Is Robotics For You? Wrap-up
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
Most students think robotics is a closed door unless you're studying mechatronics.
It isn't — but that assumption keeps the talent pipeline far narrower than it needs to be. Plenty of CS, AI and data science students never look at the field at all, despite having exactly the skills it runs on.
Is Robotics For You? Panel Night existed to fix that. Held at the UWA Tav, it was a Venture UWA event, supported by UWA Rover Club, UWA Robotics Club and RoboGirls.
We Skipped the Panel
Traditional panels have a habit of becoming five people talking over each other for an hour while the room listens quietly. So we ran it differently.
Each speaker got a twelve-minute one-on-one interview — two questions from our MC, then the floor opened to the room. After the interviews, everyone rotated through the company tables to keep talking directly with the people building this stuff.
The result was actual conversations, not a Q&A queue.
Who Was in the Room
Speakers:
Christopher Lamb — CoraMetix
Jayden White-Smith — ArthroLase
Daniel Smith — Greenroom Robotics
Adrien Boeing — UWA
Holding company tables all night:
Dr Michael Vernon and Eric Buck — CoraMetix
Oliver Shaw and Fraser Loneragan — ArthroLase
Between them: surgical robotics, defence and autonomy — in the same room, on the same night.
Three Things That Stuck
Your projects are a pathway into industry. They don't have to be the next big startup. They can just be something you enjoyed building because it was cool. That's still the thing that gets you a conversation.
Robotics in production is still overwhelmingly deterministic. LLMs largely aren't in these systems yet, for two very practical reasons: onboard devices don't have the compute to run them, and for a medtech company the regulatory exposure is a nightmare. The interesting engineering problem right now isn't "add AI" — it's knowing where it genuinely earns its place.
Robotics isn't one discipline. It's a stack. Mechanical, electrical, perception, software, data. There are far more entry points into it than most students realise.
The Feedback That Mattered Most
Afterwards, students kept saying the same thing: every robotics event they'd been to before this one was either mining or consulting. This one wasn't.
And med students turned up alongside the engineers — which tells you the interest was always there. It just needed the door opened.
What is next
Venture UWA runs industry panels, workshops, hackathons and programs across the year, free for UWA students and alumni.
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