Edwin Ma / Engineer & Founder
Electrical & Computer Engineering + Computer Science at Duke. Currently building across AI, robotics, and startups.
I'm Edwin Ma, an engineer and entrepreneur who enjoys working at the intersection of technology, design, and people.
I've spent my time building robots, developing automation systems, experimenting with AI, and starting companies.
I started out interested in medicine and biology before finding my way into electrical engineering and computer science. Along the way, I realized that what excites me most isn't one particular field. It's finding interesting problems and figuring out how to solve them.
I like understanding how things work, questioning why they work that way, and building something better.
When I'm not working on a project, I'm probably exploring a new idea, playing sports, or spending time with friends.
Some ideas became companies. Some became robots. Others were just fun experiments.
Building a shared wallet that lets people pay for what they use across AI and software applications, without committing to another subscription.
Designing and building a robotic system to automate repetitive laboratory workflows, combining mechanical design, electronics, control systems, and software. At Pololu, this meant replacing a rigid Dobot-plus-vision pipeline with a low-cost system that trains itself, down to a 3D-printed rotation slide for exact 90° part reorientation.
Read the story →Experimenting with computer vision, sensing, and control to build robots that can navigate and interact with their environments. A Pixhawk drone that flies to any what3words coordinate and scans for accidents with YOLOv5, and a microphone-array CNN that localizes a drone and estimates its payload from sound alone.
Started a robotics education business, built and sold robotics kits, and taught students how to bring their own engineering ideas to life. Product line: Wrebot UNO, Wrebot Pi, a person-following robot, a smart pet feeder, and a solar tracker, with a 2D plotter and gyro car in development.
See the products →Slice-aware attention model that flags unreliable breast tumor segmentations, trained on 1,500+ multi-center DCE-MRI scans.
AI shopping research that distills real reviews from Amazon, Reddit, and blogs into a top three with plain-English pros and cons.
Camera-based calorie tracking for buffets. Shipped through TestFlight, and taught me more about design than Swift.
Image-generation try-on for campus apparel, with prompt experiments to stabilize output and avatar models on the roadmap.
Laser-cut incubator for Ugandan hospitals. I built the electrical system: skin temperature sensor, relay-switched heat lamp, LCD readout.
TDS, pH, and dissolved-oxygen data from a Raspberry Pi to Google Cloud, with a one-class SVM flagging readings outside the normal envelope.
Three-conv, two-dense CNN backbone and batch-size tuning alongside a graduate student's hyperparameter sweep.
Force, temperature, and salinity sensors calibrated by linear regression. My introduction to EE, and state and national medals.
Built AI-powered diagnostic tools, developer workflows, and software automation to make engineering processes more efficient.
Developed manufacturing automation, robotic testing systems, and computer vision solutions.
Built an automated quality-control framework for deep-learning tumor segmentation in breast MRI, so radiologists only review the scans that need it.
Working on robotics, electronics, and intelligent systems, from precision analog circuits to autonomous laboratory equipment. Earlier work in the General Robotics Lab on acoustic drone localization with ROS and VICON ground truth.
Exploring problems, talking to users, shipping products, and learning what it takes to turn an idea into a business.
I'm interested in how technology changes the way we live, work, learn, and connect.
My curiosity has taken me from medicine and neuroscience to robotics, AI, entrepreneurship, and product design.
I don't know exactly what I'll be building ten years from now, and that's part of what makes it exciting.
Arduino Uno Q motor car, written as it happened. The debugging is the interesting part.
analogWrite(M1_PWM, 255): PWM on D11 was disabling the latch on D12. Switched to digitalWrite and moved PWM to a free pin.latch_state = 0 before updating it.An internship in automation, robotics, and learning how to ask questions.
Read →The bugs that mattered weren't crashes. "Correct" and "good" turned out to be different questions.
Read →