Most robotics companies treat perception as a preprocessing step — a box that spits out coordinates. I think that's exactly backwards. Perception is the bottleneck. It's the thing that determines whether your robot can handle the real world or only works in a cage.
I've spent my career closing that gap: building foundation models that generalize to unseen objects, writing CUDA kernels that run in single-digit milliseconds, and shipping systems that work in production — not just in simulation.
MIT News, 2022
University of Waterloo, 2021
I occasionally advise and angel invest in early-stage robotics and applied ML companies. If you're building something interesting, reach out.