Black Women in Robotics: Giving Birth to the Future

Afrofuturism is a kind of artistic expression that centers Blackness in the sphere of all things futuristic, using elements ranging from fantasy to magical realism to explore everything to do with the Diaspora. You can hear it in the music of Janelle Monae’s Archandroid and see it in a movie like Blade. The characters look familiar, though the times and technology are often far beyond our own. But the future is now, right? I’ve heard that all my life, and for years certain technological advancements have born out that concept. Even though we’re not whipping solar powered cars through the airways of major cities, we carry supercomputers in our pockets, and some of us hold them with 3D-printed hands controlled by our brains. So if the future is now, shouldn’t the same hold for Afrofuturism? Steve Jobs gave us the handheld computers of today, but who’s hard at work bringing us the tech of tomorrow? Enter the Spelbots. Founded in 2004 on the campus of the historically Black women’s college Spelman, this group of young women made history the very next year when they became the first all African-American undergraduate girls team to qualify and compete in the International RoboCup four-legged robot soccer competition. In just one year they went from not existing to competing on a national level. The Spelbots had to engineer robots that could perform in a soccer match against other robots designed by students from various institutions. The team was created by Dr. Andrew Williams to e…