One of the few things I was able to take a picture with!

This past summer I had the incredible opportunity to work at Amazon Robotics in North Reading, MA. This was truly my first “in person” internship in the sense that I actually had to relocate. Also, this is the first time I was really working with robotics outside a research or hobbyist setting.

During my time at AR, I was able gain more software engineering skills. My project was to take perception algorithms for item picking tasks (including object segmentation and barcode detection), adapt them for the Jetson AGX Orin platform, and benchmark their performance. This exposed me to many of the perception algorithms used on Amazon’s warehouse manipulation robots.

On a personal note, I was able to spend a decent chunk of time explore the cities of Boston and Cambridge. I’ve never actually lived in a large city (Athens is really just a college town and Atlanta isn’t very exciting), so I took advantage of the T and went exploring! I hit many of the tourist attractions (walking around North End, Chinatown, seeing MIT and Harvard) but by far my favorite thing was running along the Charles River! My daily routine was doing a 3 mile circuit in which I crossed both the Harvard and Longfellow bridges, both which have incredible views of the city.

From left to right: (1) View from Harvard Bridge (2) View from Longfellow Bridge