Inventor Stephen C. Jacobsen, long associated with the University of Utah first as an undergrad and then master's candidate, started building his research team in 1973. That's when he returned to the campus with his newly won MIT doctorate in mechanical engineering.
Nearly 36 years later, the president of Raytheon Sarcos in Research Park still works with two of those original team members. And the majority of his 65-strong staff has been with him for more than 20 years, developing new technology that ranges from robots for the entertainment industry and the military, to breakthrough medical devices, such as the artificial kidney and high-tech prosthetic arms for amputees.
The entertainment portion of the business is perhaps the most visible to the public.
For example, Sarcos developers created the robotic dinosaurs at Universal Studios Jurassic Park in Hollywood, including the 80,000-pound T-Rex that moves and roars at startles visitors just before their boat goes over an 8-foot waterfall. And his team built 100 humanoid robots that populate Disneyland Paris in Marne-la-Vallée, France.
Another project that Jacobsen characterizes as "an amazing act of magic" is the quarter-mile-long roboticized fountain at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The Sarcos team built the portion of the Steve Wynn-designed fountain that is made up of 224 directional water jets weighing in at 3,000 pounds each. Those components go through 130 computer-controlled motions and must continuously function in "pretty crummy water. It's a beast," he said.
Building machines that never have been built before enhances his close-knit team's growing body of knowledge. "We constantly learn new things simply by doing it."
And accepting such assignments "keeps everybody funded. We're always selling, developing opportunities. We have to keep everything together," he said. "We are an unusual group of creative people -- people who are 'obsessible,' who lose track of time, who sometimes don't know whether it's day or night."
In other words, many of those who work for Jacobsen are like Jacobsen. He wasn't a focused student as an undergraduate in the U.'s College of Engineering. He almost was kicked out of school by university administrators and was saved only by a perceptive college dean who recognized just how smart Jacobsen was.
"We spend a lot of time interviewing potential newcomers," said the inventor, now in his late 60s. He tries to ferret out how candidates would approach the kind of technical problems the company's staff wrestles with every day. How do you build robots that soldiers and Marines can "wear" in the field to give them super-human strength, or create robotic dinosaurs for a theme park, or build a high-resolution camera that is not much bigger than a human hair and can produce razor-sharp images when it looks inside tiny machines?
These are things that haven't been done before, said Jacobsen. "We're results-oriented; we have a lot of meetings to talk out problems. And when something is designed, built and it works, we're eager to move on to the next project."
His staff of engineers, designers and artists certainly is not process-oriented, Jacobsen said.
"Management realizes that we cannot tell these people what to do. We take a sort of 'Lewis and Clark' approach. They didn't know where they were going or what they would find; they just kept looking west."
And, he added, hiring decisions aren't always based on how well potential employees did in school.
"Formal school is more about memory anyway," Jacobsen said. "A lot of them [his employees] struggled in school. We're looking for people who may have struggled as children and became good problem-solvers in the process.
"That's the fundamental difference between those who are focused on 'proving' every nuance versus what we do" -- producing real-world results without jumping through all the traditional scientific hoops.
He recalled a visiting scientist who was given a demonstration of a high-tech device. The visitor said he couldn't make any judgments about what he had just witnessed until he reviewed the scientific papers on the project.
"We said that there weren't any, and that he had just seen the thing work right in front of his eyes. What more did he need? He couldn't accept that," said Jacobsen. "Some people are good at theory, some are good at common sense. We want those who are good at both."
