Now
I am currently living in the "post-pandemic" Singapore. Singapore borders are currently closed due to COVID-19 so I am learning to be more local.
Geylang unmasked
I recently relocated to Geylang—Singapore's neighborhood famous mainly for its red-light district. Its night bars and brothels gave it a bad rep among Singaporeans. Dark filthy alleys and uncanny individuals drove the rental prices down despite the amazing location just next to the central Marina Bay. But it is a neighborhood with the soul of a true Chinatown. As a side-project, on an instagram account I venture into its lorongs to find stories and unmask the "other face" of Singapore.
Zobrazit příspěvek na InstagramuPříspěvek sdílený Geylang Unmasked (@geylangunmasked), Srp 1, 2020 v 7:41 PDT
TV
I finished the third season of the Westworld. It was set in Singapore. Jonathan Nolan, the director, said he chose to film here because the future had already arrived "in places like Singapore". While Singapore's futuristic architecture does make a good background for sci-fi, I learned there is more depth to that statement. The meritocratic system with government babysitting their citizens is exactly what the show criticizes. The life of a Singaporean is charted from his/her inception.
Kettlebell
I recently added a kettlebell into my training routine and it's loads of fun. I bought a 16kg kettlebell from Decathlon (it was almost impossible to get kettlebells in Singapore during the lockdown). 16kg is just perfect for a beginner with 65 kg. I follow Pavel Tsatsouline for technique and Ryan Raw for interval workouts. Before this, my routine before was mostly body-weight and TRX training. Adding a weight, I certainly can see lots of progress in strength in a short time period as my body gets more balanced. I also supplement protein now as I try to gain some muscles.
Yoga
Since April, I've done yoga every morning. The balance poses are real fun!
Fasting
I picked up fasting as part of my lifestyle. I do a three-day fast once a month followed by four days of the keto diet (no carbs, lots of fats). I don't do it for weight loss but longevity.
I first got interested in fasting during my travels in India in 2013 meeting a friendly hippie who was in the midst of a seven-day fast. My interest got reinvigorated recently by comprehensive info from Peter Attia Drive podcast. In the past decade or two, the understanding of mechanisms of cellular regeneration improved drastically. And it seems that longevity has to do a lot with being in a fasted state. Also, the surge in modern diseases like cancer or obesity seems to be related to modern dietary patterns. It was not that uncommon for an ancient man to go without food for days. In 2016, there was a Nobel prize awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy.
I got some extra time in my hands during the Singapore lockdown to focus on myself, so I thought why not challenge myself. A three-day water fast was easy enough to get started.
Books
I am reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It has helped me rethink my relationship with social media. Also, it is interesting to observe the faster erosion of privacy during 2020, the year of pandemic. I picked it up from Obama's favorite books of 2019.
Work
In January, I started working as a Senior Robotics Engineer at Cognicept Systems. Cognicept has a network of human-robot pilots attending to robot failures and helping robots navigate new situations. I am building a peer-to-peer communication protocol for robot data streaming based on WebRTC.
Last updated: 9th of August, 2020
About me
I am an explorer, a full-stack robotics engineer, a scuba diver, a European, a space nerd, a minimalist, and an introvert. I fly drones and climb mountains in my free time.
Robotics engineer
I envision the world where robots empower people by taking on their mundane and dangerous tasks. I am currently responsible for building robot teleoperation systems at Cognicept. We enable new robot applications outside of factories by providing a safety net of human operators.
In the past, I worked on world's first robotic solution for the automatic build-up and break-down of aviation cargo pallets at Speedcargo. I was leading the development of CARGOEYE—a scanning system for dimensioning, fingerprinting, and documenting cargo. We deployed multiple systems at Changi airport where it is used 24/7 for cargo scanning and in the cargo acceptance process.
Lunar rover
I built navigation and localization system for a lunar rover prototype for the European Space Agency. We ran a month-long field test at Las Cañadas caldera at El Teide national park on Tenerife to understand Lunar South Pole remote operations.
Zero gravity machines
I was an intern at Automation and Robotics group at European Space Research and Technological Center in Netherlands. I built a novel robotic system to emulate zero gravity on the ground for testing space robots. I presented the platform at iSAIRAS 2016 in Beijing, China; the [paper] describes the platform in detail.
Academia
I received Master's degree at Czech Technical University in the field of control systems. I was a proud member of AA4CC—an academic research group at Department of Control Engineering. I also studied at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Dielectrophoresis
In my thesis I built optoelectronic tweezers—a laboratory platform where light shapes electric field. I also worked on lensless sensor for tracking of microscopic objects. I used lensless holography for estimating position in 3rd dimension. Download the thesis [PDF] .
Other small school projects
- Control of double pendulum using LQR,
- magnetic levitation controlled with PID,
- Analysis of Research and Development in China, Chinese economy (HE303) at NTU in Singapore,
- Special Topics in Robotics at SKKU in South Korea,
- Application of Genetic Programming to the Tileworld agents for Intelligent agents at NTU in Singapore,
- Analysis of international relations using Complex network theory, Complex systems and networks at SKKU.
Photo by Fernando Gandía during LUCID field test, curtesy of ESA