My name is Ed, and I build robots.

I like to work where software and hardware meet—where mechanical and electrical engineering collide with software engineering. I’ve heard it called systems engineering, mechatronics, or just “robotics,” but each of those words seems to mean something different to everyone. The important thing is that I like things that move by themselves.

These days, I’m at Latitude AI, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ford, working on advanced driver assistance systems for upcoming consumer vehicles. I’m the manager of our Faults, Signals, and Modes team. We’re responsible for monitoring and aggregating fault signals from the various hardware and software components of the system and triggering a Minimum Risk Maneuver to bring the vehicle to a safe state if something goes wrong. On a typical day, I split my time between software development (mostly C++), software design and architecture, systems engineering, project management, and people management.

Before that, I worked at Argo AI from 2018 until the company folded at the end of 2022. I spent most of my time at Argo on Motion planning teams, including managing the Motion Planning and Controls Integration team, which supported the Motion Planning and Motion Controls teams by doing a mix of software development, troubleshooting, and metrics analysis. We were sort of like SREs for autonomous vehicles.

Before Argo, I spent almost five years as a research engineer at Southwest Research Institute, where I worked on various ground vehicle robotics projects for industrial and military clients. As a masters student at Case Western Reserve University, I developed an experimental mobile industrial robotic arm and managed a team of web developers for the Center for Evidence Based Practices. In the mean time, I’ve also been working on a lot of projects for fun.