Owen Oliver

Showcasing design engineering projects and leadership in innovative manufacturing and automation solutions.

Hi,

my name is Owen Oliver, and from a young age I’ve been fascinated with all things mechanical. I’m not one hundred percent sure where and when it started, but I was the kind of kid who brought a belt sander at eight years old, begged to get my own mig welder, and built an aluminum smelting furnace in the garage.

I was curious about everything, I loved to tinker, to figure out how things worked and I always had a project.

This led me to buying an old stick shift BMW e30 before I could legally drive and a job at a mechanics shop soon followed. But it wasn’t any old shop, it specialized in vintage, collectible cars, and at seventeen years old I was working every day after school on old Alfas, Volvos, and Porsches, and if I was lucky I was got to drive them as well.

But it was the shop’s racing team that really caught my imagination and for the next few years I traveled around California and the West coast states, working as pit crew on a variety of different teams.

I love racing, even the challenges something like a grueling twenty-five hour endurance race throws at you, but above all I learned to enjoy working as part of a team.

It was during this time that I brought together my racing experience with my growing interest in additive manufacturing. I’d begun working with 3d printers in my early teens, teaching myself Fusion 360 in my spare time, and as I became more skilled suddenly all kinds of racing specific projects started presenting themselves to me.

I designed, built and sold headlight brackets that enabled older model endurance cars to be retrofitted with modern high intensity LED lights. I custom printed modular brackets to hold electronics securely to roll cages, and designed and fabricated a rapid lift system that meant we could change all four tires at once, (that one led to new rules being made).

It’s been a few years now, but additive manufacturing and CAD design became the technology path that’s led me to this point in my career. I’m always excited by it, excited my the advances that have been made, even in the past few years, of not just the power it gives us, the ability to design and rapid prototype in ways that couldn’t have been dreamed of even a few years ago, but of the promise and possibilities of where the technology will take us.

It’s this promise that has led me to my current outside-of-college project, where I put together and led a team of diversely talented individuals to develop a machine learning-powered robotic arm.

Despite still being a work in progress it’s introduced me to the emerging world of AI learning. Coming from more of the hardware side of things, this project is proving to be a crash course in software development and AI and is really helping me explore the possibilities of how AI technology can be combined with adaptive and subtractive manufacturing technology.

I might be a long way from belt sanders and aluminum smelting furnaces, but I’m still just as curious, still tinkering and I always have a project.

Owen Oliver.