About

I'm Kenrick. I work in construction robotics: the kind where a robot does the heavy, dangerous part of a job and a tradesperson signs off.

What I'm interested in

I don't usually talk about work in non-work settings, so this page is where it goes.

Construction sites are a hard environment for a robot. The weather rarely cooperates: wind, rain, ice, temperatures that swing wide. Silica dust coats the LiDAR. The floor shakes whenever a drill runs nearby, and the higher you are in the building, the more it moves. Different subcontractors share the floor, each on their own schedule and with their own opinion of the robot.

A lot of robotics gets built for a stable environment and a long runway of prep work. Construction lets you have neither. That gap is the interesting part of the job. (The trades on site have taught me how this work actually happens.)

Where I am

I live in the South Bay and commute up to San Francisco on the days I'm not traveling.

The travel side picks up the slack. My projects are commercial, which means most of my time on the road is spent in the up-and-coming neighborhood of a city worth being in. Austin, Baltimore, Nashville, Los Angeles. The neighborhood is a quiet upside.

That rhythm shapes everything else. I don't make commitments much further out than a few weeks, or if I do, I flag that I might need to bail. Work is taking priority for this stretch and I try to be honest about it upfront.

How I got into construction robotics

I grew up in Jakarta, in a family that mostly does engineering, so the wiring was there early. The first time it really clicked was 2020, when my undergrad team at Universitas Gadjah Mada won the CanSat Competition in Stephenville, Texas. That was also my first time in the United States. After that came research at Carnegie Mellon on 3D concrete spray printing, and then Raise.

(The closest I've come to actual disaster on the job was the night before our first commercial deployment. We'd finished testing the robot in Santa Clara and were packing it up for the next morning's pickup when it tipped over on the ramp. The robot was fine; the deployment shipped on time.)

How I got into tennis

I played tennis before tennis was cool. My father trained me growing up, with a stretch at Kemayoran Tennis Center in Jakarta. I made the UGM university team my first year and, by my last, was barely hanging onto the engineering faculty's intra-uni team — a rare athletic career that runs in reverse.

These days I watch live when I can: WTA Finals, Cincinnati Open, Indian Wells, Austin Open. Catching a major from the stands is its own kind of luck.

How I got into photography

My first camera was a Fuji X-M1, picked up in college. I made the final stage of the 2019 Biak Munara Wampasi Festival photo competition with cameras borrowed between sessions and no idea how to caption anything I shot.

I travel a fair amount now and post most of what comes back to VSCO. Seattle, Belize, and New Hampshire have all earned their own albums. The catch with the camera is that it's just bulky enough that I keep sabotaging myself with it. Every other trip I'll throw the body in a bag and forget the battery, the charger, or the SD card, sometimes all three. My phone fills in. The phone takes pretty good pictures.

I'd like to start writing some of these trips up here.

Contact

Email: hello@ktjandra.com
Photography: vsco.co/kenrlck

Colophon

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