The problem with turning my hobby into my career is I can’t seem to figure out what’s just me having fun, and what’s professional development. At this point I just try my best to maintain the illusion of a work life balance
Currently working at SAGA Robotics on mobile robots
I love obsessing over projects in software and hardware, and luckily I have a role in agritech that lets me do that.
Treating my job description like a child at a buffet, I’ve managed to fit a variety of roles on there. From acting as my company’s project lead/manager on the Bacchus Project EU2020, Mechatronics lead on some projects, software lead on some others, and dirt shoveler and robot repair man among many many others.
“We need to have a meeting to figure out what your job title is” - My direct lead. Maybe I can actually update this page with it once we figure that out :P
Focusing more on leading Research and Development in hardware + software products with big focus on use of ML, CV, etc..
In my free time, I’m currently playing around with ferrofluids/magnets and trying to make some displays using them. I’ve also been working on a custom Android Auto project for my beat up Honda Jazz 2004 (my first car), and meanwhile also playing around with my proxmox cluster and cloud computing to explore deployment and scaling of my projects and some self hosted services. (or more accurately fixing all the mistakes I made while setting them up when I started)
(I had to rewrite this part 5 times before I decided to shorten it to just the tasks I’ve done significant work towards over the past week. Really need to stop picking up new projects…)
My issue atmo is I don’t post things publically until I’m done with them, but I never feel done with them so I really need to start updating my site with progress posts.
Some bits about me at University
- SLAM implementations on mobile robots.
- Soft mobile robots and actuators.
- President of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Society at the Queen Mary University of London for two years.
- Winner of MEng Project of the year https://www.sems.qmul.ac.uk/news/5267/robot-hand-team-wins-top-prize-at-ilf
About the Robotics Society, took it from 30 to 150 memebers in my first year there. With my committee, we set up robotics tutorials, got access to workshops, campaigned for a makerspace at my university, and honestly just got a really cool group of people together. Ended the year with hosting an Ant-weight robot wars tournament. Second year was quite fun, and we’d laid a lot of groundwork, so we pushed things a lot further as we actually had some facilities and strong foundations. Got our membership to over 200 that year, and the society still uses a lot of these things to this day which is super exciting.
Put a lot of time into it and met a lot of cool people, many of which are now off doing really REALLY cool things that they cant talk to me about anymore cause of NDAs :(