Written by Jillian Mallon
Caption for featured photo: Harshil Parekh (right) presented Figueroa Robotics Lab’s research during the Fall 2023 GRASP Industry Day event to visiting industry representatives, including Barrett Ames (left), the CEO of BotBuilt. Parekh and Ames met during this event, and Parekh is now a Robotics Software Engineer at BotBuilt!
The GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania will be holding its Fall 2025 Industry Day on Thursday, November 6th. The event fosters connections between visitors from the robotics industry and the GRASP community through a day-long program of industry presentations, student poster and demo sessions, a networking reception, and more. To get a sense of the types of collaborations and opportunities that could emerge from this type of event, GRASP spoke with Harshil Parekh, a Robotics Master’s alumnus who made his first connection with his current employer, BotBuilt, during GRASP’s 2023 Industry Day.
Parekh approached the Robotics Master’s program at Penn in 2021 with the intention of discovering where his skills and interests would fit best into the robotics field at large. One course that sparked his interest was MEAM 5200: Introduction to Robotics, a class that introduces core kinematic, dynamic and computational robotics principles through the use of robot manipulator arms. Parekh was inspired to reach out to the course instructor at the time, Professor Nadia Figueroa.
“I was already fascinated with manipulators, which brought me to UPenn. During the class, I was extremely interested in how Prof. Figueroa presented these ideas,” remembered Parekh. “I identified research problems that she was interested in and how I could contribute to that. I would stick around after her classes, ask her questions, be inquisitive about the course, and she needed some students to help set up her new lab space. That’s where I spent most of my summer during MS robotics at UPenn, and then eventually I took on interesting problems in computer vision and manipulation, specifically, that helped me explore different theories she was working on.”
Parekh worked on projects involving humans interacting and collaborating with manipulators as a part-time research assistant in Figueroa Robotics Lab, a research group within the GRASP Lab, while also taking courses that helped build a solid research foundation.
“Every course that I took at Penn contributed some knowledge that I use today at BotBuilt, be it the mechatronics class with Dr. Mark Yim, or Introduction to Robotics with Prof. Figueroa, or Stereo Geometry and Deep Learning for Computer Vision with Prof. Kostas Daniilidis and Prof. Jianbo Shi,” Parekh explained. “All of these courses have concepts that are extremely critical and core to how you think about the design and performance of robotic systems.”
After graduating in 2023, Parekh decided to continue his work at Penn. “Having completed the Master’s at UPenn, I knew I was extremely well-positioned to have a great alumni base, as well as industry experts. I wanted to maximize my time at UPenn, which is why joining a research lab allowed me to get that exposure,” Parekh said. “At the same time, the seemingly difficult market allowed me to explore my research position a little more with Nadia, trying to understand at a deeper level what I was interested in within robotics. All the while, I would be attending conferences or meeting people from the industry at these conferences and events that really helped me hone in on what I was interested in.”
Parekh started working as full-time researcher at Figueroa Robotics Lab in June 2023 and acted as a point of contact in the lab for visitors, collaborators, and tour groups, which taught him the importance of demonstrating his high-level research projects in a universally understandable way. “I realized that Prof. Figueroa had some incredible work that required simple language to explain it in a way which was easy to digest for people,” Parekh stated, “I felt that breaking down these complex ideas to something that was comprehensible to people really helped me share how my skills could help in industry or in academia.”
By the time GRASP’s Fall 2023 Industry Event arrived in October 2023, Parekh was reaching closer to a decision on his next career steps. Between applying for PhD positions and building his research portfolio at Figueroa Robotics Lab, he RSVPed to attend the full-day event that included presentations from industry representatives from seven companies, including Google DeepMind, GE Research, Lockheed Martin ATL, and BotBuilt.
“GRASP Industry Day was basically the turning point where I thought: okay, I have had enough exposure doing research, and I would love to finally get into the industry where I could contribute more to solving real-world problems,” remembered Parekh.
Parekh admired the mission and brand identity of BotBuilt, a robotics start-up focused on designing systems that tackle housing construction. Since BotBuilt’s co-founder and CEO, Barrett Ames, was presenting a talk at Industry Day, he made a point to connect with him before and after his talk.
The following day, the GRASP Lab hosted tours of their facilities for the visiting industry representatives, and, naturally, Parekh was tasked with touring the representatives through Figueroa Robotics Lab and describing their current research.
“That turned out to be a strong point of connection — at BotBuilt we use advanced computer vision on manipulators, which was exactly what I had been working on with Nadia,” said Parekh. “It felt like a natural fit, and as our discussions continued, they evolved into interviews that eventually led to this position.”
Within the next four months, a robotics engineer position at BotBuilt had opened up and Parekh was invited to join the team. While his official title is software engineer, he is glad that the start-up environment allows him to participate in every stage of production.
“This is exactly what I envisioned to be working on,” Parekh shared. “Anyone in robotics understands that there are different facets to robotics and it takes some time to become an expert in any one of these. Especially in a startup environment, you get to experience these different aspects of robotics in a very rich manner because you don’t have enough hands to contribute to a single project. Construction is a huge problem. It goes from trying to estimate how many components you need to build a house, using computer vision to read floorplans, to actually building those components like walls and roof trusses using robots and specialized end-effectors. I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to every aspect of this pipeline.”
In a full-circle moment in the Spring 2025 semester, when GRASP invited BotBuilt to present a GRASP Seminar, the company sent Parekh back to campus. This time, instead of sharing his research at Penn to external visitors, he was the external visitor sharing back with Penn. Parekh’s talk, “From GRASP to BotBuilt: Using Robotics and AI to Revolutionize Construction”, opened a window into the post-graduate career path for all of the current students in attendance.
The GRASP Lab will be holding our next industry day on Thursday, November 6th! We hope this testimonial inspires current lab members to engage in conversations with our industry partners to help discover where the next step in your career path might lead you!