Clara Vu, Roboticist Clara Vu is a software engineer and user-centered design expert specializing in robotics. As a designer she is at her best energizing and facilitating teams from different disciplines. She synthesizes technical and non-technical viewpoints to design products that are easy-to-use and compelling, with features that are meaningful to customers. As a software engineer, she has extensive experience with the two sides of robot software - autonomous machine intelligence and interaction with human operators. In her nine years in the field of robotics, her work has ranged from an interaction engine for robotic toys to a behavior arbitration framework for an oil well exploration robot. She co-developed a programming language and software architecture that addresses many of the key problems in behavior-based robot software allowing system and software designers to focus more intently on the robot than the underlying software.