Mr Raymond Russell

Biography

 

A 1981 graduate of Penn State University, Mr. Russell holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. After graduation, he spent 20 years in the aerospace industry, working for numerous aircraft companies including General Dynamics, Saab Aircraft, The Boeing Company and Lockheed-Martin. In recent years, he has turned his engineering and design talents towards the mobile robotics industry. Prior to forming RoPro Design in 2003, he had worked as a consultant in the robotics field for the Carnegie Science Center, Probotics and the National Robotics Engineering Consortium. For the past 13 years, he has owned and operated RoPro Design, a small energetic company specializing in the design and fabrication of prototypes for the mobile robotics market.

In 2014, Mr. Russell took a sabbatical from RoPro Design and is now working at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia His current assignment is the design and fabrication of the next generation of farming robots.

 

RoPro Design – incorporated in 2003, our company’s core focus is the design and fabrication of mechanical / eletctronic prototypes for the mobile robotics industry as well as other high technology research and development markets. In addition to this core focus, we also aspire to be a ‘Teaching Hospital for Young Engineers’. Of all we do, we consider this our highest calling and a critical part of our Mission Statement. After not being able to find the engineering talent we needed, we decided in 2004 to grow this talent internally. We sifted through the local high schools for ‘good clay’, then offered internships to the aspiring engineers we found there. Rather than teaching engineering from the classroom, we teach it from the shop floor. If you can’t fabricate, how can you possibly expect to design? So we quickly immerse the interns into our shop’s fabrication process. Through fabrication, they slowly begin to get a sense of scale, of the ‘feel’ of materials, of best design practices. Armed with this strong sense of fabrication and design then, their high school and college engineering classes begin to take on more meaning – rather than being empty-ended exercises with no seeming practical application.

This immersion style of teaching is needed now more than ever, as kids simply don’t get the exposure to mechanical systems as previous generations. I’m my era; all our Dads changed the oil in their cars and did the majority of household repairs themselves. We all built tree houses and go-carts from scratch. We knew how a bicycle worked and how to fix it when it didn’t. When the car quit running, there wasn’t a cell phone lying on the seat to call AAA. We’ve lost this sense of mechanical resourcefulness, and you can see it clearly reflected in the poorly designed products that infest the market place today.

Regardless of the continued proliferation of software and electronic gadgets, we are 3-dimensional creatures that inhabit a 3-dimensional world. We interact with this world through mechanical devices and tools. In our own small way then, we are fighting back against this increasing lack of mechanical knowledge one intern at a time. If our company achieves nothing more than turning out solid engineers, grounded in the principles of practical engineering, we will ultimately deem our work at RoPro Design a rousing success