Roboticist Travis Deyle honored with achievement award
The UNO Alumni Association bestowed its Citation for Alumni Achievement award upon 2005 UNO graduate Travis Deyle, co-founder and CEO of Cobalt Robotics, during the university’s December Commencement ceremony Friday, Dec. 17, at Baxter Arena. Based in San Mateo, California, Cobalt Robotics is marketed as the leading robotic security solution provider in the world.
Deyle received his award during the 9 a.m. ceremony, one of two that UNO hosted Dec. 17. The Citation, inaugurated in 1949, is the association’s highest honor and the university’s oldest award. It encompasses career achievement, community service, business and professional engagement, and fidelity to UNO.
Deyle is the 184th graduate to receive the award, but the first from UNO’s College of Information Science & Technology, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2022.
Deyle graduated with two degrees and four majors from the University of Nebraska system in 2005: a BS in computer science and math from IS&T; and, a BS in electronics engineering and computer engineering from UNL’s College of Engineering. The latter was delivered on the UNO campus.
Deyle also earned an MS in electrical and computer engineering (2008) and a Ph.D. in robotics (2011) from Georgia Tech University. There he built some of the first mobile robots with arms that worked in homes — for example, helping get and deliver medication for older adults; or, helping quadriplegics shave. He demonstrated one robot during an appearance on CNN. He later completed a postdoc fellowship at Duke University, where he built cyborg dragonflies — designing custom chips and implanting them in the brains of living dragonflies to read out their brain signals in flight.
From there, Deyle became a senior hardware engineer for GoogleX Life Sciences, where he worked on implantable medical devices to help control organ functions. One initiative included work on building glucose-measuring contact lenses. The GoogleX group ultimately became one of the first independent Alphabet companies, called Verily Life Sciences.
With fellow GoogleX inventor Erik Schluntz, Deyle in 2016 founded Cobalt, which provides autonomous mobile robots designed to offer on-site security. It already has won numerous awards and attracted widespread media attention.
Deyle holds more than 20 patents within robotics, power-harvesting, medical-devices and other fields. He also has been published more than two dozen times in academic journals and founded a website for academic and professional roboticists. Deyle has received numerous awards, including being named to the MIT Tech Review “Top Innovators under 35” list in 2015 and to the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” list in 2019.
Deyle is a Kearney, Nebraska, native whose family moved to Omaha when he was in the fifth grade. He graduated from Millard West High School. He and his wife, Fei Deyle, also a Millard West graduate, reside in Silicon Valley, California.