Author: Candy McGrevy

As I approach the end of my industry year at Dogtooth, I’ve been reflecting on everything I’ve experienced – from technical lessons to unexpected personal growth. I wanted to share my time here, both to document it for myself and to offer insight into what working at Dogtooth is really like.

My Background

I came to Dogtooth looking for an industry year. I wanted a career that combined my love of programming with my love of the outdoors and agricultural robotics seemed like a really good start towards this. Dogtooth felt like exactly what I was looking for. It also provided some interesting ideas: the idea of working towards a new kind of farming with less reliance on mono-crops, less food waste, and although not as strictly related to their work, less reliance on herbicides and pesticides. The idea of automating food production pulled on a political chord in me too, a chance to see what the people working at Dogtooth saw in a future where their product was commonplace.

I also wanted to develop some new skills, especially around electronics and firmware and I wanted to get my foot in the door at a pleasant company so I had somewhere to turn to after university.

What I Learned at Dogtooth

From my first month at Dogtooth I started learning a wild amount. I’d basically been dropped into a new career space and had a lot to take in. Although I joined the software team I was also assigned an electronics and hardware tutor who would meet up with me once a week to help me develop the additional skills I wanted to learn. This was done even though I wasn’t working in that space! This tutoring was amazing and really gave me a lot. Having one-on-one time with someone was so valuable; any question I had was not only answered quickly but in a way that really integrated itself into my understanding well.

I also found that I very quickly learnt a lot about how an entire electronic rig, like our robots, is structured. Learning how a computer can work, manage and run electronic parts really blew my mind! It turns out, our robots have tens of embedded-systems computers inside them, each managing different parts, communicating with a main central computer through a networking system. I’d gone into this assuming there were just chips with massive sets of GPIO pins connecting to all the arms and rails at once. The more I dug into the robots as I worked with them, the more I learnt about the depth of their functioning and the systems Dogtooth has built around them.

Through the job I picked up an insane amount of knowledge about the stuff I was already working on in my life outside of work. To list just a few things off the top of my head: the insane depth of C#’s inner workings and flexibility, Python’s weird little quirks, all the tools and processes for maintaining and running servers and real time data services, and a massive amount just working with a relatively old codebase; seeing what we can do well and badly to ensure the code stays robust and maintainable for years to come.

The Unexpected Lessons

More interestingly, I got a large number of things from my time at Dogtooth that I wasn’t looking for such as interesting views into other worlds and other ways of working. A nice little example of why we should always be pushing ourselves to try new experiences.

An Ego Check

Dogtooth has been a great place for working slightly above my skill level and regularly making mistakes and learning. As an agile company it’s really open to failure and does really well at leaning into a blameless culture. This has been really good for keeping my ego tuned down, regularly reminding me that I don’t know everything, and that I’m surrounded by highly experienced people whose knowledge runs impressively deep. There was a lot of challenging work but my line manager very quickly made sure that I felt I was able to say “I don’t know how to do this, but I’ll give it a go as long as people are willing to help me when I need it”. Developing that kind of knowledge based humility whilst still being willing to undertake tough work feels like a really important skill that I’m glad I developed and I felt like it was definitely at the core of how Dogtooth treats its interns.

Working in a Team with a Range of Opinionated Views

People at Dogtooth are great at their job, and this comes with confidence. They know how to solve a problem and will fight for their view. Coming into these teams and seeing sets of 4-5 people consolidate their mass of widely different points through discussions, compromise and friendly jokes and somehow seeing them all come together in a clean, realistic and reasonable form is incredible. I had moments when I first joined Dogtooth where I’d see this and it would leave me in a really positive mood for the rest of the day. Just being around people as ideas fly and get slowly thinned out through genuine expert discussion is really comforting, especially nowadays when it’s easy to think people with adverse opinions just can’t get on. Dogtooth is really solid evidence against this.

A View into Manufacturing

Dogtooth is a very small company but needs to have a full production team. A nice benefit of this is that this means you have a really wide range of people but everybody still knows everybody. This has given me a chance to get a view into areas of work I would never have otherwise even thought to learn about. This especially applies to manufacturing where the head of the department, has a long and well-established background in the field. Talking to him about this has been profoundly eye-opening. A really interesting view into an industry that’s actually very good at organising humans and solving human problems. Just seeing the whole process a product goes through, from R&D to production to the planning of mass production has been super educational and shown me a whole chunk of the real world I’d never have got to see otherwise.

