Arts & Culture
Engineered imagination
UC Santa Cruz alumna Lisa Winter (Porter ’09, art) brings an artist’s eye to the arena of combat robotics—evolving from childhood Robot Wars competitor to BattleBots judge and robotics entrepreneur.
UC Santa Cruz alumna Lisa Winter (front right) is a judge on Discovery Channel’s BattleBots and is co-founder and COO of Sensible Robotics. Winter graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2009 with a degree in art.
Key takeaways
- Alumna Lisa Winter (Porter ’09, art) is a judge on Discovery Channel’s BattleBots, and is co-founder and COO of Sensible Robotics, a tech company specializing in advanced tactile sensors for robots.
“The fight starts, and we both turn our robots on. My blade is spinning, and we went towards each other. Within the first second, I hit his ¾ inch steel axle. Sliced one of his wheels off, now down to one. I won within the first second.”
Ten-year-old Lisa Winter (Porter ’09, art) had just beat Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, in Robot Wars.
With Winter’s upbringing, some might say she was destined for the arts and robotics. Her dad is a start-up connoisseur, skilled at engineering and developing apps. Her mom is a graphic designer. Both parents graduated from their alma maters with art degrees. Winter’s dad took her to her first Robot Wars competition, and from that moment, she was hooked.
Growing up, Winter’s parents encouraged her to create constantly.
“My parents were always doing interesting, artsy, non-corporate jobs. So one day, with a limited budget, my dad suggested we make our own board game instead of buying one,” Winter said. “All of that creativity and playing games really got my mind going.”
Winter competed in Robot Wars through elementary school and middle school, but when high school came around, the competitions took a hiatus. Winter spent the time focusing on her arts. She wanted to pursue higher education in a place that inspired her. That’s how she landed on UC Santa Cruz.
“I always thought of myself as an artist. When I was looking at a college I traveled to all the UC campuses. In terms of art, I thought UC Santa Cruz looked the best,” Winter said. “And it was the best physical environment too.”
Winter spent her time at UCSC experimenting with printmaking, painting, and more, often spending hours in the intaglio acid room etching projects for her printmaking courses. She’d usually finish up at 1 a.m., bike home through the fog-ridden Heller and Empire Grade, awed by the glimmer of deer eyes on her journey.
Those other worldly experiences and professors like Paul Rangell inspired her art evolution. UC Santa Cruz became a place for her to mix her political beliefs with art, and create prints that conveyed her political messages.
Winter graduated college not knowing exactly what to do. Around the same time, the BattleBots TV show got renewed and she applied. Being in the competition circuit put Winter out there. Her skills were sought after by different people and companies, and eventually she started her own rapid prototyping business. Around 2023, she heard of a group of people looking for someone to prototype robotic fingers for humanoids. She answered the call, and ended up co-founding Sensible Robotics.
Competing and working took long hours of Winter’s time. Around 2018, Winter was diagnosed with celiac disease. It was no longer feasible to work on her robots until three in the morning. Still wanting to be a part of the competition circuit, Winter asked the producers of BattleBots if they had room for one more judge. Ever since, she has been one of the principal judges on the show.
To Winter, being a judge felt like graduating. Now she was on the other side of the panel, inspiring and mentoring other fellow robot savants.
“There was a young girl who said that she didn’t think building robots was an option until she saw me on TV doing it,” Winter said. “That’s a thing. If there’s no representation, there’s going to be people who think this isn’t an option.”
One of Winter’s own inspirations is her late-aunt Lauren, who transitioned in her mid-40s. Both of them worked in male-dominated fields, and found that getting your voice heard as women took more effort than their male counterparts. They found themselves discussing how to deal with these scenarios.
“It almost feels like the older you get, the gender disparity is worse,” Winter said. “We are all just trying to be more vocal so that everyone’s voice is heard and that we all deserve the same respect. I often think, ‘What would Lauren do?’ Would she let it slide, or would she get louder about a certain thing?’”
And to this day, that advice has brought Winter the prize of being one of the best creators of humanoid tactile sensors in the tech market, a judge on BattleBots, and an advocate for her beliefs.
As a lover of animals, Winter volunteers her skills at the Marine Mammal Center. She created a better mode of identifying marine life. Every pupping season, she prints out more tags that help the center identify and keep track of their animals.
Winter is the true amalgamation of the advice, “do what you love, and success will follow.” She found a way of fusing all her interests into her current work.
“Doing art and doing robotics may seem different, but to me they are related. From the beginning, I’ve wanted my robots to not look like a boring metal box and have a personality,” Winter said. “Winning was fun, but for me it was never about that. It was about being hands-on and crafting all the parts.”