Business Innovation & Entrepreneurship

I studied English Literature. I got a degree in Arts. If you had asked me 10 years ago, you know, could you imagine that you would be running a robotics company, my straight up answer would be “No”.

[Text on Screen] A&K ROBOTICS
[Text on Screen] Jessica Yip, COO & Co-Founder A&K Robotics

We focus on self-driving technologies.
Our company has invented a system that can attach onto anything with wheels and make that thing self-driving.

In terms of what we physically make, a lot of it is in the A.I.
So, if you think of a self-driving car on the roadway, you’ve got vision sensors, you’ve got LIDARs, you’ve got SONARs.
All of these things need to be packaged nicely and neatly in a very smart way to help the robot see and understand its world.

And as a startup, you are constantly iterating and iterating and trying to make your system better and better every day.

It is incredibly surprising how fast technology can outpace itself within a year, within six months.
You know, everything is constantly getting better, faster, cheaper, smarter.

I don’t have a technical background.
Everything was quite new when I got into it because I didn’t know about engineering. I didn’t study it.

I did not grow up with exposure to technology.
And the more I learned about robots, and what they could do and the potential they had, I thought, “this is exactly what I want to be spending my time working on.”

The advice I give to young people is: think big!
This is an industry that is ripe for change. It is absolutely ready for fresh ideas, new ideas.
It needs an injection of energy to really get to that next level quickly.

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