2022–2026·Boulder / Denver, CO
Co-Founder & CTO
From first principles to shipped product.
Rooted Robotics is where the physicist became a product engineer. I owned the entire technical side of the company: I designed four commercial automation robots end to end — every bracket, board, and line of firmware — and built the manufacturing process that produced them.
We went from $0 to $700K in revenue, raised $1.2M, earned CE certification for the whole product line, and filed three patents. The company is being acquired by an industry competitor, closing Q4 2026.
Sole designer of four shipped commercial robots — tabletop seeder, germination robot, harvesting arm, and tray washer. Owned mechanical, electrical, PCB, and enclosure design across the entire line.
A 6-axis robotic arm that locates and picks produce using depth-camera vision — custom end effectors, closed-loop motion control, and a perception pipeline running on the edge.
Vision pipelines on Intel RealSense and OAK-D Pro depth cameras with YOLO V5, AWS Rekognition, and Azure Vision — driving crop quality control, yield prediction, and vision-guided harvesting on custom on-site datasets.
All machine firmware in Python and C++ — closed-loop position and velocity control across DC, servo, and stepper motors, conveyors, and linear actuators, bridged from HMI to ClearCore and Siemens controllers.
A Django web application for customers plus a remote dashboard for the deployed machine fleet — live status and logs streamed from Raspberry Pi controllers over Tailscale, hosted on Vercel and AWS.