I spent 3.5 years at Canvas Construction making robots to help construction workers finish drywall more safely and efficiently. Drywall finishing represents an area of construction that is suffering from a serious labor shortage and can benefit greatly from a consistent and repeatable process. The Canvas robot sprays gypsum-based mud onto a wall - using computer vision to detect seams between panels. The robot can completely spray a wall in a single day, which would take 5 days (with drying required overnight) for traditional labor. The next day the robot sands the mud down to a perfectly flat finish using 2D and 3D sensors to validate the surface finish.
I spent my time at Canvas overseeing system architecture and leading the Behavior Algorithms and Manipulation team. We used ROS, python, and C++, and I was the resident state machine and git expert.
