Yeah, robots! I'm a mechatronic engineer with a Ph.D. in robotics from Sydney Uni. I'm entirely sick of the academic rat race, so I've quit to start Triple Point Robotics (www.triplepointrobotics.com) with another colleague from my work, and an old high school friend.
Ultimately, we want to be the Apple of consumer robotics, and to have our robots in your homes and offices. That's a big ask, so we're starting out by using robotic technologies to solve various problems. Our first product line will be a combination of augmented reality, computer vision, and SLAM* - we're calling it Augmented Reality over IP. It lets a remote operator draw things in your local environment, and we think this is useful for training, helping the less tech-savvy, tele-medicine, and a bunch of other stuff.
One of the coolest parts of our five year plan is that this first product is essentially one component of the head of our ultimate mobile robot. So we get a nice product and some revenue early on, but also solve a bunch of the problems that we'd have to solve later anyway.
If you want to know more, ask here, on Quora (there's a TPR topic), or by email to tom@jugglethis.net. I've got HN's noprocrast turned on, so I don't get around to responding here much more than once a day.
[*] Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping; an algorithm that is traditionally used to let a robot build a map of its environment at the same time as using the features of this map to work out where it is. We're using it to work out where a camera took a picture from, so that we can stabilise augmented reality overlays projected on the real world.
