It’s been almost a year since my last post and a lot has happened. As Sam Altman puts it so well, the days are long but the decades are short.
When CoVid-19 turned the entire world on its head in 2020, I took the opportunity to return to Canada. Moving from the center of Europe to the west coast of North America in the middle of a pandemic wasn’t trivial, but considering this was my fourth international move since graduating in 2015, I’m somewhat practiced at it.
I always knew Vancouver had a great reputation, but now that I live here I can truly appreciate why that is. For me, the city ticks all the important boxes: ramen, craft beer, dogs, cycling, mountains, forest, lakes, skyline, cherry blossoms, public transit…
Job-wise, I’m using my mechatronics skills to develop robots that can search through huge numbers of cells in order to find the rare ones secreting antibodies we can potentially develop into therapeutics. It’s often said that your calling is the intersection of what you’re good at, what you can earn a living doing, what you enjoy and what the world needs. I like to think that’s a pretty apt description for my current state.
Working on the hardware side of things, the slower iteration cycles (compared to software) can sometimes be frustrating. One of my major projects at Magazino is developing our Shoebox Handler, a multi-axis suction array based manipulator, and making any changes to it involves tons of testing and coordination with our software teams, as this manipulator is our interface to the rest of the world.
Over the course of more than a year, we’ve been working to improve the design of the Shoebox Handler by integrating better sensors, making assembly easier and bringing down costs through DFM changes. I’m happy to say that the effort finally paid off and the new hardware is live at the customer site!
To see a TORU fleet in action at ASICS Krefeld, check out the video below:
It’s been almost 18 months since I last updated the site, and since then a lot has changed. To make a long story short, I got a new job at a robotics startup in Munich, packed my bags and left Japan. There are a lot of things that I miss about the Land of the Rising Sun - friends and colleagues, delicious food, incredibly efficient public transportation and 24 hour convenience stores come immediately to mind. However, Germany, and Bavaria in particular, has some perks as well - great work-life balance, easy access to the Alps (and the rest of Europe for that matter), Oktoberfest, Christmas markets, to name a few.
The changes extend to work as well, and now I’m helping develop autonomous perception driven robots for warehouse and assembly line logistics. Moving from drones (lightweight, few moving parts, flying) to ground-based manipulator robots (heavy, many degrees of freedom, not flying) has been a really interesting process for me. There’s a whole new set of challenges to overcome when physically interacting with objects (and humans) in the real world.
After moving from Rapyuta Robotics’ software team to the hardware team in mid-2017, I got the opportunity to help with the design and manufacturing of the Beta generation of our drone and docking station. The design goals for the Beta generation were extremely ambitious - in particular, the ability to survive outdoors year-round and the ability to autonomously land and charge. While with every iteration we discover new challenges to overcome, the hope is that more problems are solved than are created.
After a herculean effort from the entire engineering team at Rapyuta Robotics, the Beta generation of our drone and docking station was deployed for field testing and customer evaluation. The promotional video linked below gives an overview of some of the features of the system, as well as some of its capabilities.
During my tenure as a Robotic Software Developer at Rapyuta Robotics, I had the opportunity to work on a series of technical demonstations designed to show off our expertise in mobile robotics and controls.
Over the course of several months, myself and the other engineers working on the project produced a number of demonstrations with our nimble indoor quadrotors and ground vehicles, including a choreographed dance, quadrotor pole-balancing and ground vehicle flips. The fruits of our labour can be seen in the montage video below:
