first e2→e4 grab, but only one piece on the board. wrist cam for accuracy, grab-and-drop on leader–follower, full board still next.
thoughts on engineering, startups, and building things
weekly build log · jun – sep 2026 · embodied ai on the xlerobot
first e2→e4 grab, but only one piece on the board. wrist cam for accuracy, grab-and-drop on leader–follower, full board still next.
vr teleop still shook, so i swapped to leader–follower. “go to a5” works. grasp training in parallel. also talking to people i’m not ready to name yet.
back from vacation, a reprinted gripper, an orbbec depth camera, and chess board perception that finally reads 64/64.
no robots, no jetson, no chess. just an island, a lot of tzatziki, and zero commits. the most productive week of the summer.
first vr teleop on meta quest, a custom parallel gripper, destroyed screws, and building a chess robot for remote play.
ssh into a headless jetson, split the video stack, find the example code is broken, and fix it with a cpu vs gpu experiment.
kickoff day in otaniemi — hardware handoff, the challenge ahead, and committing to twelve weeks of writing.
one-off posts
five themes where i think the real money and hard problems actually are: physical ai, energy, compute, biology, and brain-computer interfaces.
stepping into the role of cto at slush — from lego bricks in new delhi to building foundations where thousands of others can create what comes next.