latice

Incumbent capital and better-funded startups already covered nearly every layer of this stack. The remaining differentiation was end-to-end autonomy, and I could not reach it alone at the speed the space was moving. Signed LOI, working rover, wrong market.

What it was: a sealed mecanum-drive rover that works between the beds, and a spray drone with boom nozzles that treats one bed instead of dousing a field. I designed the enclosures and the boards, wrote the firmware, and tuned the UWB positioning that keeps them on the row. The economics work I did with a New Jersey farm was in labor hours first, dollars second — that framing turned out to be the most portable thing I learned.

Killing it was the right call and it was not a close one by the end. The parts moved forward: the positioning stack, the drive control, the multi-MCU board practice, and the agent orchestration all sit underneath what I am building now.