Elizabeth Hosmer

Principles of Engineering
Block 3
Interview with Laura Lindzey
Roboticist
October 9, 2015
Via Skype

2
Professional Background:
Name: Laura Lindzey
Degrees: Master of Science in Robotics, Bachelor of Science in Physics,
Geophysics (currently working on a PhD)
Place of Employment: Stone Aerospace
Email: Lindzey
Professional Interview:
Beth: How would you describe the field of robotics in general?
Laura: Its so broad and theres so many different things that people
call a robot, that Im not even sure Ask more.
Beth: What would you say the main branches of robotics are that you
or I guess I, could go into?
Laura: For me the big divide was in me realizing that Im not an
academic roboticist, I dont want to write papers about new algorithms
or do research, Id rather make something work in the real world. The
robots that are out there right now are mostly pretty stupid. The
Roomba is the most common example, you have things they call
robots, but theyre actually just remote-controlled, like the da Vinci
surgical robot, which is purely human in the loop telling it where to go,
its just a mechanical device with some really nice controls built in.
Same with the PackBot. So youre using control algorithms for robotics
to control better, and then youve got theres some really fun ocean
gliders out there, but then again theyre not much smarter than a
Roomba: theyre told where to go, but they dont do much obstacle
avoidance. And then you start getting to things like the Google selfdriving car, where thats not yet commercial, because theyre still
working the kinks out of it. But it is absolutely trying to interact with
the world, and interact with humans, which gets a lot harder.

3
Beth: So youre saying that modern-day robots are mostly built to
perform certain functions, but you think in the future more intelligent
robots that can figure things out themselves are coming up?
Laura: I dont know that I would say figure things out themselves, I
would say that theyd be able to perform more difficult tasks. I gave a
talk last week, trying to describe to a bunch of scientists whats hard in
robotics right now, and what problems are considered solved, and then
I was really pitching to them the fact that what I consider solved
problems are the same problems that scientists really want to use to
collect data.
So things that are really hard for a robot, that would be useful to
develop, is things like manipulation. Robots at this point can recognize
an object that is modeled, if they already have the model of the object
put in to its system. They can recognize it with computer vision, they
can reach out and grab it and pick it up, and then put it down
somewhere else. But if they havent seen the object before? Thats
hard. If theres a bunch of clutter? Thats still researched. If you have to
pick it up with one hand, and the grab it with another so you can put it
back down like imagine picking a plate up off the dinner table, and
trying to put it in the dish washer, but realizing that youre holding the
part that needs to go down, so you need to grab the top or side or
bottom or something. That is still open to research. Like dealing with
folding towels and clothes? Theres a great video of a robot folding
towels, its painfully slow to watch, and then you find out that the video
is sped up fifty times.
Another way to think about the different branches of robotics is,
you have the sensing. So its making sense of the world. So taking in
camera data, or laser data, - its easier to reason about the world if you
know the 3D structure of it, rather than if its 2D image. So they
actually have sensors that send out laser beams, and measure how
long it takes the laser beam to come back at you, and it tells you how

4
far away something is at that angle. So you bounce the laser off a
mirror, and scan it back and forth, and get a 3D map of your world.
Making sense of that map, and making sense of your camera data, and
turn that into a perception that can be simplified. Now call that
perception, and there are people who do entire degrees on that at the
robot institute and never touch a robot because theyre just doing
computer vision. Thats stuff that Googles been doing a lot, and
YouTube trying to recognize whats happening in videos, that all gets
lumped under robotics even though Id say thats a broader field of
computer science.
Beth: Would you say that robotics is very closely tied to computer
science?
Laura: Oh, very much so. At least at the level I do Im biased,
because I only do the software. I interact with the hardware, thats
what makes it fun for me, the fact that my software isnt just running in
this virtual world of perfect simulation of ones and zeros and the
computers just always doing the same thing. Theres so much
randomness that happens when you have to go out into the world. I
love that. You then have to have a team of mechanical engineers, or
electrical engineers, who actually design and build the robot. So the
mechanical engineers are the ones designing the actual shape, how it
moves to be able to do what we want, how to do it robustly. And then
you have the electrical engineers who are doing all the integration,
who are doing How do we control this? What current do we need to
send to what motor to be able to take advantage of all these
capabilities that are built in by the mechanical engineers?
I rely on them to put together an interface that I can control the
robot with through software. Im primarily into software, but theres all
sorts of fun design work on the mechanical and electrical side. I would
say that the mechanical side behind robots is probably decades ahead

