Being a part of a robotics team is a lot
like being part of an orchestra.
Sometimes it's important to be really
heard as an individual, and sometimes
it's really important to blend into the
team action that's going on.
There's no robot thats going to be built by a single person, you need a big team.
The only way that we're going to be able to succeed in robotics is to have people
who have different perspectives,
different experiences.
When you work together as an orchestra you can make some really cool things happen as a
group, there's a reason people say
working in concert
I am a hardware reliability engineer
I'm the tech lead for the
navigation team.  I'm the electrical and
compute lead.  I'm a software engineer.
Im a mechanical engineer on the team. If you're trying to build robots that don't just
perform for one video but will perform
reliably for a long period of time
there's a lot of things you have to get
right and a lot of testing you have to
put in place. Being able to classify the
environment in a way that it can extract
meaning from it this is a super hard
problem isn't really impossible to
hard-code the only way around that is to
really leverage data and the power of machine learning.
At X we are given the
opportunity to be creative and put our
own ideas forward. I think that kind of
freedom is unusual.
When I have a question about say motion planning or navigation or kinematics I can walk 10
feet and talk to a world-class expert in
those fields.
Every day I show up to work expecting to think, expecting to solve problems, expecting to have good
conversations with people about the
content that we're working on
We have to support, the infrastructure to
build a super complex system.
I don't know of many other places where you can do that at that scale.
Even though it's an incredibly long road, coming to work every day and solving some of the
hardest problems and robotics is
incredibly fulfilling
