As told to PATRICIA R. OLSEN  Chetan Kapoor, 47, is director of technology at Yaskawa Innovation in Austin, Tex.  Q. What kinds of robots does Yaskawa Innovation make?  A. We’ve made robots for the packaging, welding, pharmaceutical, confectionery and automotive industries. Our robots can add ingredients to test tubes in pharmaceutical labs for drug development or move patients lying on a bed for radiation treatment in a six-dimensional space to align their tumor with a radiation beam. Almost all our robots look like mechanical arms.  You studied engineering. How did you become interested in that field?  When I was 5, my father bought me a Meccano set, a metal construction toy, and helped me build a tank. In ninth grade, I made a hydroelectric dam using electric motors as generators and put them under a faucet to turn on a light bulb. While I was at Punjab Engineering College in India, I lived in a dorm with doctors from a nearby hospital. One was helping a paralysis patient who had difficulty with mobility, so I made an exercise machine for him. It wasn’t computer-controlled; I used a knob to control speed. We didn’t have access to computers in my engineering program.  What other education do you have?  I came to the United States to get a master’s in engineering from the University of Alabama. I received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, and was hired afterward as associate director and chief scientist of a robotics research group there. We worked on robotics projects for groups that included Darpa and NASA.  How did you end up at Yaskawa?  In 2007 I started a robotics firm, Agile Planet, which I sold to Yaskawa Motoman in 2013. The name was changed to Yaskawa Innovation.  Are the robots made by your company hard to operate?  Our software allows factory workers to enter a simple command like “Pick up a cookie from conveyor belt A.” Usually, it would take highly trained employees using a complex computer language to direct robots like this. I like to say we’re democratizing industrial robots because having less complicated software allows more workers to operate them.  Vocations asks people about their jobs. Interview conducted and condensed by Patricia R. Olsen.
Chetan Kapoor, director of technology for Yaskawa Innovation, is helping make industrial robots that accept simple commands instead of complex code.