Programming Throwdown, Episode 118, Building a Robotic Software Platform with Abhe Venkatesh. Take it away, Patrick.

Hey, everybody. We're here with another exciting interview. Today we have Abhe, who's a software

engineer at Andril Industries. Go ahead and say hello to us, Abhe, and tell us a little bit about

your current role there. Yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast, Jason and Patrick.

I'm Abe.

I'm a software engineer at Unreal Industries, and I work on platform infrastructure,

mainly focusing on aspects of simulation, deployment, and so forth.

Before that, I did a lot of work in our autonomy area of expertise and did some

foundational work there and also have a background in perception and machine learning.

You said so many buzzwords already right up front. You're going to have a lot of people very excited.

I mean, I think there's a couple topics that I think are very motivational to people early on when they're getting into programming.

Or at least they were for me.

Maybe now people are excited by like, you know, websites and web apps and stuff.

But for me, it was always building games and building robots.

Right.

Yeah, I guess to the point of buzzwords, I often like to say we do everything but blockchain

at Andrea. So we really do have that diversity of expertise. And certainly, robotics is one of the

areas that we are particularly excited about. I'm particularly excited about. And yeah, I, you know,

the first time I started working on robotics was at Stanford, where

we had this fun project of, well, having this sort of chairbot.

And the sort of problem space was going to study how humans interact with various robotic

furniture and how can you sort of imagine those kinds of interactions and

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