BRENNAND PIERCE
Brennand is a seasoned roboticist and a successful entrepreneur. He has 15 years’ experience in both designing robotic hardware and writing low level embedded and high level cloud software. During his career he has founded three companies, managed small to middle sized interdisciplinary teams, and hired about 100 employees of all levels. His biggest strength is his in-depth knowledge of software, electronics and also hardware. Brennand is capable of designing and implementing architecture from low level VHDL or C to making choices about using protobuf to high level cloud infrastructure to use. Additionally, he has experience in designing pcb and motor controllers and other electronics for robots while always making sure all the different components are tightly integrated.
As a Robotic Researcher at the University in Munich he built a compliant humanoid robot and a new generation of FPGA based robotic controllers. Afterwards he set up his robotic startup Robotise in Munich which was solely based on his idea, design, and implementation for an autonomous mobile delivery system. In his current role as Co-founder and Chief Robotics Officer for the Silicon Valley based startup Bear Robotics he plays a crucial role for the product design, the hardware and software for their mobile delivery robot Penny. Bear Robotics successfully raised a $32 Million Series A funding lead by SoftBank.
My Goals
As a world class robotics designer I’m working to make robots part of every day life and strive to automate boring and mundane tasks.
Software
For over 20 years I’ve been writing various software and have worked on low level VHDL all the way to high level cloud infrastructure.
Electronics
I’ve designed and worked on all aspects of robotics electrical systems; from integrating off-the-shelf sensors to designing custom FPGA based motor controllers.
Hardware
During my career I have worked on over 10+ robotic hardware projects from the hands-on but also the project management side. These projects included a wide range from humanoids as well as quadcopters, which as given me a lot of experience in designing complex mechatronic systems.
Product manager
Building a robot is futile unless you understand the market for it. What features do the customer want and need? How much money and time are they willing to spend? Is it a nice-to-have or a killer feature? Without answers to thee significant questions you can't design the hardware specs, or priorities what software features to write. Having a robot that does the job of a minimum wage worker but costs $100k isn't going to be a successful product on the market.
