Robots that made burgers

Momentum Machines, later renamed Creator, built a machine that griddled, assembled, and boxed a burger with no human in the loop. I was Director of Software, leading the fifteen-engineer team responsible for everything that thought: the real-time control system, the firmware, and the computer vision that decided whether a tomato slice was acceptable.

Food robotics is a brutal teacher. The physical world does not retry idempotently. Cheese behaves differently at every temperature, produce arrives in shapes no one planned for, and a control loop that is correct ninety-nine percent of the time produces an unacceptable lunch several times a day. We learned to design for graceful degradation in hardware the way most teams design for it in software, and to treat sensor noise as a permanent resident rather than a bug.

By the time I left we had more than twenty robotic units in the field, with a centralized dashboard giving operational oversight of the whole fleet: state, throughput, and failures visible in one place, which is fleet observability before that phrase was fashionable.

It remains the best systems education I have had. Robots concentrate every hard problem (real-time constraints, distributed coordination, hardware that lies to you) into one machine that also has to make lunch.