Hello! My name is William Spies, and I make robots!
I currently reside in sunny Colorado, where you can find me doing a whole host of things. I am known by my colleagues for being methodical, practical, supportive, lighthearted, and relentless. I have been lucky to work with many elite movers and shakers in the realm of robotics, all of whom have been a joy to work with!
I originally hail from Cincinnati, Ohio. I graduated from the University of Cincinnati in June of 2012 with my Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering, accompanied by a minor in Photonics. During my undergraduate career, I spent over a year co-oping at L3Harris Cincinnati Electronics in the Space Avionics group, where I worked on avionics systems used on active launch platforms still today. Much of my free time was consumed by serving as part of a partnership between Habitat for Humanity and the University of Cincinnati, and I took opportunities to show leadership in engineering and community relationship building through the University Honors Program and the Center for Community Engagement.
I served from mid-2012 to mid-2017 as a leading Electrical Design Engineer, Systems Programmer, and Systems Project Engineer with ATS Automation in Columbus, Ohio. My project portfolio carries the distinction of delivering custom industrial automation systems currently in use by General Motors, Dow Chemical, TRW Automotive, Oral-B, Tesla Motors, First Solar, and various other corporations. I was given several opportunities to lead controls development on cutting-edge, highly-automated industrial manufacturing lines, and those opportunities served as critical stepping stones on the path to where I find myself today. At the peak of my responsibilities at ATS, I was leading a warm and brilliant team of twelve Systems Programmers with over 100 cumulative years of systems and robot programming experience. I also passed many moments at the Columbus Idea Foundry and was an active participant in the Columbus swing dancing community, where I met my lovely and wonderful wife.
Towards the end of my time in Columbus, I kicked off my next chapter when I was accepted to and attended Northwestern University’s accelerated MSR program in September of 2017. In September of 2018, I graduated from Northwestern with my Masters of Science in Robotics along with a cohort of nearly two dozen other incredible individuals. While studying at NU, I specialized in computer vision applications, 3D reconstruction, embedded systems programming (a.k.a. working in ROS), and robotic manipulation.
Part of my responsibilites to the MSR program led me to join the Computational Photography Lab as a Research Scientist under Dr. Oliver Cossairt. For the several months I worked in the CPL, my main areas of focus involved working alongside Dr. Florian Willomitzer on an improved implementation of Flying Triangulation and on a novel use of WebRTC to facilitate surface measurements of famous paintings and stained glass works using consumer-grade electronic devices (that’s my hand holding the Android tablet in Figure 1a of the Optics Express article).
Since 2019 I have been a senior robotics engineer at Outrider Technologies, working on the incredible TrailerConnect system and as a lead software engineer at True Anomaly, writing command-and-control software for their Mosaic software product. The opportunity to work on both terrestrial and space robots has been phenomenally enjoyable, and you can find more details of time spent at those companies in the Career Retrospectives area. I started my own robotics consulting LLC in 2022, named Fenris Robotics, to provide consulting experience to other companies needing assistance across a wide swath of robotic product domains. Some of my experiences with those customers are still work-in-progress, so keep an eye out for blog updates.
When I am not tinkering with robots or working on side projects, you can find me searching for new coffee shops and food spots, trying out a new board game, rock climbing, playing with my dog Luna, looking for interesting places to explore, swing dancing, reading a good book, skiing, 3D printing, or building things in Factorio.
Of course, I cannot hope to include everything in just this segment…but pictures may help fill in a few gaps:
If you have professional inquiries, check the Resume section of the website for PDF and HTML versions of my resume.
If you have other questions about the site, please send an email to admin[at]spieswl.com.
About the Website
This site, and any opinions or insights expressed on my part, are the responsibility of me, William Spies. Any software, directions, schematics, and other creative content is to be used at your own risk; I bear no responsibility if you happen to graze, taze, or lase yourself while recreating one of my projects!
Original pictures, code, documents, or other non-website-related content is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The website infrastructure (everything other than original content covered above) is covered under MIT License and is freely available at GitHub.