IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2016 - 8

industrial activities

Winners of the Inaugural IEEE RAS
Start-Up Competition Announced!
By Raj Madhavan, Erwin Prassler, and Oliver Brock

F

rench poet and novelist Victor
Hugo is attributed with the quote
"Nothing is more powerful than
an idea whose time has come."
The saying is especially true as it applies
to robotics and automation. In the last
few years, entrepreneurship in robotics
and automation has received renewed
interest due to several high-profile acquisitions, for example, Amazon's
US$775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems in early 2012 and Google's acquisition of eight robotics companies in late
2013. In addition, companies like Da-Jiang Innovations Science and Technology Co., Ltd., a Chinese technology
company that produces unmanned aerial vehicles, are currently valued at US$8
billion, indicating the market's belief in
the commercial impact of robotic technology. However, a powerful idea alone
is not enough for a successful transition
of a concept to a commercializable product, as anyone who has attempted to
make their dream a reality would attest.
To foster the entrepreneurial spirit
and to provide a platform to encourage
researchers and practitioners to transition ideas and prototypes to commercializable products, the IEEE Robotics
and Automation Society's (RAS's)
Industrial Activities Board invited the
robotics and automation community to
participate in an Entrepreneurship
Forum and Start-Up Competition at the
2015 IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan
International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS) held in

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2015.2511698
Date of publication: 8 March 2016

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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Figure 1. (From left) Erwin Prassler; Raj Madhavan; competition winners Alvin Chen and
Max Balter (of VascuLogic); and Oliver Brock.

Hamburg, Germany, on 1 October
2015. The event was intended to inspire,
educate, enable, and empower researchers, students, young professionals, and
anyone else who has the start-up bug
and wants to launch companies but is
not sure of how to go about it. It is our
belief that such efforts will create an
ecosystem that will provide much-needed support for start-ups to launch their
initiatives while being realistic about
their envisioned ideas and products.
In a rigorous review process, a panel
of experts from industry selected 12
finalists from 55 submissions. The finalists were invited to IROS in Hamburg to
make their final pitches. In an interim
coaching stage, the finalists were paired
with an expert to fine-tune their presentations and ideas to present at the finals,
where they made a 5-min presentation
(followed by a 5-min question and
answer session) to a distinguished judging panel from industry and academia.

march 2016

The presentations were judged based
on the following seven criteria: business
idea, customer benefit, competitive
advantage, market analysis, management, traction, and financial concept.
The judges were Dominik Boesl, corporate innovation manager, KUKA AG,
Germany; Francois Boucher, chief business development officer, Kinova, Canada; Ryan Gariepy, chief technology
officer, Clearpath Robotics, Canada;
Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, Distinguished McKnight University Professor,
University of Minnesota; Slawomir
Sander, Bosch Robotics, Germany; and
Alin Albu-Schaeffer, head of the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR).
The top three prize winners of the
first IEEE RAS Start-Up Competition
were as follows (Figure 1):
● Grand prize winner: Alvin Chen of
VascuLogic, LLC, whose business
idea was a portable, image-guided
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