Machani Robotics

What I Worked On

At Machani Robotics I worked with a team building advanced humanoid robots, getting exposure across the stack: mechanical design, engineering workflows, some of the software layer, and the operational reality of running a robotics startup. I wasn't handed a narrow task and left alone with it. I was in the room for how decisions actually get made across disciplines that all have to agree at once.

What I Learned

Humanoid robotics is a coordination problem before it's a technical one. Mechanical, electrical, and software teams are all constraining each other simultaneously, and a change in one discipline can quietly break an assumption in another. I learned to think about a robot as a system of negotiated trade-offs, not a mechanism plus a controller plus some code.

Insights

Startups building hard hardware move differently than I expected. There's less certainty and more iteration than any textbook description of "robotics engineering" suggests. Being comfortable saying "we don't know yet, here's how we'll find out" turned out to be a core engineering skill, not a gap in one.

Engineering Notes

Seeing early-stage product thinking applied to humanoid robots, what to build first, what to fake for a demo, what to actually solve, reframed my own approach to PX-1. Machani Robotics is the internship that turned robotics from "the field I'm interested in" into "the field I'm going to spend my career in." That's not a small thing for an internship to do.