aerophilic

geçen yıldiscuss

Honestly, and I feel like a promoter… but get either a hackpack from Mark Rober or as otherwise mentioned, mindstorms from LEGO.

Crunch labs: https://www.crunchlabs.com/

As someone in the industry (I literally can call myself a Robot Master having a Masters Degree in Robotics), these simple “kid kits” are phenomenal. When you first start out, the hardest part is knowing the hardware is actually going to do what you tell it to do. Simplifying the mechanical engineering/electrical engineering so you can immediately create real world actions makes a huge difference in giving you motivation to keep going.

Once you have the basics in place and you understand mechanisms, sensors, and some algorithms, you can move on to other parts of robotics.

However, keep in mind robotics is really about system thinking… you have to understand trades between sensing, thinking, and acting. But most importantly you have to remember you are dealing with the real world… you can’t as easily write a unit test and know that a particular actuator will behave exactly the same way every time.

aerophilic

4 yıl öncediscuss

L5 Automation | Multiple Positions | Los Angeles, CA | Full-Time | https://www.l5automation.com/

L5 Automation is working to enable the next generation of automation by giving robots the same 'hand eye coordination' we as humans take for granted, starting with Strawberry Harvesting. Sizzle video here: https://youtu.be/WTOcdZh5lMo

We are an early-stage startup, with a total of about a dozen people, including several part time folks and a couple of interns. We have fielded a working proof of concept and are in process of building our first operational prototype to allow us to service our first commercial contract.

We are hiring for Software, Robotics, and Mechatronics. Prefer on-site but depending on role can consider remote.

If interested, please send a resume to [email protected], referencing this HN Post and sharing a project you are particularly proud of.

aerophilic

7 yıl öncediscuss

Since we are talking about “useful approximations”, one I have always found useful in robotics is doubling m/s to get miles per hour. While a bit “rough” usually “good enough” for when thinking about normal driving speeds. Here are some examples:

    1 m/s ~ 2 mph (2.2 mph)
    5 m/s ~ 10 mph (11.2 mph)
    10 m/s ~ 20 mph (22.4 mph)
    20 m/s ~ 40 mph (44.7 mph)
    30 m/s ~ 60 mph (67.1 mph)

You could argue that it is a very rough estimation, but I find that most times you are just trying to get a “rough speed” when doing this conversion anyway.

aerophilic

7 yıl öncediscuss

I think the bottom line is this: Where do you want to spend your time?

Yes, you can use process and tools to make a low trust team “work”. This is in fact how most government works.

This isn’t horrible per say, it is just very ineffective. You will spend 2-3X the amount of time/money to produce the same result as a highly effective team. The multiple gets better with good process and tools, the multiplier gets worse if you have bad processes on top of having low trust.

If you want to change things, and don’t have support/the ear of leadership above you, then the alternative is to do what you can that is in your control. This is where great leadership shines (and leadership is much different than management, more on that another time).

A great leader doesn’t need formal lines of authority. They gain influence indirectly by “casting a vision” and enrolling others to pursue it. If you can do that, you can (over time) shift a culture. It is just very slow, and not straightforward to do.

The one bright spot is that in general, the more something is resistant to change, the more readily it will adopt/embrace it once changed. If you can shift the culture, they will never want to go back to how it was before.

But once again, you need to decide you WANT to do this, and in particular do it for this particular org. For most folks, that isn’t what they want to do, therefore they have to either learn to live with an ineffective organization, or move on.

aerophilic

7 yıl öncediscuss

I was actually hoping for this response. This is something that I fundamentally feel like many startups/companies miss: You should not be pursing any activity that is not inherently profitable given your cost structure.

Let me say this a different way, if you can expect $10 of revenue, the absolute most you can spend is $10-your minimum profit margin (for normal businesses... for VC backed, it is more about “value/market share creation for eventual earnings).

If you can not do the above, while ensuring the value, you are in the wrong business.

Business 101 dictates you spend less than you earn. The question is can you really do it given your cost structure. I would go even further that if you cant afford to pay what the market dictates to achieve a specific business outcome, you should not be pursuing that business outcome in the first place.

aerophilic

7 yıl öncediscuss

Assuming this is a serious question: You/Your group needs some serious help.

What you do about it depends on your role/level of influence in your organization. Regardless of your level, I highly recommend reading Speed of Trust (like I recommended above). However, two example roles:

If you are the CEO/key leader, there is no excuse for creating/fostering this mess. You have to address the culture you have fostered heads on. Your complaint: “But it will cost too much!”. If that is your mentality, you are missing the point. Don’t look at absolute costs, look at value, that is what good CEOs do. If you can realize $2 for $1 cost, or $5 for $2 of cost, which should you choose?

The $2 for $1 is what you realize by creating/fostering a low trust environment. When you hire folks, find the best people you can, and then enable them. If you aren’t getting good people, it is either because a) they think your environment is toxic or b) you aren’t offering “enough” to compensate them. Note: compensation is NOT just dollars. It could be flexibility, it could be the ability to work on their side projects, it can be ability to learn new skills, or can be shared vision. Take your pick. In general, after some number of x $$$, money becomes secondary. Foster a culture of trust, mutual respect, and you will get dividends.

If you are at the “lower” on the totem pole, the answer is more simple. Ask yourself: can this org be saved? If you brought this up to leadership, would they work to change the culture? If not, then it is time to pack your bags/look for a better org. If they will listen, You have to decide if you WANT to save the org. If so, you have a long road ahead, but if you can pull it off, you will gain lots of experience and will rapidly increase your marketability.

Edit: In case it wasn’t made clear, let me make this final point for the ceo/leader: Spend the money/create the perks that allow you to attract the people you can trust, then once you get them, TRUST them. Yes, verify, but if you don’t do this, you are doomed to fail. Also, either find a way to trust the people you have, or get rid of them. It is a disservice to both you and them to keep around people you can’t trust.

One big caveat: make sure you are someone THEY can trust too.

Additional edit for spelling/grammar

aerophilic

7 yıl öncediscuss

> Effective teams need trust. That’s not to say that frameworks for decision making or metrics tracking are not useful, they are critical — but replacing trust with process is called bureaucracy.

A thousand times this. Highly effective teams have super high levels of trust and mutual accountability.

The moment you lose trust, you now have to replace trust with some other type of mechanism. This leads to process/bureaucracy.

Trivial example for those that don’t “get it”: think about why do we need code reviews? If we knew people would write perfect code every time, they would never be needed. However, we hold them because we know that even in our own “best code” we may miss something/forget some detail.

However, think about your own process, at least for me, depending on a feature/the engineer, my code review might be cursory rather than super line by line. The difference? How much I trust that engineers ability in that specific type of code.

But that was a digression, my main point is that hight trust means high speed, low trust causes slow speeds. The more you can build up trust and eliminate/prevent process, the better your organization will be.

For anyone that wants more details on this, I highly recommend the book “The speed of trust” by Stephen Covey.

aerophilic

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