RightHand Robotics' Engineering Team: An Inside Look

About RightHand Robotics and what they do

RightHand Robotics. So super exciting company. We're a mid stage startup about six years old. We currently have 75 employees across the whole company. So still pretty small-sized, we are headquartered in Somerville Mass, which is adjacent For those not familiar with the Boston area adjacent to Boston Proper and Cambridge as well. We develop a piece picking solution, we focus on warehouse automation. Our goal is to light up order fulfillment. So these warehouse operators don't turn off the lights in the warehouse and their entire operation can be automated. To wildly oversimplify what we do, we train our robot to pick things up and put them down. Got customers around the world, in our right pick system, the right pick robots have picked 10s of millions of items in warehouses around the world, since we deployed it. So that's a little bit about the right hand. 

Details on RightHand Robotic's engineering team

Yes, the hardware and software shop, I lead both of those groups, we have on the hardware side, we have mechanical engineers and electrical engineers, folks that do everything from helping design new work cells for our customers, and then those who are working on next-generation hardware designs to bring a product to the next level. On the software side, we have a team of five different Scrum teams that do a variety of different things from all the way from engineering infrastructure and keeping the lights on all the way up to our computer vision team. And everything in between. Engineering has grown significantly in the last year. A year ago, if we were sitting here talking, I would have told you there are 20 people, we now have 40. And we're rapidly growing, we're going to double again from 40 to 80 in the next year. So we also have course quality engineers big focus on quality here. So end to end engineering everything we need to deliver a combined hardware-software solution to our customers. 

Cool projects engineers get to work on

Robots, it's so cool. My background actually is in the data center, data center appliances. So coming to a robot robotics world recently is just so cool. Instead of writing code and watching disk drives, Flash, we write code and robots move around, pick things up, put them down. And so you know, when if I go to pick up my can of seltzer here and then put it down the brain, the brain, we've got the computer we've got is so incredibly powerful. I didn't think about any of the joints in my arm or the muscles, tendons, I didn't think about how hard I was going to grasp that can or how is my hand was going to run into anything along the way of picking it up. When I put it down, I didn't think about how I was going to drop it from it all just happened, right. And what I tell people is, to train technology to do just that. And to do it flawlessly, which is the goal is an amazingly cool challenge. And we're we are there we have greater than 99% accuracy and reliability in our customer sites. It really is like bringing science fiction to life, it's incredibly cool. terms of some of the cool things the engineers get to work on, we are always trying to improve the reliability of the system, the better that this robot can, can operate. And with high reliability, a fast rate, and a high range meaning the number of items we can pick, the better it is for our customers because they can drop that thing into many different situations in the warehouse, and it can operate as well or better than a human. So and by the way, the jobs that the robot do are terrible monotonous jobs. A human would stand there for 12 or 15 hours and the same exact spot, pick something up out of one box and place it into another box, rinse and repeat. So you can imagine not the most exciting job and a perfect opportunity for a robot to do that job. In addition to improving rate range and reliability, engineers are always working on new capabilities to the to system, we have a really exciting roadmap coming up in the next 18 months hardware features software features that are really going to set us apart even further apart from the competition. 

Details on the tech stack

So we are a Python shop. Python in and out with a small amount of C++. But everything's built on Python. We run Ubuntu OS. So Linux and Python are the two things we're looking for. So if you're listening to this in here Python developer was in Linux experience, we're looking for you. There's a, as I mentioned, we have a computer vision team, that there's a machine learning and AI layer course and in the software, so the robots always improving how it's picking, we ledger, we leveraged tensor flow for that. On the hardware side, we have a proprietary gripper. And so for you, on the mechanical side, looking for people that have some experience in either the warehouse automation picking area, we suction pneumatics and things like that. So some of those backgrounds are helpful as well. Oh, we, in addition to the proprietary gripper our software, of course, is where a lot of the magic happens. So fully proprietary software, a lot of people want to know for running Ross Robotic Operating System, we are not we do all of our own path planning, sort of all proprietary down and all the way into the deepest guts. The only thing we really don't do is the robotic arm, we use a third-party arm for that, because we're not in the business of building arms we are in the business of building software and the awesome gripper that we have. 

What to expect during the interview process

We try to keep things streamlined. And I'm a strong believer of you don't, you don't need to put somebody through the wringer to figure out if they're going to be a good fit. You know, we do a tech screen, what we do. firstly, a screen with the manager and or our recruiter, our internal recruiter, we then do a technical interview, which is two developers or two hardware engineers interviewing with the candidate at the same time, and now enough, the person passes the technical chops round, we just move them on to a cultural interview. Culture is incredibly important at RightHand and so we dedicate an entire round to that, to make sure the person is really going to fit in well. And, and that's pretty much it a couple of you know, mop up rubber stamps at the end around references and things like that. But largely, some will expect to talk to 5-5-6-7 people at most and we are able to make a good decision based on just that information there.

Why now is the ideal time to join

I don't know if you remember, Charlie and the chat Chocolate Factory, one of the final scenes where they're getting on the elevator, and they're not sure where it's going and it blasts through the roof. I feel like I'm getting on that elevator every day at RightHand. And I'll tell you why. Only 5% of warehouses worldwide are using any sophisticated automation like this. So sort of the opportunity is massive. On top of that, you know, we've had this pandemic it's just dragging on and on. There are some silver linings particularly for this business e-commerce, you think about what people are going by and everything online now that direct e-commerce directly translates the warehouses. And so the amount of growth in that space have been about 40% year over year increase and e-commerce and again directly translates the need for more, more things going through warehouses and more need for picking technology and warehouse. So while with some of our first customers of those early adopters, we are quickly swinging into mainstream adoption of this technology. Speaking of technology, engineers love cool technology. It is such cool technology, and it is bleeding edge, we're doing stuff nobody else is doing, solving a problem that hasn't been solved before. And fulfilling a real customer need. This is a really cool part about it. Perhaps most importantly, at least to me, the culture, I mentioned how important culture is for us. Culture was one of the reasons I joined RightHand a little over a year ago. I've described the culture as super collaborative, very, very transparent. As far as communication, nothing is withheld. And kind of scrappy. We may be a six-year-old startup, but we've got this get stuff done attitude. And actually a really fun environment. We do even with the pandemic, we've transitioned to full hybrid. And we're doing lots of events every week on Zoom and occasionally some in the office when we can get out a parking lot at barbecues and things like that. And on top of all that amazing team, I am every day feeling absolutely blessed to be working with such smart people. They're also just genuinely good humans, that we have this really tight-knit type of group, very supportive. Our new hires were hiring all the time. They constantly are commenting how our onboarding is particularly good, which is first for a small scrappy startup. Sometimes you might think you're going to get thrown into the deep end without your swimmies on. But we have great onboarding and the entire engineering team is so supportive during that process that candidates over and over as we retrospect on our hiring, onboarding, they always say, This is unbelievable. People are so helpful in bringing me up to speed. So I don't know. Right product, amazing team, amazing culture, the right time to market. You know, that's why it feels like that elevator is about the blast through the roof.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai