Portrait of Sofie Nilsson

My passion for robotics began with a fascination for the interplay between hardware and software to create movement. What started with a fascination for autonomous mobility, particularly in perception and the modeling of perceived content for reasoning and decision-making, has since evolved towards an interest in enhancing flexibility in production by making robots more capable, and thereby turning them into more efficient and useful tools in production — a challenge still far from being solved to a satisfactory extent.

This aligns perfectly with the vision of my current employer, Cognibotics: “to make robots affordable and versatile tools to support humans.” Our current focus is on fundamental features such as motion accuracy, system performance, and innovative methods for instructing robots; All essential for building efficient reasoning and flexible high-level applications. In my role as a product manager, I enjoy the variety of tasks that span technical, business, and people aspects. Technically, I am intrigued by complex systems that involve hardware, timing requirements, and multi-layer software. My interest is not only to make these systems functional but also to ensure that they are scalable, maintainable over time, and that they create real customer value.

My move into management is motivated by my strength in understanding the interconnection of people, knowledge and system components, as well as relating technical solutions to real-world tasks. I have realized that to achieve my goals it is more efficient to utilize top talents from various fields, rather than being an expert myself. I find my technical background is crucial in facilitating this process. Additionally, interacting with our fantastic customers and understanding their applications, continually enhances my awareness of real industrial challenges.

In conclusion, robotics is an ideal field for anyone who loves cool technology and seeks variety in their work.

Career path

I grew up with robots. Back then, robots were not very impressive in their abilities, even more so than today. Although my early contact with robots didn’t directly influence my career path, it created an early awareness around the field.

I Learned programming in high school and chose to study electrical engineering to understand how things really work, such as what lies behind a programming language and how a computer functions. My first hands-on experience with building and programming moving things came from hobby projects involving microcontrollers and toy servos, which I found fascinating. This in combination with a specialization in automatic control, made me realize that robotics offered the exactly the combination of Hardware, software, mechatronics, reasoning, and motion that I really liked.

Did my master thesis on mobile service robotics at Fraunhofer IPA in Germany, a place I really liked and decided to stay at to start my professional career. I found IPA to be a good mix between research and industry activities. Initially I was involved in projects on driving assistance systems and perception for the automative industry. After a few years my focus switched towards production technology and robotics. This created a growing interest in creating flexible production systems and their potential for creating sustainability and worker friendly production.

Encouraged by my boss at the time, I went from managing smaller projects to taking on larger projects and strategic cooperation on more general Industry 4.0 topics. Together with our partner company Trumpf and various visits at their innovative customers, I gained insight into the challenges with small lot sizes, in transparent decision making, etc. that SMEs in the sheet metal production faces, something that has strongly affected my view on reality in production.

After eight years in Germany, I moved back to Sweden and joined Cognibotics as one of our first product managers. I especially value the unique opportunity to be part of building a company with such an interesting and diverse technology portfolio, alongside truly extraordinary colleagues.

Find out more about IFR's initiative "Women in Robotics".