“Think Iron Man, without the guy inside.” That’s how Alex Sowell, a robotics and avionics engineer, describes the kinds of things he helps build at NASA. His favorite project, Valkyrie, involved creating a humanoid robot that astronauts can remotely operate through VR technology.
At Stanford, Sowell, ’18, MS ’18, chose to major in electrical engineering—and earn a master’s in it—because it put him at a nexus between mechanical engineering and software engineering. He had competed in robotics competitions in high school, and while his team “wasn’t particularly good,” he says, he knew he wanted to learn more about the field. After Stanford, Sowell went on to earn a master’s in computer science at Georgia Tech, which has enabled him to understand the code that makes robots do useful things.
Photo: Stanford SigEp
His first experience with NASA was as an intern in the software robotics and simulation division, working on ARGOS, a robot-driven reduced gravity simulation system that makes users feel like they are walking on the moon. Today, he designs robots’ electrical systems.
STANFORD: What do robotics engineers do?
Sowell: In robotics in general, there’s a mechanical aspect, there’s an electrical aspect, there’s a software aspect, and usually there’s a control aspect. Within those, there are a lot of subdisciplines. Robotics engineers usually touch one or many of those different disciplines. In my case, I’m usually in the electrical and in the software world. I design electronics that go into different robots, write the software to communicate with the electronics, and then get the robot to move.
What is the role of your team at NASA?
The team that I’m on—the Dexterous Robotics Team—is a research and development team for robotic manipulation in space applications. It is what you might find inside a research lab at a university, as opposed to flying robots that are used in the critical missions at NASA. I had to learn a lot really quickly, and I enjoyed that environment. We do [write] research papers, but we focus more on development now, and we don’t publish as much. We still do put together white papers describing our work to NASA internal stakeholders. In a big organization like NASA, where you can identify use cases and actually see what technologies are feasible, we research to develop more and get it into space.
What is your day-to-day work routine?
It varies. We have to think of lifecycle standards. If you hear the term systems engineering, there’s usually a lifecycle involved with the engineering of a system, so depending on where you are in your project, you find yourself doing different things. In my case, in the early stages of a project, you think of gathering the requirements of the project from whoever the customer is.
So, say you have the Artemis program and we’re going back to the moon. They can be a customer, in a sense, when they come to my robotics group and say, “Hey, we need a robot arm that can pick up rocks,” and we’re like, “OK, what kind of rocks do you need to pick up? How heavy are these rocks?”
Once we gather those high-level requirements, eventually it trickles down into my specific discipline. Someone will say, “Hey, I need this voltage and this current for my electronics to actually work.” After the requirements-gathering phase, there’s a concept phase. You think of different ways or different technologies you can use to design and achieve those requirements. In that phase, you’re brainstorming a lot with other engineers, and then you come up with a design idea. For me, it’s like, “All right, we’re going to use this protocol to talk to this motor controller or this piece of electronics, and then we need this bus voltage, and we need this current rating,” etc. So, once we have a conceptual idea, then the day-to-day is actual design work.
What is your current project?
I’m designing a PCB—a printed circuit board. They’re the boards that are inside your computers. I’m designing one of those, but its job is to make a motor spin, and then we program it to make the motor spin however we want it to spin.
If you’re moving a robot arm, usually you’re controlling the positions of the different joints of the robot arm. I go into a CAD software called Altium and I design the circuit. Then I design what the board is going to look like. I place the different electronic components and then route the traces or the wires that are inside those in the board. That’s the phase I’m in now; I’m designing schematics and then laying out the board.
How does collaboration work across teams?
It depends on the size of the project, but in general, each team owns some subsystem. We’re robotics, but the robot has to talk to a rover if we’re designing a robot arm. Now, we might be responsible for the entire robot arm, but we have to make sure that we can communicate and interoperate with the rover part owned by another team.
You have to be very particular, and you need to make sure that there’s a lot of communication between the teams, such that anything and everything that has to interface between different subsystems stays consistent. Everyone is aware and on the same page, from my individual role of designing one piece of electronics all the way up into the Artemis program, where you have a lander and the lander has to dock with a space station. You have to make sure that both are able to communicate and interoperate with each other, so you definitely have to collaborate with a bunch of other teams. You’re not siloed at all.
What was unexpected about going into robotics engineering?
The challenging part is learning enough about all the things that you interface with to be able to think and speak the language of the other engineers. Going into my job, most of what I knew was writing firmware. There’s a microcontroller, or a little chip that’s on a board. I’m used to writing code for that chip. However, when I got to the job, it was like, oh, the chip has to talk to another computer, then the chip has to be on a printed circuit board, then that printed circuit board has to be inside some mechanical structure, and then this printed circuit board gets really, really hot.
I have to talk to the thermal engineers and understand how the thermal properties change. Then, oh, you want to stick that in space? Well, the vacuum and the radiation environment are different, so there are other engineers that are experts in that. There’s just so much that you have to think about. I think that’s consistent anywhere, but especially for space and at NASA because you can’t really fix it once it’s already launched. You have to think of and account for everything beforehand.
What’s the most rewarding part of the job?
That’s an easy answer. The opportunity to learn about a lot of other engineering disciplines, not just with robotics, but then space. So, in space robotics, there are so many different types of engineering. You learn about science because, ultimately, you’re engineering something for science or for some exploration, expanding human knowledge. The breadth of knowledge and the breadth of the types of people that I interact with are amazing. It’s very rewarding.
Did your electrical engineering coursework prepare you for your work?
Yeah, I think so, especially in the lab. The labs and the hands-on work are a lot of what we do—the physical, hands-on troubleshooting, rapid prototyping, and trying to see if something works. If it does work, then great! If it doesn’t, then how can we fix it? The flexibility of electrical engineering at Stanford—I was able to take a lot of computer science classes—helped with the hardware-software interface.
My electrical engineering background has been helpful on the job because I have insight into how the lower-level stuff works. Using that, I understand, or can inform others writing the software, exactly what is feasible and what is not feasible from a hardware standpoint. So, it’s like, you want the robot to move really, really fast? Well, OK. I understand how fast it can move because I understand the actual electromechanical aspects of it.
What advice do you have for aspiring engineers?
My advice is always to be curious and ask as many questions as you can. There are no stupid questions. You’ll get a lot of answers, and then people are going to recognize your curiosity. They’re going to want to help you.
Kalissa Greene, ’25, was an editorial intern at Stanford. Email her at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
