In our latest profile of personalities within the euRobotics community, the Newsletter had the pleasure of speaking to Radhika Gudipati last month. In the latest stage of an interesting and varied career, Radhika has just moved to ARIA, the Advanced Research and Funding Agency, launched in 2023 as a research funding agency of the UK government.
When we spoke, Radhika was enjoying the physical setting of her new workplace, within the architectural masterpiece of the British Library in central London, where ARIA currently shares premises with the Alan Turing Institute.
ARIA was set up by an Act of Parliament in 2022 to identify ground-breaking research for long-term funding with one of its specific focus areas: smart embodied robotics capable of assisting humans. This is in recognition of the urgent need to bridge a growing workforce skills gap against a background of an ageing population.
“Because of my own career background and experience I was first approached about what attributes a role vacancy at ARIA should have and that initial conversation led to a series of interviews and presentations. I actually wasn’t looking for a move but the more I considered it, the more opportunity I could see and the attraction grew!” With her domain knowledge and strong connections within an extensive professional network, Radhika sees how she can contribute to ARIA’s objectives: “I’m good at the ‘sweet spot’ between engineering and user perspectives.” This was borne out with her previous roles, at Ocado Technology and Shadow Robot Company, where she worked for several years in robotics research and business solutions roles. Identifying a given market need, where the technology was failing to address that need, and how the gap could be bridged, were the key strength that Radhika brought into those roles. She was then successful in securing funds, leading collaborative R&D and tech transfer projects involving academia, research and industry along the way.
Now at ARIA, Radhika and her new colleagues are entering a very busy period, first reviewing proposals and selecting those most likely to lead to solutions that will actually contribute to helping humans in a range of scenarios. Then, once funding has been awarded to the chosen projects, Radhika’s work will move into a monitoring phase, assessing the projects’ success in reaching their milestones and how well they stay on track in their intended direction, learning from failures where these occur and ultimately even pulling out funding if necessary. It’s clear that she relishes the role.
Yet robotics were not an inevitable career path for the young student Radhika in her native India. “I was first exposed to AI while studying for a masters in computer science. I took a few courses in AI but didn’t pursue it at the time and began a corporate career instead. It was during maternity leave several years later that Radhika took stock and decided to follow her research interests in robotics, which she did in the UK at the University of Hertfordshire.
She was first introduced to euRobotics, as an exhibitor at ERF while working at Shadow Robot: “It was my only connection with euRobotics at first, but as I began to understand robotics’ applications in certain sectors – pharma, nuclear, semi-conductors, space among others – I realised that the topic groups had similar interests to mine.” And that led to her involvement in the Laboratory Robotics TG, an introduction to Patrick Courtney and the beginning of the work that culminated in their white paper on laboratory robotics launched at Future Labs Live in Basel this summer (see also FLL: White paper launched on lab robotics).
Over time, Radhika’s connections with euRobotics have grown. An invitation to join the ERF programme committee followed in 2023. As well as TG Lab Robotics, Radhika is also active in TG Entrepreneurship, too: “I’ve enjoyed being an organiser of the Ask Me Anything webinars for the Entrepreneurship TG, enabling entrepreneurs to share their journeys, including the challenges and the satisfying elements, too.”
Neatly bridging work and leisure interests, those of us who have taken part in ERF Charity Runs are familiar with the presence of Radhika on the start line (and later around the course, naturally – Radhika isn’t one to give up before the finish!). “I started running after I had children, just a few hundred metres at first, before slowly building up to longer runs – parkrun, 5K, 10K and half marathons. Running a marathon would be my dream!” Radhika is grateful for the friendships she has made through running and also through hiking, whether in the Brecon Beacons or the Three Peaks in the UK, on Kilimanjaro, with her latest hiking trek to come this autumn in the Dolomites.
Radhika recognises some personal strengths: “I try to stay focused, be patient and persevere and to keep learning, even from failure.” Equally, there are moments of self-doubt, too: “I sometimes get into that syndrome ‘Am I in the right place? I don’t know anything about that…’ But you don’t have to know everything. It’s important to reach out and get help from other people who know more about something than you do.”
For sources of inspiration, Radhika doesn’t acknowledge a personal ‘guru’. Instead she tends to gather insightful examples of personal development and advancement from groups like Women in Engineering. She also gets useful guidance from books about thinking and behavioural habits. Radhika describes reading one such text Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Dweck, Carol S., Random House, 2006) as a personal turning point that has had a lasting influence.
It was almost time to finish our conversation. One last question – any secret skills, something others might not expect? Radhika paused and reflected, and then said: “Well, I’m quite good at origami…!”
