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 eight automation product lines end to end — every bracket, board, and line of firmware — and built the manufacturing process that produced them.
We went from $0 to $1.1M 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 eight automation product lines — tabletop seeder, tabletop harvester, tray washer, channel washer, and gel-media filler, plus conveyor-integrated concepts. 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.
Interactive 3D models of the hardware I designed end to end. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom.
Automated tray seeding — singulates and drops seed at high throughput.
Bench-scale automated harvesting of tray-grown crops.
Automated wash-and-sanitize station for grow trays.
High-throughput continuous tray washer.
Inline wash-and-sanitize for hydroponic grow channels.
Precision dispensing of gel growth media into trays.
Inline seeder integrated onto a roller conveyor line.
Conveyor-fed automated harvesting station.
The machines and the computer vision running — from the pitch reel. Click any clip to play.
A vision-guided six-axis arm on a linear-rail gantry that transplants seedlings and harvests produce — driven end to end by an overhead depth camera and a real-time perception pipeline (detect → localize → pick).
Computer vision for crop quality — leaf-area heatmaps, growth tracking, and per-plant classification from the grow-room cameras, feeding yield prediction and harvest decisions.
Integrating the automation line into a commercial controlled-environment-agriculture facility — machines, conveyors, and controls wired into a working production flow.
The shipped product line at a glance — seeders, harvesters, and washers in action.