AI-enabled automation in machine shops today.
I'm VP of Operations at Trener Robotics. I came into technology leadership the long way: business administration at Cornell, design and fabrication at RISD, computer science at Georgia Tech, with robots and CNC machines throughout. My grandparents owned a machine shop, and I see them in a lot of the people I work with now.
Selected work
2021 – present
Now · Trener Robotics
At Trener Robotics I run operations: deployment and field engineering, customer success, recruitment, supply chain, facilities and logistics. Eight people report to me, in a company of about fifty. We're Series A, and the job runs the whole distance, from the multi-year roadmap and the board presentation down to the shop floor.
We're deploying into machine shops now, and we've run real production. That's the bar. Not a demo that photographs well, but new technology holding up where the work actually happens and moving something you can measure: throughput, efficiency, the job itself.
Past · Autodesk Research
I spent eight years at Autodesk Research bridging robotics research into product, working on Adaptive Robotic Assembly at the Technology Centers in San Francisco and Boston. I wanted to be closer to the customer, on shop floors, which is what took me to Trener. What follows is a selection from those years.
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Dar Smart Bridge
A robotically fabricated 5 metre pedestrian bridge built with Dar. Printed on a six-axis arm, instrumented, and walked on by the public at Autodesk University.
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Text to Robotic Assembly
A text prompt becomes a mesh, a voxel decomposition, a toolpath sequence, and a structure two robots actually build. No human in the loop after the prompt.
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Automated Housekeeping with Spot
A quadruped walking live construction sites for Skanska, across terrain and clutter that change every day.
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The Arroyo Bridge
An 80 ft single span of 600+ one-off steel parts, each held in place by a robot while master welders made the joins.
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Robotic Timber Truss Fabrication
Structural joinery machined into full-size timber for OpenHOUse, the University of Houston's Gateway Decathlon housing prototype.
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Contactless Material Assessment
Thermal, RGB and depth sensing to find the studs and fasteners behind a wall, then cut and lift the drywall off intact so it can be used again.
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Robotic Workcells: From the Lab to the Field
Multi-robot workcells designed and built from the floor up, plus the training that let customers, collaborators and researchers run them without me.