Scaling robot learning across machines.

In short

I built my first robot at 14 because films and Asimov's stories made it look possible, and kept going until the competition wins passed thirty 🏆. The hobby took me to Bristol for a master's in robotics, then to founding Chisel Robotics: a bionic leg that learns the person wearing it, four NHS trials and a Young Innovators Award (one of 23 in the UK that year) 🥇. Since then it has been eight years of making robots and computer vision work for real, from factory robot arms to the wheel loaders I work on now. I spend about as much time at customer sites as at my desk, because that is where you find out whether the thing works.

Now

HIVE retrofits the heavy machines customers already own, forklifts to wheel loaders, so they work under human supervision instead of a driver in every cab. I lead the learned-autonomy side from London: one shared intelligence across machines, sites and tasks. Every robot so far has been trained for its own job on its own machine, which is one big reason robotics never scaled the way software did. Making that learning carry from one machine to the next is still an open problem, and it is the one I work on.

Before HIVE

• Almetra, Berlin. Vision-language models watching 60+ factory sites, then built the robotics team and ran a customer pilot with Franka and UR arms. The DeepMind, AWS and NVIDIA programmes above were this chapter.
• BCA. Computer vision for remote car inspection: about four hours per car down to under 90 minutes.
• Q-Free. A roadside camera on an NVIDIA Jetson that counts, classifies and times traffic across up to eight lanes. Ten units in the UK and US.
• Chisel Robotics, my own company. A bionic leg that learns the person wearing it. Five years, four NHS trials, and performance legs for a Rio Paralympic gold medallist.

Off the clock

I swam at national level from the age of eight and only recently retired. Sea swims up to 30 km, scuba to 30 m. And I have never had a fizzy drink in my life 🥤.

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Working on learned autonomy for heavy machines? Message me on LinkedIn.