Featured venture: Organic Robotics

Organic Robotics Corporation specializes in making soft and stretchable fiber optic sensors dubbed Light Lace™. Rob Shepard and Ilayda Samilgil started the company with the original intent of building sensors to enable robots to feel their environment.

“Robots don’t work so well right now, and top performance athletes work extremely well,” said Shepard. They quickly added the monitoring of human motion, which they found was also a much more fun application of the technology.

In April 2021, the venture came out as the winner of the first Sun Devils Athletics Venture Challenge, a bespoke pitch competition the Global Sport Institute forged with the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute and Sun Devil Athletics.

On the judging panel for the competition were key Sun Devil Athletics personnel integral to making the connection between Organic Robotics’ technology and the university’s athletics programs. Jeff Kunowski, associate director of the Global Sport Institute’s innovation programs, recounted that Joe Connolly, head coach of football performance, and Gerry Garcia, associate head athletic trainer, saw immediate potential to improve their athletes’ multiple training regimens, reduce and prevent injuries, and gain a deeper understanding of impact at different angles. While the department already deployed some technology for monitoring, these were typically chest-mounted and not as flexible as Organic Robotics’ offerings.

As an integral part of their winnings, the venture will have the chance to beta test Light Lace™ with a group of football players from ASU. Samilgil said that, so far, they’ve only had the chance to use the technology on their own employees and that this opportunity will be one of the first times they’ll get to test outside of their lab.

Through kinematic and forced interactions, they will measure locations of interest. By sending light to the area they want to measure, they will interpret it as biometric information. Shepard estimates that with those measurements, they’re capturing them one hundred times faster and with more precision than other products. “We believe we can do things that no one else can,” Shepard emphasized.

We just want to do that with the players who need that information. You’re [Global Sport Institute] our next step.

After planning in the summer of 2021, Organic Robotics and Sun Devil Athletics aim to begin the process of the beta testing phase in early 2022, with approximately 10 to 20 athletes.