Half-Built-Robots: page 3

The blog you are reading is no longer WordPress. As of this week, half-built-robots is a static site built with Astro and served from Cloudflare. If I did my job right, you shouldn't be able to tell…

A cobot on a factory floor is only as good as the person programming it. The people who are good at that have been doing it for years, and most operators are not those people. There is a persistent…

Most manufacturing work was designed for a pair of human hands. Put a cobot on the line and someone has to take that work apart and decide which pieces go to the robot and which stay with the person…

Working next to a cobot means sharing a task with a machine that runs on its own for a while and then needs you, and the hard part is guessing when it will need you and for how long. During my time at…

Back in Fall 2018, I took CS 534 (Computational Photography) at UW-Madison. The term project was open-ended, so naturally my team and I decided to see if we could get a neural network to generate…

When you’re working on human-robot interaction research, there’s a surprisingly mundane problem that keeps showing up. The robot needs to know where things are. Specifically, in our case, the robot…

During my Master’s in Computer Science at UW-Madison, I spent most of my time in the People and Robots Lab working on human-robot interaction research under Dr. Bilge Mutlu. The lab had a UR3e cobot…

I found a 2D WebGL fluid simulation on GitHub’s trending page one Friday afternoon and lost about twenty minutes clicking around the canvas watching colors swirl. I forgot what I was actually doing…

Back in undergrad, when I set up the LED strip around my apartment’s living room window, I thought the little IR remote it came with was fine. Point, click, color changes. Simple. Then I lost the…

This past January (2026) my husband and I flew from the Bay Area to Tokyo for two weeks. The first week was vacation. We took the Shinkansen down to Osaka and came back up to Tokyo. I specifically put…