Engineering a Life

For a moment, Salvador Rojas glimpsed his future through a courthouse window.

Inside the Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court in Monterey Park, he felt the weight of the room around him: worried adults talking on cellphones, kids yelling, lawyers coaching preschoolers about what to say in the room that would decide their future. He felt the weight of the moment: His time as a foster kid was ending.

He walked to a teal-tinted window in the courthouse, gazed out beyond his present and saw his future—the bold, gold letters spelling out “Cal State LA” on top of a campus building a half-mile away catching his eye. The certainty of his thoughts drowned out his surroundings: That’s where I’m going to be the best I can be. That’s where I’m going to be great.

That day, in his mind, through that window, he determined his destination. What he didn’t see yet was how he’d get there—the long nights of studying, the robot he’d build, the lab he’d help grow, the passion he’d find along the way.

“It was like it was meant to happen,” Rojas says, sitting at a table near Cal State LA’s library. From where he sits, you can almost make out in the distance that same window he peered out as a teenager. He smiles as he continues, “You could say that.”

Design. Build. Test.

There’s a process that characterizes engineering—imagine a concept, design a prototype, build it, test, start again and improve. Design. Build. Test.

It’s a formula the now 27-year-old Rojas has come to love. A formula he learned at a place where he became great. A place where he learned to be a creator. His second-greatest creation is Melo, a humanoid robot designed to go places too dangerous or inconvenient for humans to go.

Inside a lab in the Cal State LA College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology (ECST), you’d typically find Rojas in a T-shirt, athletic shorts and black Nike sneakers, as if he’s ready to step out on a court or a field at a moment’s notice. He’s a presence, making jokes and helping fellow students work through complex problems in the lab, where he spent countless hours as an undergraduate and graduate student at the University.

On this day, he’s showing off Melo to East Los Angeles College students on a visit with Cal State LA’s Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement (MESA) Schools Program, which aims to inspire youth in underserved schools to pursue science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM. The group surrounds Rojas inside the lab. He punctuates each statement with a question for the students.

Rojas asks if anyone knows what a humanoid robot is. A few mumble guesses as they marvel at the machine. Rojas points out the robot’s arms, body, head. They’re robots that mimic human characteristics, he explains.

Who knows what we can use these types of robots for?

Factories, one teenage boy shouts out, a drawstring navy blue backpack slung over his shoulder.

“Yes, factories. But also, schools, hospitals, space,” Rojas says.

“We want to send these types of robots to places where we can expand exploration or places dangerous to us.”

What are the three stages of engineering? Rojas asks. Uncertainty fills the air as the teenagers shift their weight back and forth, looking at each other and Rojas blankly.

“Design. Build. Test,” he says, explaining the process inherent to engineering, one he and his research team of five undergraduate students used to design, build and continuously improve Melo.

The testing stage is critical, he says, because problems can—and often do—arise when you begin to build what you dream up. Sometimes the problems that arise are obstacles you never anticipated. But you return to your plan, adapt and try again.

Meet Melo

On a fall afternoon in second grade, Rojas returned home to his family’s apartment in Whittier to find that his mom and her boyfriend were arrested and later jailed on a drug-related charge. That day was the start of an unplanned journey through the foster care system for Rojas and his younger brother and one of his sisters.

From that day forward he would live with a foster family, his great aunt—whom he now considers his grandma—and his aunt in cities across the county. He attended three elementary schools, two middle schools and two high schools.

“I think the cards were stacked against him, to be quite honest,” Rojas’ cousin Dominic Sermeno says. Sermeno, 38, was a college student studying sociology at Loyola Marymount University when Rojas and his brother Vincent and sister Michelle were living with their great aunt, Sermeno’s grandmother.

Sermeno would drive down to attend parent-teacher conferences for Rojas and help out when he could. But his most significant role was being a positive influence and a role model in Rojas’ life.

Sermeno would ask his young cousin if he planned to go to college one day, telling him stories of what he was learning. Rojas hadn’t heard of college. But he said, “yes,” because he looked up to his cousin.

One day as they rode in the car together, Sermeno played a song for Rojas, who was sitting next to him in the passenger’s seat.

“I know I can. (I know I can.) Be what I want to be. (Be what I want to be.)”

The anthemic lyrics of Nas’ “I Can” blared out of the speakers and the open sunroof of Sermeno’s black Mitsubishi Eclipse.

“If I work hard at it. (If I work hard at it.) I’ll be where I want to be. (I’ll be where I want to be.)”

Rojas never forgot that day.

Design. Build. Test.

Meet Melo

Rojas introduces Melo to the students from East Los Angeles College, showing off his creation as he’s done dozens of times in presentations.

If Melo were a man, he’d stand 5 feet, 7 inches tall, looking eye-to-eye with Rojas, and weighing close to 290 pounds.

He wouldn’t have a head like yours or mine, but one akin to WALL-E, the lovable robot in Disney Pixar’s movie of the same name. Melo’s head is fashioned out of an Xbox One Kinect Sensor, allowing someone to connect remotely with a laptop to see and hear what Melo sees and hears.

