Speaking to a lecturer on issues which you wouldn’t have discussed back in the university days would surely be eye-opening, and this is what this episode has been to me. The number of realizations that go through my mind when speaking with Dr. Khan made me start to wonder whether the discrepancy between the expectations of a lecturer and those of students could one day be eradicated entirely. This conversation I believe is the start to that.

I didn't know a lot about Nava when I first met him, though he was called by everyone else a Product Architect at our company. The title sounds fancy and the way we create products are almost identical, but he gets the cooler products to play with. Now I know why.

In this episode, I sat down with Nava, a product engineer, a title I would give him because of the knowledge he has about a certain technical product, and we talked about robotics. In fact, you know he’s one of the street smarts who can decrypt the underlying rules of a game, like the Shell Eco Marathon when he topped the event together with his team by simply understanding the rules. Many of us don’t understand the rules enough to survive the game. The ability to understand engineering requirements is in my opinion one of the most underrated skills an engineer can learn. Only after grasping the requirement by heart can we start discussing the constraints and limitations of building a product. Either way, Nava is just like you and me, who tries to win but expects to fail and this has impacted the many facets of his life.

Timeline:

[00:00] What does he do and why does he do it?

[02:11] How the love of robots flourish into the passion for engineering

[09:08] Different MBTI personalities for different roles 

[13:19] Nava’s childhood & how his parents brought him up

[14:24] The first few bells that kickstarted his engineering career

[24:35] Stressing the small things as an engineer

[28:09] RoboCon

[33:08] Understanding engineering requirements

[36:36] His Robocon team

[39:03] The useless absurdity of Tesla Cybertruck

[44:35] His development process

[49:41] Constraints vs Limitations

[55:16] Winner of the Shell Eco Marathon

[01:10:23] Best Final Year Project

[01:27:16] How has his passion impacted his other areas of life

[01:29:12] Can anyone have a passion for robotics?

[01:31:44] How do you keep your passion going for engineering/robotics?

[01:35:21] Misconceptions of robotics - Everyone thinks it’s AI!