Time Flies When You're Having Fun

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.