Melo is teleoperated—meaning someone can control him from a distance.

In the field of robotics, these kinds of machines can be used in scenarios like medical surgeries and military operations, rescue missions during natural disasters and underwater explorations. Or in lower-stakes scenarios, like going to work or school for us if we’re at home sick.

His coloring is silver, black and a grayish blue, from his lightweight and strong body and limbs, made of aluminum, steel and flexible 3D-printed materials. You can see inside his torso to what would be his skeleton and the electrical wiring that sends signals from a remote laptop to sensors so Melo can move.

It took Rojas and his research team about a year and a half to build Melo, which started as the first robotics project overseen by Cal State LA Mechanical Engineering Professor He Shen. Shen came up with the idea in his first year as faculty member in the College of ECST.

The team developed Melo to move, but if he were to walk with you he couldn’t go faster than about 5 miles per hour. But he could use his sensors to navigate the unpredictable and uneven human-made terrain. He wouldn’t be able to talk, but he could hand you a small book or put papers in a file.

Melo couldn’t slip on sneakers because he has no feet. Instead of walking, he rolls about. His base is a motorized chair Rojas tracked down on eBay. The man who sold it to Rojas had refurbished the chair for his elderly father, Carmelo. His father was set to leave the hospital but died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest, Rojas says.

When it came time to name his robot, Melo felt like the perfect fit.

Sometimes you find exactly what you’re looking for.

Design. Build. Test.

Finding A Passion

As Rojas was growing up, family members noticed his creativity—in his drawings of Spider-Man swinging from buildings and of nature around him. They noticed his aptitude for math, excelling in the subject even as he changed schools and moved homes.

“He always had a good imagination and it shows today with how he built his robot,” says Rojas’ cousin Jeremy Sermeno, Dominic’s younger brother, who is a Cal State LA alumnus. Jeremy Sermeno now works as an advisor in the College of Natural and Social Sciences. “It’s just never-ending, he’s always thinking.”

Rojas’ path to becoming an engineer at Cal State LA wasn’t easy. He struggled at first to find his way while taking classes at Cerritos College after high school. But with help from counselors and programs supporting foster youth, Rojas transferred to Cal State LA as a mechanical engineering major.

After an interview for what he thought was an internship at a company manufacturing aerospace parts, he was instead offered a position as a janitor. He took it.

He meticulously cleaned the machines that made parts like components of jet pistons, and learned all he could about engineering, asking the workers who operated the machines how everything worked. He came to appreciate the benefits of working from the ground up. On a keychain in his pocket he still keeps parts from some of the machines he cleaned so he’ll never forget.

His desire to learn and constantly improve was what first made Rojas stand out to Professor Shen. When Shen gave harsh criticism in front of classmates to Rojas after a midterm presentation, Rojas thanked him and asked what he could do better next time. When Shen asked for volunteers to restart the University’s chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Rojas stepped up. When Shen needed a student to work on a robotics project and to start a robotics lab? Count him in.

'I see gold in it'

With help from College of ECST Dean Emily Allen, Shen and Rojas were able to get space in a lab on campus. They cleaned it up and the innovations and inspiration flowed. “Given our resources, given what we have, I see gold in it,” Rojas says.

The students who have come through the lab are ambitious, innovative and scrappy—key qualities in engineers, who must always adapt. Initial funding for the lab has so far come from Shen’s University research funds, grants and Rojas’ Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Bridge to the Doctorate master’s fellowship, funded by the National Science Foundation and the California State University Office of the Chancellor.

The National Science Foundation has recognized Cal State LA as number one in the nation among master’s universities for graduating Latino students, like Rojas, who go on to earn Ph.D.s in science and engineering fields. “He has the kind of character our country needs in engineering leaders, whether in private industry or as a future member of the professoriate,” Allen says. “If you could capture and bottle the notion of role model, it would look and speak like Sal Rojas.”

With projects like Melo, the students find ways to solve problems and achieve engineering feats using low-cost materials, making the research attainable for universities with less funding, Shen says.

“You provide a better learning experience if you have to build a robotic arm than if you go out and buy it,” Shen says. “We look at how we can design a learning experience where we can really change their lives and also make technology that is affordable to the general public. That’s important for us.”

In the two and a half years since Shen and Rojas started the lab, students have participated in robotics competitions and worked on projects including educational robots controlled by cellphones, unmanned aerial vehicle transformers, robotic submarines, a vertical wind turbine, a Segway robot and more.

In that time, Rojas and Shen’s relationship has grown. Discussions about pending projects and promising students turned to conversations about family and future and the kind of person Rojas wants to be.

“It’s much more than a professor-student relationship,” Shen says. “It’s more like a friend you can talk to, make jokes with. A lifelong friend.”

They found commonalities in their upbringings—in their shared drive to excel in school and pursue higher education despite no other examples in their immediate families. Rojas would talk of his childhood and experiences in the foster care system; Shen would share stories of growing up on his parents’ farm in a small village in eastern China.

