Two robot experts have won the Joseph F. Engelberger Robotics Awards, named after the founding force behind industrial robots.
The awards are presented to individuals for excellence in technology development, application, education and leadership in the robotics industry. The Robotic Industries Association announced the 2019 award winners.
Catherine Morris won the Engelberger Robotics Award for Leadership. She is the director of automotive sales of ATI Industrial Automation in Apex, N.C. Morris served as RIA chairperson in 2012-2013 — the first women chair in the association’s 45-year history. She also chaired the Automate Show committee.
She remains an active board member of RIA and as a board member of RIA’s parent Group, the Association for Advancing Automation (A3).
Howie Choset won the Engelberger Award Robotics Award for Education. He is the Kavcic-Moura professor of computer science in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, as well as the co-director of the Biorobotics Lab and the director of the university’s undergraduate robotics degree program.
Choset’s research has helped solve significant problems in areas such as surgery, manufacturing, infrastructure inspection and search and rescue. He has founded several companies, including Medrobotics for surgical systems, Hebi Robotics for modular robots and Bio Robotics for autonomous guided vehicles.
Since 2015, his Food and Drug Administration-approved surgical snake robot has been used in the United States and Europe. He co-founded the national Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute in 2017.
Nominations for the 2020 Engelberger Robotics Awards are now being accepted. They are due by Feb. 1, 2020.