajectory took a detour. “We applied for different accelerators, got introduced to different investors, incorporated our business and then got funding, and then everything just sort of grew from there,” she says.
Brown has been on perpetual fast forward since then. “I think I’ve slept in my own bed for a total of two weeks this year,” she laughs. Splitting her time between the cities where she and her engineering team are based – Melbourne and Boston, one of the top robotics communities in the world, with visits to Sydney, where her investors are, Brown is proof that success never sleeps. Her commitment to Abi’s success is far more than just an unwavering work ethic, though. Brown’s dedication is indicative of her belief in the potential of humanoids like Abi to redefine the robotic space. “Previously, [robots] have been used for very objective purposes. Their utility is very industrial and mechanical,” Brown says. “Abi, to me, represents a new age where you’re not just integrating the utility of robotic labour, but you’re combining that with empathy and personality and expression, and that’s really new.”
In this new age – of which Brown is at the frontier – robots like Abi are designed as companions to those in need, finding homes in aged care centres and hospitals and offering a sense of connection to individuals experiencing loneliness.
“There’s nothing in the world that’s like that yet,” Brown muses. It is in this very niche area that Andromeda Robotics – the robotic and artificial intelligence startup Brown co-founded and is CEO of – exists.
Abi has grown from simulation to prototype, a development emblematic of a changing of the guards in the robotic space, yet one that is truly just the beginning for Brown and her team. With customers in both the US and Australia, Brown has her sights set firmly on expansion, seeing Andromeda as a company with the potential to become a world-class leader in the industry. “I do see Abi at the forefront of this market so, not to be too cheesy, but I know nothing’s really going to stop me from getting there.”
This year’s Vogue Codes Future Innovators competition is now open and closes September 1, 2023. Enter your business idea and you could win $10,000. For more information, go to vogue.com.au/codes.
Katherine Bennell-Pegg
Since speaking on a panel at Adelaide’s Vogue Codes In-conversation Breakfast in 2022, Katherine Bennell-Pegg, a director of Space Technology at the Australian Space Agency, will train as an astronaut at the European Space Agency, the first Australian woman to do so.
Contrary to what her profession would have you believe, Katherine Bennell-Pegg is a very grounded person. When we speak, she is in the middle of her third week of a rigorous training regime at the European Space Agency (ESA), just outside of Cologne, Germany. In 14 months, when she finishes, she will be the first person to be trained as an astronaut under the Australian flag.
Astronaut training at the ESA is unsurprisingly taxing. Every day she undergoes two hours of instructed fitness, and takes classes on everything from radiation biology to foreign languages (the International Space Station, the destination for most space missions, naturally attracts astronauts from around the world). She will plunge into hostile environments from oceans to tundras for survival training, and learn the basics of a space mission – from how to manoeuvre a robotic arm, to the mechanics of extraterrestrial experiments.
Bennell-Pegg’s journey into the program wasn’t straightforward. After making it to the final 25 of more than 22,500 applicants, she was not among the 17 selected in late 2022, because of her limited connection to Europe, but will now attend as an employee of the Australian Space Agency based on her impressive results in the selection process.
The program is notoriously difficult to get into, with the gruelling application process including everything from extensive medical and fitness testing and memory and concentration drills to personal essays on strengths and weaknesses, psychological tests and scores of maths and physics problems. Compounding the intellectual rigour was the psychological peril: all of this was taking place in Germany in mid-2021 during the pandemic. But Bennell-Pegg prevailed, and her success is set to be shared with all Australians.
“Now I get to show that there’s so much opportunity for Australians in STEM and in space, and that they can be part of it, too,” she says.
For Bennell-Pegg, 38, the dream of space has always been tied firmly to what happens on earth. “When I was young, I was drawn to space for the adventure of it,” she says. “But it’s so much more powerful than that. You can help contribute to human discovery.”
Bennell-Pegg’s mother passed away from breast cancer 11 years ago, and she is interested in the potential for space to give us answers to medical questions, including how radiation affects organs. “Your cells behave quite differently in microgravity, interestingly, than on earth,” she notes. “Even to be a tiny part of that would mean a lot to me.”
As for her goals, Bennell-Pegg says: “Absolutely, going to space … most astronauts hope for the exciting stuff, they hope for spacewalks, they hope to operate the robotic arm, they hope to pilot the vehicle. The next big destination for people is the moon, and everyone wants their boots to be the one [on the ground]. That would be the best. But the reason you do that is for the discoveries you help make.”