“I can relate to him a lot. I understand now how and why he works so hard,” Rojas says of Shen. “He just wants to be the best. These two words—hard work—don’t mean a lot to some people, but to some—to me—it means a lot. It’s everything.”

Design. Build. Test.

A Bright Future

In May 2018, Rojas sat inside the University Gymnasium at the Billie Jean King Sports Complex, clad in a black cap and gown for the second time at the University. In the stands were his mom, four sisters and brother, his girlfriend and her parents, and his grandma and aunt who helped raise him. None of them knew that Rojas had been selected for a Commencement honor—until the president of the University asked him to stand.

“Here, graduates like Salvador Rojas discover their passion and begin building the future,” President William A. Covino said at the College of ECST commencement ceremony, praising Rojas’ impressive accomplishments and aspirations to the hundreds of graduates and friends and family there to watch their loved ones mark this milestone.

“As an undergraduate student at Cal State LA, Salvador helped create an open-wheel race car with the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers team and he founded a campus chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He was awarded a CSU Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Bridge to the Doctorate Fellowship, which supported his pursuit of a master’s degree at Cal State LA,” he continued.

“Salvador’s ultimate goal is to develop a robot that can go into space, or on dangerous rescue missions in natural disasters. In his frequent talks and demonstrations to audiences, Salvador explains the potential robotics possesses to help carry out such critical tasks. Congratulations, Salvador!”

As the president spoke, Rojas’ aunt Vivian Arias thought of the little boy who came to live with her years ago. The one who loved to wrestle with his brother and help one of his older sisters with her math homework. The preteen who would go out and get a job to earn money to buy Christmas gifts for each member of the family. The teenager who’d guzzle down glasses of milk and PB&J sandwiches at her kitchen counter while working long hours on homework after football practice.

In that moment, Arias couldn’t hold back her tears.

“That day was—wow—he just blew us all away,” says Arias, choking up as she recalled the memory. “That’s our son, he did it. Look at him standing up there. You could see him look for us and his smile—his smile from ear to ear. You just get chills.”

A few months after receiving his master’s degree in mechanical engineering, Rojas returned to the Whittier apartment where his life changed nearly 18 years ago. The hot July morning was the first time he’d been back to the apartment complex since he was placed in foster care.

He looks up at the gray building with red doors and shutters as the sun beats down. He wonders how his life would be different if that day had never happened. But he’s more curious than sad. Maybe it’s easier to return to your past when you’re living your future and it’s bright.

In the fall of 2018, Rojas started a five-year doctoral program at Purdue University in Indiana, his education fully funded by the university’s George Washington Carver Doctoral Fellowship. There’s a new lab, a new advisor, new research into mechanical engineering and robotics.

“He is a true success story. His journey has not been easy,” says Thelma Federico, director for MESA at Cal State LA. “He has no idea the impact that his story has. For him, it’s just his every day.”

At the end of his presentation to the students from East Los Angeles College, he asks them again, “What are the three steps of engineering?”

Most answer this time: Design. Build. Test.

He smiles. “Great, you guys will leave here engineers now,” he says as they walk out of the lab and the next group comes in.

Never Finished

Two days before embarking on the more than 2,000-mile road trip to start his new chapter in West Lafayette, Indiana, Rojas packs up textbooks and notebooks that once covered his desk in the research lab. He moves slowly, stopping to reminisce with some of the students who will carry on the research and work on Melo.

He’ll miss the people he worked with the most, he says. Like Holly Griffiths. Rojas encouraged her to pursue a master’s degree by introducing her to the lab. She started a Ph.D. program last fall at McGill University, one of the top engineering schools in Canada. He’ll miss Jeovanny Reyes, who started a job as a computer engineering analyst at Northrop Grumman in San Diego. He’ll miss his family and especially his younger brother, who is attending Mt. San Antonio College in hopes of becoming a teacher one day.

Even as Rojas leaves, the work in the lab and on his robot continues. Melo will likely never be finished. “That’s the beauty of research,” Rojas says. It’s a never-ending process of improvement—everything you can make better. Rojas believes he’ll never be finished either.

One day he hopes to return to his home of Los Angeles, maybe work at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and teach nights at Cal State LA. When Rojas talks to the community college students about robotics, about Melo, it feels inevitable that he’ll be a professor one day. He wants to find ways to encourage early STEM education in the same communities where he grew up.

He feels he’s proof—to his siblings, to students at Cal State LA and in underserved communities across Los Angeles—that you can be the first in your family to get a high school diploma and then a bachelor’s, master’s and even a Ph.D. That you can build a robot to help humankind. That maybe one day you can become a college professor.

You can look through a window and imagine your life, adapt to unexpected challenges that come your way and keep on going.

Rojas’ second-greatest creation was Melo. But his first? Himself.

“Nobody told me this is what you’re going to do, this is how you’re going to do it, here’s some help. I kind of had to find it,” he says. He’d look to others he admired, see where they are and trace back what they did to get there.

“I had to kind of reverse engineer it—reverse engineer life.”

Design. Build. Test.