Opportunities and Challenges for MEMS and Optical Sensors in the Age of Physical AI
ABSTRACT
Physical AI – especially as related to humanoid robotics – has the potential to be as impactful to the MEMS and optical sensing industries as the smartphone, and its recent vigorous emergence presents myriad opportunities and challenges. While non-contact transduction opportunities (such as motion, humanoid proprioception, platform stabilization, and localization) share many characteristics with existing sensing markets, there are some important differences, especially surrounding the increased value of enabling sensor fusion and contextual awareness, which the first part of this talk will explore. By contrast, robotic tactile manipulation generally obligates the use of flexible contact surfaces, most often elastomeric, which complicate the otherwise mature stationarity and reliability of fully integrated and compensated silicon sensors with extrinsic issues of creep, hysteresis, durability, and other variability. The second part of this talk will outline several approaches Bosch is exploring to mitigate these issues so that robotic tactile sensing solutions can meet humanoid industry requirements for accuracy, reliability, and robustness.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Sondra Hellstrom manages business development and partner engagement at Bosch Sensortec in Sunnyvale, CA, USA with a focus on emerging products and innovation projects in optics and optical MEMS, including for environmental monitoring. She previously served in various engineering, scouting and analysis, and technical management capacities at Bosch Corporate Research, developing precommercial battery and hydrogen fuel cell technology, as well as water purification and carbon management solutions. She has >15 high impact journal publications and >30 combined patent applications and patents across the fields of sensing, energy, environmental technology, and advanced materials. She received her MPhil in Chemistry from Imperial College London in 2007 and her PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 2012. She hails from Ellicott City, Maryland.