Smart cars, agriculture drones and intelligent devices that assist the elderly in their homes are all part of the “robot revolution” — and the focus of Greg Chirikjian’s day job as program director of the National Science Foundation’s National Robotics Initiative.

A professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University for the last 23 years, Chirikjian was appointed in September 2014 to a rotation at NSF, where he spends much of his time leading a board that doles out funding for robotics research. He continues to conduct his own research at his home university, exploring topics like co-robotics, which he described as “robots and humans working together to achieve some useful goals.”

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