The Entrepreneurial Landscape for
Developers of Robotics

Saturday, February 9, 2008

at the California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, California
Registration and Continental Breakfast:
8:00 a.m. Baxter Hall
Program: 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at Baxter Lecture Hall
Networking: 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at Baxter Lecture Hall
Cost: $40 on-line registration fee.  $50 at-the-door.  $10 for students with full-time student ID (must show at door); free to Caltech students. Registrations will be accepted on-line up to 5 p.m., Thursday, February 7th. There are no refunds for no-shows.

Several years ago, Sony demonstrated a corps of bipedal robots that perform a fully-coordinated elegant modern dance. They could do everything but jump, but they needed to be programmed in detail. Last year, a Carnegie-Mellon researcher joined with a Japanese counterpart to produce a toy-sized robot that would move rhythmically on its own to music. Service robots are no longer a fantasy. The Roomba will vacuum your house when you are away and it won’t knock anything over in the process. New high-end cars parallel park themselves. Visions of C3PO may still be a gleam in the eye, but autonomous and semi-autonomous special-purpose devices are no longer limited to laboratory experiments, and no longer limited to government customers and military applications.

Manufacture and sale of heavy duty manufacturing robots is still pretty much limited to industrial giants. What has changed is that there are now opportunities for emerging businesses in the marketplace for smaller scale and more autonomous devices. Much of the market is still wide-open. New companies can develop components, or they can even develop and sell whole assemblies -- provided that they understand their customers and markets, and do not bite off more than they can chew.

The February 2008 session of the Caltech/MIT Enterprise will look at the entrepreneurial opportunities in the robotics industry, illuminate the market segments and their entrepreneurial profiles, and highlight the kinds of strategic relationships would-be purveyors will need to take their robotics products to market.

Keynote Speaker

The Growing Commercial Markets for Semi-Autonomous Devices
Thomas Paige
Project Engineer
Robotics Special Project
Aerospace Corporation

Panelists

Moji Ghodoussi, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer
Interface Surgical Technologies, L.L.C.

Wei-Min Shen, Ph.D
Director
Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory
Information Sciences Institute

Sven Strohbend
Partner
Mohr-Davidow Ventures

Moderator/Producer

Ira D. Moscatel
Attorney at Law
Arnold & Porter LLP

Co-Producer

Rogelio Nochebuena
President
Nochebuena R&D

Date
Saturday morning, February 8, 2008

Location
Registration and Continental Breakfast:
8:00 a.m. at Baxter Hall, Caltech
Program:
9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at Baxter Lecture Hall
Networking:
11:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon at Baxter Hall, Caltech

Cost
$40 on-line registration fee.  $50 at-the-door.  $10 for students with full-time student ID (must show at door); free to Caltech students. Registrations will be accepted on-line up to 5 p.m., Thursday, February 7th. There are no refunds for no-shows.

Sponsor for this Program

FOUNDING SPONSORS

	Caltech Industrial Relations Center
	Caltech Alumni Association
	MIT Alumni Association

Empowering Entrepreneurs to Build New Businesses
through Capital, Education, Strategic Partners and People

The Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum is administered in
conjunction with Entretech