An Unusual and Sincerely Pleasant Working Environment

A smaller thing, but Dogtooth is just a really lovely environment. I really hoped to get some outdoor manual labour mixed in with my coding whilst working here and I’ve definitely got it. Helping out while a whole team of really lovely people tear-down or rebuild poly-tunnels, weed plants or clear out containers has just been really pleasant. Being able to go and sit outside while working on my laptop on summer days or just having to sit outside whenever a robot needs testing makes Dogtooth a really unique place to work in a really good way; there’s almost a whimsy to it. That whimsy is also added to by having an infinite supply of strawberries to eat during the summer.

I kind of like to think that this is a bit of a window into what computing could be in a world where Dogtooth’s industry is thriving. The programming community definitely needs to be more willing to go outside and Dogtooth sometimes teeters on showing what that could look like. It’s a bit reminiscent of some sort of solarpunk utopian story.

Final Thoughts

That final point definitely ties into my feelings on Dogtooth generally. Working at Dogtooth for a year has really shown me the kind of environments I want to work in. In terms of my future goals and career aspirations, it’s definitely convinced me I want to stay in agri-tech, especially as it continues to grow and carves out its own space. Hopefully it becomes a place with a strong tie to nature, a trust in its workers and an understanding of its own identity. I think Dogtooth is moving in that direction well and I’m definitely hoping to return eventually.

Dogtooth is thrilled to announced the appointment of Jorge Heraud as chairman of our board.

Having achieved a significant inflection point in robot productivity, we are now equipping our first customers to adopt dexterous harvesting robots at scale. As we embark on this exciting next phase of our journey, we are hugely fortunate to be able to benefit from Jorge’s experience and wisdom.

To members of the agricultural robotics community, Jorge will need little introduction. He co-founded and served as CEO of Blue River Technology, a company that uses computer vision and AI to detect plants individually and reduce chemical use. After Blue River was acquired by John Deere in 2017, he became their VP of Automation and Autonomy, leading a team of over 600 people. Earlier in his career, he worked at Trimble Navigation International Ltd as Director of Engineering and Business Unit Director for Precision Agriculture. He holds master’s degrees in both engineering and business from Stanford University.

Dogtooth’s fifth generation robot was featured in a recent Financial Times article. We are enormously proud to be a part of Dyson Farming ‘s efforts to produce sensational British strawberries this Christmas.

We were thrilled to be one of 16 finalists, selected from over 100 entries across the UK, to participate in the inaugural Future of Food competition.

The competition brought together some of the country’s most innovative food and farming businesses, with each finalist invited to pitch their ideas live to a panel of industry experts and decision-makers at the historic Royal Geographical Society in London.

Future of Food Creator, Barney Mauleverer said, “The mega trends of the future – rising sea levels, shifting populations, threats to our economy, farming and climate, even space tourism are undeniable. But the food industry has a unique opportunity to lead the charge in solving these seismic shifts and crises. It’s incredibly inspiring to see so many young, up and coming innovators forging ahead.

Without the strength of big brands or budgets behind them, they’re making waves, pushing boundaries and showing the incredible talent this industry has to offer. That’s exactly what the Future of Food competition is here to celebrate: their passion, drive and game changing potential.

Dr Duncan Robertson, Founder & CEO of Dogtooth Technologies, leads a pioneering team that has spent eight years developing robots capable of harvesting delicate berry fruits as effectively as human pickers.

Well done to Duncan and the team on winning the Bronze Award!”

www.futureoffood.org.uk

Dr Duncan Robertson on stage at the Royal Geographical Society.

Earlier this year, Dogtooth’s Software CTO Anders Johansson Associate Professor in Engineering Mathematics at Bristol University very much enjoyed working with Bristol Engineering student, Ben Winstanley. Ben used a state-of-the-art computer vision approach to create detailed 3D models of complex plant geometry.

This ability is central to our robot’s ability to pick delicate berry fruits without damage to other parts of the plant. Rather than grasping the body of the fruit, our robots work by gripping and cutting their stalks – an approach that helps to minimize cross contamination and bruising (and that Dogtooth has patented worldwide). For the robot to position its cut/grip end effector with sufficient precision, it must form detailed and accurate 3D models in real time.