Presentation - Essential Robotics: Designing for application

Imagine you're a talented team applying the latest in robotics tech to a problem, but you quickly run into uncomfortable questions. Does our robot do the full job, or just one part of it? When will the edge cases stop? How can we do all this faster? Is our robot too expensive to make money? Like many failed or struggling robotics companies, you may realize you've done the ideation backwards: you should have started with understanding the economics and operations of the customer's problem, before even starting to think about the tech design and implementation. In this talk, Tim Brackbill, Tortuga's Co-founder and CTO, will share a holistic philosophy that Tortuga calls "Essential Robotics." This is a guide to designing, refining, deploying, and maintaining a large fleet of robots designed and focused solely on a customer's core operational problem.

Biography

Tim Brackbill is the co-founder and CTO at Tortuga AgTech.  He has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, where his research focused on high performance and extremely low cost precision plastics for single cell analysis. Tim previously worked in and managed design-to-commercialization at several high tech and automated startups including QuantaLife (now BioRad), Triaxis Medical devices, and several others. He also served as Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, focusing on operations, high tech, and new ventures. Tim's previous engineering experience involves robotic design, automation, vision, rapid fabrication, and systems integration.