As of 2021, I’ve been involved with Tortuga Agtech working with fruit-picking robots to help address the current labor shortage in agriculture (and hopefully doing it in a way that creates better, more interesting jobs rather than just replacing human pickers).
In my time at Tortuga, as their first UK hire, and only UK based engineer to this day, I’ve spent considerable amounts of time in-situ helping the operations team solve problems in the field.
I’ve also had the chance to be very involved with data engineering, visualization, as well as the machine learning pipeline, from MLOps, to training models, as well as completely overhauling the on-robot machine learning software to improve code reuse and allow for faster deployments of ML artifacts (this was a rather large and exciting project that went seamlessly!).
You can find more information on Tortuga and what we do on the website or this youtube channel.
EDIT 2023:
I am now not the sole engineer in the field (at all, I now work mostly remotely for the US part of the team). It’s been an interesting ride working on all sorts of software mostly in Data and Computer Vision to support picking operations.
I’m quite proud of the tool suites and interfaces I’ve built during my time at Tortuga and how ubiquitous they have become to our ML work. I think we have a really solid foundation for moving forward and am excited for future work!