Hashed People: Fueling the Robotics Economy by Co-founder from Kambria, Thuc Vu

I am an engineer nerd at heart who is passionate about entrepreneurship and social causes. I started writing computer programs back in junior high, and was competing nationally and internationally like it was a sport. I left Vietnam when I was 17 to go to the US for an undergraduate program at Carnegie Mellon University, and later a PhD at Stanford, both in Computer Science, focusing on Artificial Intelligence.

Right after Stanford, I started a company called Katango which provided social analytics for users on Facebook. Katango got acquired by Google less than 2 years later. I stayed at Google for 3 years, and then left to start OhmniLabs/Kambria in July 2015.

Besides OhmniLabs and Kambria, I am also involved with several community and non-profit projects in Vietnam, such as VietSeeds, a scholarship program that helps underprivileged students to attend universities, and VietAI, an educational project that bring AI courses from Silicon Valley back to train engineers in Vietnam.

(→)Thuc Vu, Co-founder of Kambria. Simon Seojoon Kim, CEO of #HASHED. Jared Go, Co-founder of Kambria.

Even after more than couple decades of research, we still have made little headway in developing affordable robots that can address our everyday needs. Traditional development processes used by robotics companies result in high cost production, effectively isolating the everyday consumer market. Only robots programmed to do very simple household tasks, such as vacuuming or mowing, were able to capitalize on the small profit margin.

Highly functional robots, including the Honda Asimo that can walk up the stairs and the Toyota’s Human Support Robot that can fetch, only exist in research facilities due to their expensive price tags. Neither will be commercially viable in the near future.

We are passionate not only about robotics but also about bringing value to people. Our mission is to accelerate the process of robotics innovation, enabling faster, cheaper, and easier robotics development and adoption by everyone. It will be revolutionary to be able to foster an open collaborative ecosystem, where every contribution can easily be shared, manufactured, and implemented. And this is the reason why we start developing Kambria.

Full interview: http://www.hashedpost.com/2018/04/eng-hashed-people-fueling-robotics.html