Wen-Loong Ma
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  • About me
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About me

Hi, I’m Wen-Loong.  I build machines that thrive where people shouldn’t have to--underwater cities and settlements in space. What started as a fascination with multi-body dynamics and control theory has grown into a career-long pursuit of one question: How do we achieve extreme robotic performance in extreme environments?

My conviction is simple: the key lies in the brute computational force now at our fingertips. From first-principles modeling to large-scale simulation, machine learning, and custom high-performance code, modern compute lets us push hardware harder-and smarter-than ever. Mathematics provides the language, silicon supplies the muscle, and disciplined engineering turns the two into useful machines.

What I’m Doing Now

​​I am the co-founder and CTO at Under Control Robotics. We build multipurpose robots to support human workers in the world’s toughest jobs—turning dangerous work from a necessity into a choice. Our work demands reliability, robustness, and readiness for the unexpected—on time, every time. We’re assembling a mission-driven team focused on delivering real impact in heavy industry, from construction and mining to energy. If you're driven to build rugged, reliable products that solve real-world problems, we’d love to talk.

For more than a decade I’ve been building robots and the brains that drive them. My process starts with computation and theory, then moves quickly to hardware, where experiments serve as the gradient that steers each new iteration. In this loop, mathematical rigor and creative heuristics carry equal weight. Much of my approach is shaped by the groundbreaking work of early robotics pioneers.
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Let's hack the experiments, observe some patterns, prove the theorems, synthesize some methods, 
Then, keep iterating.
  • ​​​Build it, break it, fix it.
  •                                                                                                   - Marc Raibert
  • Video is cheap, show me the experiments.
                                                                                                                           - Magnus Egerstedt
  • There is no demo effect, you just did not prepare enough.
  •                                                                                                               - Raffaello D'Andrea

The Martian Roboticist

4/11/2020

1 Comment

 
At some point, everything's gonna go south on you ... every robot's going to fall in front of you, and you're going to say, that is it, this is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem ... and you solve the next one ... and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, your robot gets to go to Mars, and you can go home to sleep.
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A valuable experimental philosophy

2/11/2020

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"They have fought to establish a beachhead of honesty and rigor about evidence, evaluation and complexity in an aid world that would prefer to stick to glossy brochures and celebrity photo-ops."     - The Wall Street Journal review on the book Poor Economics.
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Mentoring philosophy

1/22/2020

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I build it, you break it, we fix it. Together, we iterate.
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    Wen-Loong Ma

    Listing some thoughts here.

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