From building Soap Box Derby cars to experimenting with rocketry, Fletcher has always been fascinated by how things work. His love of problem solving and thirst for knowledge led him to Penn College where he earned a bachelor’s in plastics. That degree helped launch his diverse engineering career with standout projects including the mobile biometric device used by U.S. Navy Seals to identify the remains of Osama bin Laden and the Polaris Quattro, a submersible autonomous robotic pool cleaner. Today, he's at X, The Moonshot Factory where he's working on the Everyday Robot Project in Silicon Valley.
We create radically new technologies to solve some of the world’s hardest problems. X is a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs who build and launch technologies that aim to improve the lives of millions, even billions of people.
For decades, robots have helped us with dull, dirty and dangerous tasks in environments specifically designed for them, like assembly lines, factories and other industrial settings. We want to create robots capable of operating in unstructured everyday environments, like our homes or offices. We see robots as tools that we can put to work to extend humanity’s capabilities and believe that machine learning and robotics could one day help us find solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the world. I’m part of the mechanical engineering team, so we are involved with the hardware and design of the robots.
It’s very dynamic and consists of coming up with solutions to problems. I never have a day where I feel unchallenged. The challenge is what drives me and inspires me to be both creative and inventive in solving problems.
In my experience since graduating from Penn College, I have worked with many people of various educational backgrounds, from well-known to not-so-well-known universities. When discussing our experiences, one thing I would often hear from others is that they wished they had more hands-on labs and not as much theory. While theory is very important, I feel the balance I received at Penn College gave me a key advantage when entering the world as a new graduate. Companies tend to run lean and expect more out of their employees, whether that is solving an issue that is costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in waste or coming up with a design for a component that is manufacturable, reliable, and cost effective. My education at Penn College gave me those key attributes.
“I’m very thankful for my experience at Penn College. It has given me the right tools and direction to become what I am today.”
Fletcher Ewing
Fletcher's current focus is X’s Everyday Robot Project, dedicated to building robots that operate autonomously in unstructured human environments like homes and offices.
Dive into extensive hands-on training with industrial-scale processing equipment.
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