Some of the most telling work happens off the job site. Akshat Jain, a TerraFirma engineer, built a device he calls Totem: a four-degree-of-freedom miniature arm that maps an operator’s hand motions onto a full-size excavator in real time.
It is a control scheme and a teaching tool at once. Move the little arm, and the real machine follows. It makes an excavator feel less like heavy equipment and more like an extension of the hand, which is exactly the intuition an autonomy stack needs to capture and then automate.
The other half of the lab is safety. TerraFirma runs live person detection so a machine knows when a human enters its space. The pipeline evolved the way good engineering does: starting from a YOLO detector, moving to SSD MobileNet V2 for speed, and shifting the compute from a Coral TPU to an NVIDIA Jetson Nano to run it on the edge, on the machine, in the field.
None of this is a demo reel. A machine that can be driven like a hand and can see the people around it is a machine you can trust to work a shift alone. The lab is where that trust gets built.