5
of the software, and that we can build really cool mechanisms, really
cool robots, but we cant make them do smart things.
Beth: What is your current job title?
Laura: Gosh, I mean graduate student? Im a contractor, which
pretty much means that I am my own business, so I can call myself
whatever I want. I usually refer to myself as just a roboticist. I cans say
I work for Stone Aerospace, but I dont have a title there at all.
Beth: As a contractor, what is expected of you when you go to work?
Laura: So thats the thing when you end up being a contractor, its
different from being an employee in that one of the differences is that
company Im contracting for doesnt provide me the equipment to do
my job, and they cannot specify how I do it, which means that I work
from home, I work from coffee shops, I work wherever I want to. I will
go down to the lake when were fieldtesting the robot, because you
have to be there in person to actually test the robot. But for any
software job that Im doing, I work from wherever I want to. So pretty
much the expectation of me is to be available and to answer quickly
when emails come through about an issue I might know about, and to
be around for a once-a-week tela-con.
Beth: So besides responding quickly to emails and being around for
the tela-con, you basically have your own schedule. Instead of showing
up to work at a certain time and working for a certain number of hours,
do you work based off of deadlines?
Laura: Kind of, we have field tests that drive our deadlines, but its
such a research-y project that we dont always know if somethings
going to work. Its not like you can totally predict that youre going to
have it ready by this stage. Its I have projects Im working on, and I
actually have a big say in when I work on them. And I try to be done

6
within a certain time, but if it turns out it was harder than we expected,
or I have to work with a bunch of other people because the thing I need
to do actually pivots on what two other people are doing, then I have
to coordinate with them to negotiate who does what when & what
order it happens in. So deadlines is more accurate than thinking about
working forty hours a week.
Thats perfect for me as a student, because I have to go to
classes and would have trouble being able to go in every single day at
a given time.
Beth: Do you get paid according to project, or what?
Laura: As a contractor, it totally depends on what contract you draw
up with the company. My contract is hourly. At the end of every month,
I just send them an invoice saying I worked this many hours, this
amount got done, pay me.
Beth: So its totally up to you to report how may hours you worked.
Laura: Yeah. Which is pretty common, when I worked as an employee
at UT Austin well, some companies you report hours some companies
you dont. At UT Austin I did and I got paid hourly, even as an
employee. At Bosch, I had to report hours but I was only allowed forty a
week. And then at Google, I did not report hours, because I was not
paid hourly. I got a salary, and was expected to and did work way more
than forty hours a week. But then, it was an internship and the goal
was to get the most out of it. They were letting me write code that was
going to run on the Google self-driving cars, so I was motivated to
spend time on it. When you have your bosss boss emailing you saying
So we saw this weird behavior, and were preparing for a demo for the
CEO of Google, do you think this might involve your code? youre
going to answer really quickly.
Laura: So what are you interested in?

7
Beth: Im actually really interested in software, I didnt realize that
robotics whenever I thought of robotics, I always thought of the
mechanical side, I didnt realize that programming them could also be
considered robotics, so that actually sounds really interesting too. I
love programming stuff and figuring out the logic, and I think trying to
work things in a real world environment would be a good challenge.
Laura: Yeah, thats absolutely what caught me.
Beth: Academically, starting from high school, what has helped you
get into this field?
Laura: I think academics are overrated, its all about working on
projects outside of school, or inside of school. Grades matter, but they
dont matter. In high school, I hated computer science. I took a summer
school class at Carnegie Mellon in Java, and hated it.
Beth: I actually really liked my computer science class at school, I
think I can attribute it to the fact that I have a teacher I really love, but
I think people who had other teacher thought I hate computer
science, Im terrible at this, Im never going to do this.
Laura: When I first tried it, I took a class at my high school that was a
little too easy and I didnt really learn much, I took one at summer
school and it wasnt taught well, I was just constantly running up
against syntax errors and I didnt have a good mental model of how
programming worked, and then I took one my first year of college, and
we used Scheme, which is a programming language youve probably
never heard of, but it was beautifully simple, and I could suddenly see
the beauty of the algorithms behind everything, and so I enjoyed that
and I took more computer science classes and really still sucked at
programming.
But then, all of my friends were working on this robot. It was a
self-driving car, it was meant to compete in a race across a desert. All
my friends were working on it. As a freshman I didnt have any skills,

