Welcome
Over the past decade I've built a number of cool robots. A few of them have even done some
useful stuff. This page is a quick overview of my work, check out the
blog for more detailed write ups.
I'm currently on sabbatical.
I was most recently the
Director of Research and Development
at
Cobalt Robotics where I led the design
of their second generation robots and rearchitected their navigation planners,
among other projects.
I was previously CTO at Fetch Robotics (2014-2017). I led the design and implementation
of software and electronics for the Fetch and Freight robots. These platforms won the
Material Handling Institute (MHI) Best New Innovation Award at MODEX 2016. I was a major
contributor to a number of software milestones including the development of key firmware
components, secure bootloaders, hand-eye calibration, and high-level demonistrations of
mobility and manipulation that are still part of the research product.
During my time as CTO of Unbounded Robotics (2013-2014), I led the design of the
software and electrical systems for the UBR-1 robot platform.
Unbounded didn't make it past the seed round, but we did release some code on
GitHub.
Unbounded Robotics was a spin-off from Willow Garage, a famed robotics incubator that
I had the honor of working at for almost two years. During my time at Willow Garage
I developed a number of software packages. These include the generic
calibration package,
the turtlebot arm, and
rosserial (which, for all
my best attempts, refuses to die).
Prior to Willow Garage, I was a graduate student at State University at New York, Albany.
As part of my master's thesis I built a low-cost mobile manipulator, Maxwell. Maxwell
won the 2011 AAAI Small Scall Manipulation Challenge. I've made a number of
number of blog posts and a
RoboGames paper detailing Maxwell.
I've also built a number of hobby robots
SMALdog (sorta-maybe-almost-littledog)
is a small ArbotiX-based walker that could
jump
[
GitHub].
I won the
2009 Trinity College Fire
Fighting Home Robot Contest with a stupidly simple (and cheap) robot
[
GitHub]
[
Tutorial].
When I'm not building robots, I have a few too many other hobbies,
including woodworking and working on my farm here in NH.
Here's a few tags to help you find some (hopefully) interesting reading material:
robots
ros
maxwell
arbotix
ros2
national-robotics-week
slam
trinity-fire-fighting
ubr1
issy
dynamixel
robomagellan
3d-printing
gmr
events
mech-warfare
blast-from-the-past
smaldog
moveit
calibration
roscon
chisels
beer