Alumni News
School of Engineering Alumnus
Builds Humanoid Robot

Imagine a robot that would serve as a helpmate around the home, performing useful household chores at your beck and call. That vision will become reality sometime in the future, thanks in part to a lab created by a Vanderbilt-educated computer science engineer.

Shane Chang, MS’87, Ph.D.’90, and his colleagues are developing the “seeing” and intelligence phases of humanoid robots at the Honda R&D Fundamental Research Labs in Mountain View, Calif. Honda‘s Version I humanoid robot is named Asimo (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility). The 4-foot, 95-pound robot, which resembles a small astronaut, walked, bowed and waved to the crowd during a Japanese New Year’s Eve TV gala that rang in 2001. Asimo depends on a wireless remote-control operator to tell it what to do. Future versions will be much more sophisticated.

“It’s a very limited application right now, but that’s only Version I,” Chang says. “Eventually the robot is intended for domestic help applications. We’re seeing in Asian society that older people living alone would enjoy some kind of non-intrusive help. So you would have this baby robot that can take care of domestic chores and provide extra security for your home or around you as you travel. We are looking for an economical and reliable way to do that.”

Chang has hired eight Ph.D. engineers and computer scientists for the fledgling lab, just a year old and located in a new building. He plans to ramp up to 20 full-time employees in the near future and has the space ready to accommodate them. He may well expand beyond that. There are also seven graduate students working in the lab during the summer months.

One of the major obstacles that Honda and other humanoid robot-makers face is fear, particularly among science fiction aficionados and technofuturists, that robots will get out of control and harm humans. At least one highly-regarded scientist, Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has predicted that our own robotic creations might one day replicate themselves and contribute to humankind’s demise.

“That’s the perception, and we have to overcome that,” Chang says. “The top of all our concerns is people’s safety and security. We want to create an enjoyable experience. We don’t want people to have to worry about whether they left the robot on when they left for work like they might worry about leaving the stove on and burning down the house. We have to be sensitive to people’s perceptions.”

Prior to joining Honda in 1997 as a chief engineer responsible for research in computer science, Chang worked as a computer scientist at General Electric, where he received the GE Research and Development Center’s 1996 Albert W. Hull Award for distinguished early career achievement. He was recognized for his contributions to developing software that provides an ability to design easily maintainable jet aircraft engines, allowing parts requiring routine maintenance to be easily accessed by service personnel while greatly reducing development time and cost.

Chang came to Vanderbilt in 1985 as a graduate student in computer science. He joined the group in the Medical Image Processing Laboratory and also did work on magnetic resonance imaging under the direction of J. Michael Fitzpatrick, Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

Prior to that, he was a research associate in the Department of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. He also worked as an electrical engineer at the Research Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in his native Shanghai, China, before coming to the United States.

Chang, now in his mid-40s, has been awarded seven U.S. patents on his research and has authored 15 articles published in technical journals and conference proceedings. He has maintained his ties with Vanderbilt and Professor Fitzpatrick, who invited him to present a seminar on humanoid robotics research at Honda at the University last year.

“Vanderbilt is a special place,” Chang says. “That’s why I’ve been coming back as an advisor on and off in the last few years. I think Vanderbilt has tremendous potential.”

Maryly VanLeer Peck
Lemonade from Lemons

Although she graduated magna cum laude in chemical engineering from Vanderbilt in 1951, Maryly VanLeer Peck wasn’t eligible for the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi. Women weren’t allowed in the national organization.

It wasn’t her first encounter with chauvinism.

“In our sophomore year, we took statics and strength of materials, and the statics course came first,” Peck recalls. “My statics professor had been used to all men in his classes. I asked a lot of questions, and apparently he wasn’t accustomed to that. We had our first test and he gave me back my test and said, ‘Miss VanLeer, you are a very good student, but I don’t want you taking my course next term.’ I asked, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘I just can’t adjust. Go take it under Professor So-and-So; he’s better anyway.’ I didn’t get offended by those kinds of things. You take advantage of every opportunity and you do it all with a good sense of humor.”