8
but there was another race that was going to happen when I was a
junior, and so as soon as my sophomore year started, I tried to figure
out how I could be of use to the team. I picked the class that would
teach me the skills I needed to do that piece of the project, and then
pretty much just walked to the principals office and said I dont have
the prerequisites for this class, but I want to take it anyway because I
want to work on this robot, and I think this is the fastest way for me to
become useful. And since CalTech really believes in giving students as
much rope as they want to hang themselves, whenever I asked for
something crazy the answer was Yeah sure, lets see what happens!
So then the principal was like Sure you dont have the prereqs but
whatever, take the class.
I loved it, did well in it, and then got involved with this robot, And
so the first real computer program ever like I made the toy ones for
class, but the first real computer program ever was the program that
took the desired path through space for the robot and turned that into
steering, throttle and braking commands. So I was eighteen years old,
and I didnt really know how to program. And then I was motivated to
learn how to program, because I wanted to be better at controlling the
robots.
Beth: What language did you program the robot in? Do you
remember?
Laura: My first robot was C and C++, my current robot is mostly
Python, some C++, Bosch was Python and C++, Google was almost
entirely C++. The industry right now is really Python and C++, but
language doesnt matter Computer science isnt about learning the
language, its about learning the algorithms underneath the language.
How to break down a goal into logical, smaller functions.
Beth: So the idea behind the program?
Laura: Right. I always write my programs first in pseudo-code. Im not
writing the language when I first write the program, Im writing the

9
logic. And then I can translate that logic into whatever language. It
may be harder in some languages compared to others, and some
languages may influence the shape of it, but I dont think its that
important which one you choose.
Beth: So if you had to go back to high school and go through that long,
painful process again, is there anything you would do differently?
Laura: I actually dont think so, because as much as I hated high
school, Im pretty happy with how well my school prepared me
academically.
Beth: Did you go to a school in Austin?
Laura: I went to Westlake. The science teachers were very good. I wish
theyd had more math, because I was out of math freshman year.
Beth: What math were you in?
Laura: I took calculus my freshman year, and then I was done. Again,
in high school, it wasnt the classes that really did a lot for me. I got a
research job, it was paid, working at UT Austin, with a research
scientist here.
Beth: How old were you?
Laura: I interviewed when I was fifteen, and I started working for him
when I was sixteen.
Beth: So this is something I could do right now.
Laura: If youre interested in the type of things I do, then yes. It
depends on what you want to do, because Im doing glaciology, and
remote processing of sensor data, which has a surprising overlap with
robotics. But yeah. Rather than going off and getting a job at
McDonalds, I wound up with a research job at the university, which was
really cool. If you think thats something youre interested in, thats by
far more important than getting fantastic grades in high school. If you
have a recommendation letter from a professor at a university saying
I worked with this person, she asked good questions, shes
enthusiastic, she works well with my grad students., thats awesome.

10
Beth: So specifically, what did you do academically after you
graduated from Westlake?
Laura: I have a bachelors in physics from CalTech, and then I have a
masters in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, and Im working on a PhD in
geophysics from UT.
Beth: Is there any other advice you would give if I was interested in
following your career path, which I am very interested in?
Laura: Well first, see if you like it, because you may like the idea of it
if youre interested in going into robotics, the sooner you start playing
with the robot, the better.
Beth: So join the robotics club, contact a professor?
Laura: I havent been, but theres actually local robotics clubs. My
impression of them is that theyre more for people that want to build
up the hardware, and do some very simple computer science, and
arent really doing research-y things. Contact a professor, see if you
can attend talks, see if you can talk to more students. Theres actually
some relatively cheap robots you can buy off the internet. Especially if
youre willing to solder a little bit you can put together something
that you can drive around in your living room.
(I brought up that I own an electrical engineering kit capable of
interpreting input from the outside world)
Thats another way to think of robotics. A robot is something that
follows a sense-think-act loop, so it has sensors that pick up
information about the world, it reasons about it, and then it takes
action in the world based on that information. So what you just
described is one part of that. And then you would need to have it do
something based on that information.
(Since all the necessary information is include up to here, and
the interview took another fifteen minutes due to the extra questions I
was asking, this transcript only covers the first thirty minutes.)

11

Personal Reflection
a. I was surprised to learn about how vital programming is to
robotics, and how currently the industry is having more
difficulties with controlling robots rather than the heavily
researched subject of creating them.
b. Students with initiative who will take risks and make choices
that werent even listed in the options will find encouragement,
and gain experience and wisdom.
c. Computer science/programming seems to be not just fun and
mentally challenging, but also exciting and important, and Im
now considering pursuing some form of robotics.
d. This interview has further proved and confirmed how widespread
and useful computer science and programming are in many
industries and career paths.
e. While I dont plan on changing any of my high school courses (I
was already planning on taking computer science and digital
engineering), I will be spending more time experimenting with
electrical engineering & programming on my own, and designing
my own projects. I also will be attending a beginner robotics
meet in a couple of weeks, I plan on looking for more meets and
conventions I where I can learn and experiment, and Ill do
research to find professors or companies I can work with as a
high school student. My most important takeaway from this
interview was that searching for and creating experiences with
the career(s) Im interested in will advance me farther down that
path than allowing the funnel of high school to be my only
learning environment.