After my second year studying at Cal Poly, I got a summer-long internship at Yaskawa. I was on the controls team based out of the bay area in Santa Clara, which does research and development of silicon wafer handling robots. During my 12 weeks I was exposed to many robotics, controls, as well as general engineering development techniques.

I worked on a plethora of projects related to silicon wafer handling robots. I integrated the robot’s commands and laser to take measurements of the robot’s performance, wrote embedded controller programs to handle certain memory use cases, as well derived kinematics relationships between different coordinate frames and implemented microservice commincation to pass that information between internal utilities to better visualize robot positions. I learned a lot over the summer that exposed me to the rigorous coding workflow that many companies use today.