Both encounters ultimately ended happily. The professor who couldn’t adjust to women in his class later sent several of his students to Peck to be tutored. That made her plenty of spending money, and also made her aware that she had a knack for teaching. The same professor also brought her a wedding gift three years later when she married five days after commencement.

Peck was ultimately inducted into Tau Beta Pi about 20 years later, when women were eligible to join.

“Every year they had the Tau Beta Pi banquet at Vanderbilt, I was always invited and given flowers,” she says. “They couldn’t have been nicer to me. Every time Tau Beta Pi invited me to a national convention to talk about why women should be inducted, I said, ‘I got honored far more and received more attention than I ever would have as just an ordinary member of Tau Beta Pi. Sometimes I wonder why I’m trying to get this corrected.’”

It is little wonder that Peck became an engineer. Her father, Blake Ragsdale VanLeer, was Dean of Engineering at both the University of Florida and North Carolina State and later served as President of Georgia Tech from 1944 until his death in 1956. Both of her brothers and all three of her sons were also engineers. Two of her sons, Jordan and James, graduated from Vanderbilt. The middle son, Blake, attended West Point. All three earned their master’s in engineering at Georgia Tech and work in the family business, McDonough Bolyard Peck. Her daughter Ellaine, an art therapist, got her talent from her Grandmother VanLeer, an artist and architect.

One of only three female engineering students at Vanderbilt at the time, Peck went on to establish a number of “firsts.” She was:

• The first women to receive an engineering degree from the University of Florida. She earned an M.S.E. in 1955 and a Ph.D. in 1963.
• The first women to be appointed dean of a technical curriculum at the University of Guam, where her first husband was an Episcopal priest and missionary.
• The first female dean of Guam’s Community Career College.
• The first woman to be named president of a public institution of higher learning (Polk Community College) in the state of Florida. She held the position for 15 years.
• The first to preside over a Society of Women Engineers (SWE) section in the South, as well as the first to recruit her mother for Society membership.
• The first SWE life member of record.
• The first woman to be admitted for membership in the Downtown Rotary Club of Winter Haven, Fla.
• A National Science Foundation fellow at the University of Florida, Peck used her chemical engineering degree for North American Aviation’s Rocketdyne Division, researching solid fuels and hybrid combustion. She had previously worked for the Naval Research Laboratory in Anacostia, Md., and the Medical Field Research Laboratory in Camp LeJune, N.C. She was also associated with Pathfinders Inc., a consulting engineering firm.

Other than these stints with industry and the federal government, Peck’s entire career has been in academia. Awards far beyond the norm have been bestowed upon her over the years. In 1962, she was named one of the “100 Important Young Men and Women in the United States” in a special issue of Life magazine.

In 1992 and again in 1997, the University of Florida recognized Peck as a distinguished alumna. In 1993, she received the Society of Women’s Engineers Award for advancement and awareness of engineering as a profession for women. A year later, she received the Woman of Distinction Award from the Girls Scouts U.S.A. In 1995, she was awarded the “She Knows Where She’s Going Award” by Girls Inc., former the Girls Clubs of America.

Now retired and recovered from breast cancer, Peck continues to be active in the Rotary Club scholarship and speech programs, All Saints Academy, United Way, the American Cancer Society’s Reach for Recovery, and Girls Inc. A scholarship in her name has been endowed at Polk Community College, and another PCC scholarship is named for her through Girls Inc.

Her latest project is a joint national program of Girls Inc., the Society of Women Engineers, and the National Science Foundation to encourage young women to go into engineering and technical fields.

“I think there are certainly a lot more women going into science, math and engineering today, and there are a lot of people like myself encouraging them to do that,” says Peck, now happily married to Ed Carey, who spent his university academic career teaching business and as a dean of business.

“I usually tell the young women majoring in engineering, ‘You and all other beginning engineers are going to be given some jobs that will make you think, ‘Why on earth did I major in engineering to do this?’ The point is that you take advantage of every opportunity. You make lemonade when they give you lemons.”