Product Development Manager & Electronics Engineer Level II

At Clutterbot, we're developing a safe household robot for tidying up rooms and organising things at home. The robot drives around the house, picks toys and clutter off the floor, and organises items into containers.

My original task was to bring the existing product to market. However, after identifying shortcomings with the existing platform, a critical pivot  was needed. I decided to move to Wellington and join the Electronics team in order to create impact in the critical path this team managed. 

Chief Technical Officer (CTO)

Our mission was to create an established method to turn great ideas into greater products. By empowering people to pursue their ideas without the fear of failure, we see more creativity, more inspiration, and more joy in the world. Ventrify envisions a world where all entrepreneurs have a partner to help them innovate and share their ideas.

While I was at Ventrify, my primary role was technical leadership. We committed ourselves to every project we took on and believed the key to success is helping clients to achieve success. My job was to see those projects through to completion, on time and on budget.

Founder and CTO

UpWind is a uOttawa-based startup leveraging sensors for predictive maintenance in manufacturing. We participated in Startup Garage as part of the 2019 cohort and won $12,500 in prize cash. I was in charge of leading the development of the tech stack, which included:

• embedded sensors

• data analysis

• back-end functionality 

Ultimately, our start up didn't succeed due to product-market fit.

Engineering Assistant

During high school, I approached Proto-Advantage (a hardware prototyping company) for an unpaid internship. My role was to help around the shop, and I had the opportunity to work with electronics and 3-axis machines. I was quite proficient and was tasked with creating a CNC Pick & Place machine for the company to use. After 4 months of mistakes, learning, and growth, we had a working Pick & Place machine. This machine uses cameras with OpenCV to identify the chips, then place them on the correct part of the PCB. This was the point where I switched my career focus from Mechanical Engineering to Robotics.

In March 2020, the world was uncertain as to what was happening. I found myself isolated, with a lot of questions, and transitioning to online school. At a point of despair, I tend to become hyperactive and a "problem solver." In the haste of despair, I and a small coalition of my colleagues embarked on a mission to supply our local hospitals with face shields. At this point there were no available suppliers for face shields in Ottawa. However, we had a STEM building to ourselves and the know-how to retool the facilities. In just under a month, we were able to produce 10,000 reusable face shields for our local hospitals.

At Ottabotics, we were aiming to complete Mission 7 of the International Ariel Robotics Competition (IARC). Mission 7 took a monumental leap by requiring autonomous aerial robots to interact with and control autonomous ground robots. Teams were tasked with developing systems to herd ground robots out one end of an arena in the absence of 3D cues such as walls. The ground robots could only be interacted with by touch. A top touch would command a 45° clockwise turn and a blocking action would result in a 180° turn. To complicate matters, the ground robots did a 180° turn every 20 seconds and added up to 15 degrees of trajectory noise every 5 seconds. The ground robots also impacted one another and quickly devolved into non-deterministic travel. In the midst of the arena were four obstacle robots to complicate navigation and obstacle avoidance. 

Hackathons are a fast paced engineering competition, in which engineers and others involved in development (including graphic designers, interface designers, product managers, project managers, and domain experts) collaborate intensively on software projects. My favourite part of hackathons is to start a weekend knowing anything can be built that weekend, and you might end up winning!

I've received 1st place in 4 hackathons.