About
I’m Ryan Hickman. Most of my career has been about getting machines to understand the physical world: where they are, what’s around them, and what to do next. This is where I write about it. The opinions are my own, and some of them are spicy.
In 2009 I was working out of the Street View garage at Google, bolting Android phones and tablets onto motors and wheels with 80/20 aluminum to make phone-controlled robots for a project called Cellbots. The same shop mounted cameras on cars, and it’s where Google’s self-driving project, then called Chauffeur, got its start. I spent about six weeks part time helping that team and got to mount the first Velodyne lidar on the first Chauffeur car. My contribution to what became Waymo rounds to zero, but it’s a fun one to have been around for.
From there I started the Cloud Robotics team in 2011, and later I co-founded Project Tango. Tango turned into ARCore, and a lot of the people who built it went on to work on robots. Over thirteen years at Google, nine of my projects were canceled. I don’t mind. The stage I like best is going from zero to 0.1, when something is still a prototype and a hunch, and that’s where most of my work has been.
After Google I worked on autonomy, simulation, and synthetic data at the Toyota Research Institute, NVIDIA, and Agility Robotics. I also started two companies. I founded TickTock to give robots the same kind of map your phone uses for AR, and we tried it in homes and on retail floors moving inventory. Seahorse AI was a shorter run at spatial intelligence, 3D reconstruction, and digital twins.
Today I’m on the Robotics Lab team at Instawork. We build Instacore, a wearable rig that records real work in kitchens and warehouses so robots can learn from it.
The older essays here come from the TickTock years and from 2019, when I argued that humanoids and general-purpose robots were the wrong shape for the problem. New writing is on the way. For the full résumé, see LinkedIn.