Getting an autonomous forklift to work once is an engineering result

Getting it to work every shift, on a live warehouse floor, is a different problem entirely. That second problem is where Ashwin Mudigonda, Technical Program Manager at Third Wave Automation, spends his days.

He came to it with an unusual amount of floor time. Ashwin spent 16 years as a hands-on engineer on pick-and-place systems, where startup life meant software plus a little mechanical, a little firmware and a little electrical, and where deployments meant watching what happens to a pallet from the moment the shrink wrap comes off. This is the first time the robots he works on move.

When he moved into program management, he had a firm view on how to do it: “Getting certified tells you how to manage a Gantt chart. It does not tell you what is actually happening on the field.”

That view shapes what he pushes for. “The people who use these machines are not engineers and not technicians. They should still be able to use them.” And it shapes how he thinks about the work, which rarely has a playbook: “Many of these problems are first-time problems. Nobody has ever seen them before.”

He is specific about the engineers who do well here. Some come back with a workable alternative when the original ask cannot be done. Others “put their heads down and create the path for the other people to walk behind them.” The team needs both.

We are hiring a Senior Robotics Field Engineer to work on exactly this: making autonomy hold up on live warehouse floors, alongside the people running the machines.

Apply here: https://bit.ly/4jhz9ij Open roles across the company: https://bit.ly/4jXVGRn

Read the original LinkedIn post. Curated by Larry Sherwood Jr. from company announcements; analysis above is my own.