Dr Nicole Robinson is a Research Fellow at Monash University with a cross appointment between the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing & Health Sciences. She is affiliated with the Department of Electrical & Computer Systems Engineering, Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, and the School of Psychological Sciences. She is also an Adjunct Lecturer with  Queensland University of Technology Centre for Robotics.  

Research: She has created and built up an interdisciplinary research roup that specialises across both scientific methods and novel engineering. Her research theme is to evaluate and improve the quality and success of human-robot teamwork. This work involves theoretical and applied human-robot interaction work in domestic and field settings, including for mobile, manipulator, mobile manipulator, humanoid and social robots. 

Prior to Monash, she was a Research Fellow with the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision on Humanoid Robotics on a $1.5 million R&D project with the Queensland Government. In less than 2 years, she was promoted to become a Chief Investigator (CI) and Program Leader of Human Interaction in the QUT Robotics Centre.

Funding: Throughout her career, she has been a Chief Investigator or Lead Applicant for more than $7.4 million in awarded funds from competitive grants, industry partnerships, and student scholarships.  

Teaching: She has led and been involved in the design and implementation of university-level courses. She has been an invited guest lecture to talk on the topics of behavioural science, technology, engineering, entrepreneurship, and human-robot teams. She has also taught 1st to 3rd year level course content to both small-room tutorials and large-scale lecture halls (15 though to 500 students per class). 

Public Outreach: She is a strong advocate for public outreach and promoting STEM careers for women. She has a media reach of 40+ million to date across live television, radio, print articles and world-renowned festival stages:

• Tedx, International Business Times, MIT Technology Review, Gizmodo, and the World Science Festival. She has also hosted a postcast on artificial intelligence and robotics available on iTunes and Spotify.

Start-up: She is a Co-Founder and Executive Director of LYRO Robotics Pty Ltd, a deep-tech robotics company that builds and deploys intelligent pick and pack robots for order fufillment using state-of-the-art computer vision, deep learning and robotic systems. LYRO has successfully commercialised robotics technology in Australia, creating direct benefit and value to the agriculture and warehousing industries.

• In 2020, LYRO Robotics won 1st place in the Unicorn Cup, the worlds largest start-up pitch competition against 2,000 companies from 125 cities.
• LYRO Robotics was also selected as one of 10 companies at the Extreme Tech Challenge for Australia, which was a sub-division of the worlds largest startup competition.
• LYRO has been supported by venture capital from both national and international investors to executive the vision to build and deploy 100,000 robots by the end of the decade. 

Memberships: She is also a Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Australian Psychological Society, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology.