Question: You said you didn’t know what you wanted to be when you left school, how did you come up with building robots?

Ted Burke answered on 4 Mar 2019:

I began programming when I was very young, so that gave me a bit of a head start in robotics. I also had some Technic Lego when I was a kid, which introduced me to some relevant concepts. Then, when I was doing my PhD, I decided to build a robot to allow a paralyzed person to draw using a pen and paper. Actually, it wasn’t a very good robot, but I learned a lot building it. A couple of years later, I became a full-time teacher and I was assigned to an engineering design course where the students work in teams to build little sumo wrestling robots. I was straight away that its a really fun way for students to learn about electrical engineering and programming, so I basically just went from there. In the end, together with some colleagues, I set up a project to run robotics workshops for the public called RoboSlam.

So there were a few happy coincidences along the way, but I probably would have fallen into robotics sooner or later.