Dr Tom Allen - Engineer, Roboticist, Innovator

Tom is an Australian engineer with a background in robotics, a wealth of software experience, and a mix of failure and success in the startup world. He has spent the last ten years in consulting and permanent roles in various industries while working on side projects and startups by night.
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Tom has a combined B.E./B.Sc. from Sydney University majoring in Mechatronics and Computational Physics respectively, and a Ph.D. in Robotics from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. He currently lives in Melbourne, Australia where he focuses on being the best husband and father he can be to his wife and three young children. Somehow he still finds time to be the Head of Engineering for Cooltrax in between designing board games, riding a motorbike at exactly the speed limit, and practicing Hammock-Driven Development.

Tom loves working on the intersection of software and hardware and has built medical devices, self-driving cars, internet services, and consumer products. He's most interested in companies that combine new or established technologies in novel ways. So right now the likes of Neuralink, Ogo Technology, Planetary Resources, Waymo, Niantic, SpaceX, Magic Leap, Pointy, Helion Energy, Nintendo, Boston Dynamics, Toyota Research, Microsoft Research, Seeing Machines, iRobot and many more are sources of inspiration.

And yes - that list is intentionally jumbled up. It covers fields as disparate as Human-Computer Interfaces, Asteroid Harvesting, Computer Vision, Autonomous Robotics, and Augmented Reality. But what do they all have in common? Mechatronics!

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My CV is on Linkedin. If you're working on something I'd enjoy, please get in touch.

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