DEV-TOOLSApril 14, 20261 min read8 views

Ask HN: I quit my job over weaponized robots to start my own venture

A robotics engineer resigned from a high-end hardware company after refusing to participate in a project to weaponize robotic platforms. He is now launching a startup focused on improving robotics control interfaces and workflows.

Two weeks ago, I quit my job at a robotics company. I was working with high-end hardware (Boston Dynamics, Unitree), but I found out they were planning to mount teleoperated weapons on the robotic platforms for a demo. I’m not willing to go there, so I resigned without another offer.

I’ve decided this is the right time to go back to entrepreneurship. We're at an incredible moment for embodied intelligence, but I feel the tools and workflows we use to interact, monitor, and control these platforms are still lagging behind.

I'm currently exploring a couple of projects around how we build, test, and interact with robots. As part of my customer discovery phase, I'm trying to gather raw data on how roboticists and developers actually work day to day and what their main pain points are regarding control interfaces.

I put together a very short survey (3 mins) to validate some ideas. If you work in robotics, embedded systems, or just tinker with hardware, your input would be incredibly valuable:

Survey link: https://forms.gle/3Nm76wkeT5CMt23c8

I'm also open to discussing the ethical lines in modern robotics or anything related to ROS2 / HRI in the thread. Thanks for reading!

Source: Hacker News

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