Helping people one robot at a time
Introduction to Marita Cheng
**Marita Cheng** is the founder and CEO of Aubot, a startup robotics company. Aubot is responsible for the production of Teleport, a telepresence robot which helps children with cancer attend school and disabled people to attend work.
In 2008, she founded **Robogals**, an international student-run organization that encourages young women to pursue careers in engineering, for which Cheng received the Global Engineering Deans Council Diversity in Engineering Award in 2014.
In 2012, Cheng was named Young Australian of the Year and, in 2019, was inducted as the youngest Member of the Order of Australia. In 2018, she was awarded the Australian State Award for Excellence in Women’s Leadership.
Cheng’s Early Life & Education
**Marita Cheng** was born in 1989 in Queensland, Australia, and comes from humble beginnings. She grew up living in a housing commission apartment with her brother and mother, who was a single parent and worked as a hotel room cleaner.
In school, she was highly academic and graduated high school in 2006 in the top 0.2% of the nation while receiving Cairns Young Citizen of the Year Award for her volunteering and extra-curricular efforts. She won awards for mathematics, piano, and Japanese, which she is fluent in alongside English and Cantonese.
Cheng obtained a Bachelor’s in Engineering (Mechatronics) and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of Melbourne. In 2015, she also attended Singularity University’s 10-week flagship Graduate Studies Program, which was funded by a $40,000 scholarship from Google and held in NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.
Cheng’s Career
Cheng’s pioneering innovations began while she was at university. In 2007, she founded Nudge, a company that helped people manage their prescriptions and drug schedules by sending them reminders by phone or text message. For this, she received an award for the best undergraduate business at the University of Melbourne.
While attending Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program, Cheng cofounded Aipoly, which launched in 2016, an app that uses AI to help visually impaired people recognize objects through their mobile phones. Since its launch, Aipoly has won the CES Best of Innovation Award twice (in 2016 and 2017) and is now available in 23 languages.
Cheng travels around Australia and the world to present her work in high-profile engagements, including appearing on Q&A on ABC beside 2 Nobel Laureates and the Chief Scientist of Australia, and the World Engineering Education Forum in Dubai in 2014.
Cheng & Robogals
When Cheng was attending University of Melbourne studying for her bachelor degrees, she noticed **the low number of girls in her engineering classes**. In 2008, she decided to recruit her fellow engineering peers **Kelly Chiu, Ann Chee Lim** and **Vi Vu**, and travel to schools to teach girls robotics and encourage them to pursue careers in engineering, technology, and mathematics. That was the beginning of Robogals – a non-profit international student-run organization, founded by Cheng.
In 2009, Cheng built on the idea further by inviting female engineering students from 4 more universities around Australia to a 3-day bootcamp at the University of Melbourne. During the bootcamp, the students were taught how to run a Robogals chapter back at their home university, and the organization grew further.
While on a student exchange program at Imperial College in London, Cheng expanded the group there, and eventually throughout **Australia, the U.K., the U.S.A., and Japan**. Through robotics workshops and career talks among other activities, Robogals continues to introduce young women to the world of engineering and has so far taught 100,000 girls from 11 countries.
Robogals has received several international recognitions, including the Global Engineering Deans Council Diversity in Engineering Award (2014) and Grace Hopper Celebration’s Anita Borg Change Agent Award (2011).
Cheng at Aubot
In 2013, Cheng founded and is CEO of Aubot, which develops products to help people with their daily lives “one robot at a time.”
Aubot’s flagship product is the Teleport – a telepresence robot that tracks people’s mind focus through a headset and which users can control remotely. Teleport helps children that are in hospital with cancer attend school, people with disabilities attend work, while also helping monitor and socialize with elderly people.
Aubot, which is pronounced ‘our-bot’ (‘au’ is ‘to meet’ in Japanese), also performs research and development in robotic arms, virtual reality and autonomous mapping and navigation.
Cheng has presented about Teleport around the world, including at the M.A.P. International CEO Conference in the Philippines in 2016, the World Entrepreneurship Forum in Lyon France in 2014, and the MIT Technology Review EmTech Singapore in 2015.
