“There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish.”

Michelle Obama

In the first weekend of March, Aubot was an exhibitor at Scienceworks’ Robotica: Festival of Futurism event. The event showcased a number of companies and organisations who are driving significant innovations in Australia’s robotics industry. The festival was highly successful in attracting a large number of families and young people, with many taking our Teleport Dave for a test drive! As a team, it was greatly rewarding to witness so many children become enthusiastic about the robotics industry, it is our hope that these young minds become future innovators and robot makers!

On a cloudy Friday morning in February, Dave (a Teleport robot) and Ben (not a robot) rolled out of the Aubot office in Richmond, and made their way out away from downtown Melbourne to the Drum Theatre in the charming suburb of Dandenong.  It was here that Marita Cheng, the founder and CEO of Aubot was going to be giving a speech to a group of year twelve students.  However Marita was not going to be in the building, or even the country. Rather she was sitting in her office across the Pacific in San Francisco, enjoying a wonderfully chilly American Winter.  This is where Dave came to the rescue.

Being a Teleport, Dave went up on stage, and allowed Marita to have a presence there, under her own control, lending to the presentation a level of naturality and authenticity.  The gasps and laughter that came from the crowd when Marita turned the Teleport [Dave] around after her introduction was enough to show the level of excitement these students felt about a robot assisting in the presentation.

For the last part of 2018, we were invited by the Australian Trade and Investment Commission, (or Austrade), to go to San Francisco and expand our business to the United States of America.

It has been an amazing experience, meeting other Australian companies who are at a similar growth stage and learning about how companies in the USA think about business.

We are grateful to the Austrade for the opportunity and are excited by our future USA plans. https://www.austrade.gov.au/landingpads/locations/san-francisco

On 18 October, the aubot team was one of 4 teams from the local community who was invited to the Governor’s House of Victoria to showcase our Teleport robots to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex!

We weren’t allowed to take photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and we aren’t allowed to show the official photographs that were taken when they were speaking with us.

So here’s a photo we took before with Sarah and some aubot robot prototypes!

I wasn’t in Melbourne that day, so I appeared via Teleport robot!

It was a really fun day to show the Duke and Duchess of Sussex our robot accomplishments as well as new projects in the pipeline!

Teleport appeared in this video for the Choose Maths campaign, funded by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) to encourage girls in Australia to “choose maths” in their final years of high school.

Find out more about AMSI and their Choose Maths campaign here!

Our team took a Teleport to Defense Science Technology’s (DST) Scindicate event for DST staff from all over the country to participate and enjoy the expo, even if they couldn’t physically be there themselves.  The robots were very popular and used by many members of DST over the two-day event.

Here’s aubot engineer Sarah with a Teleport at Scindicate.

At the 10-year Robogals Anniversary Gala on 14 July 2018, Marita appeared via Teleport to deliver a speech.  Marita was in San Francisco and the gala was in Melbourne.  Teleport and the Gala were both a huge success.

It was great fun, showcasing our Teleport robot at TEDxSydney on 15 June.   Everyone loved driving Teleport around!

We flew a robot from Melbourne to Brisbane to appear one stage at the Australian Water Association conference.

We had our mechanical engineer Mack from Melbourne control the robot on stage with Marita and explain the work he’s doing with our version 2 robots.

Here’s a snippet of the interaction below!