Working with Arrival, job vacancy and plans for open source work

[Robert Osfield]

I'm working with Arrival!

At the end of May I began a 6 month contract with Arrival and will be working an average of 3 days with them per week till through the end of November.  The work is developing VulkanSceneGraph based robotics visualization software.

I am passionate about tackling climate change and how we need to electrify transport and many other sectors so working with a company that aims to make a big contribution to electrification of transport and revolutionizing manufacturing is a great fit.  The fact that they have chosen VulkanSceneGraph shows just how forward looking they are :-)

I am working as a contractor and have allocated an average of 3 days a week to working with Arrival so I still have 2 days a week available for VulkanSceneGraph open source development work, as well as handling small blocks of work with other clients. 

The allocation of days each week is flexible, so one week I might work 5 days, then the next just 1, or might drop on a cadence of 3 days a week for a block of time.  I will give precedence to this client work, but it won't be done in isolation.  If there is open source and other client work that is really pressing, or just fits being done at a certain time, or in a block of work then we can look at shuffling timings around to make things happen in a productive way.

Job Vacancy @ Arrival

The team are also looking for a full time graphics software engineer, they would be based in London area and work with myself and the robotics engineers:

     https://jobs.lever.co/arrival/6951530c-6cc4-4b73-92f3-4d2fc6673fd1

Plans for VulkanSceneGraph-1.0

In April I updated the VulkanSceneGraph/ROADMAP.md to provide guidance on what features still require development and a provisional plan for a 1.0 release in Summer/Fall of 2021.  Through the spring I worked almost exclusively on open source work to clear the decks for this new client work, so I made good progress towards 1.0, but still have a few major items left to complete. 

I still would like to make the 1.0 release this year, but now it looks likely to be well in the second half of the year, the exact timing is in flux - it will depend both on feature development, refinement, testing of the VulkanSceneGraph and ancillary libraries, as well as timing of client work.

Having a stable 1.0 to work is of interest to Arrival, and a successful and healthy VulkanSceneGraph project is important to them too, so we'll all be pulling in the same general direction, even if day to day we need to do some juggling on which block of work takes priority.

Another interesting angle in this new work for me is that I'll be developing software using VulkanSceneGraph within a industry setting, so I'll be able to see first hand what features are missing, incomplete, buggy of have design/implementations that just don't work well for real-world application/library development.  This experience I'll be able to use to refine the VulkanSceneGraph and help ensure that 1.0 is fit for purpose.

Cheers,

Robert.

[Vilas Chitrakaran]

Robert, it's a privilege to work with you.

To introduce myself, I work in the Mobile Robotics group at Arrival, and Robert is helping our team build an engineering visualisation system based on VulkanSceneGraph. We chose VSG because we wanted a high-performance scenegraph library to visualise our complex and dynamic industrial/manufacturing environments, and developed using modern C++ (our software is mostly C++17, and we are moving to C++20 soon).  

Thanks for providing a link to the open visualisation software engineer role, Robert. Although a large part of my team is based in London, if any of you are interested in working with us and VSG, please don't let our location stop you. My team alone is spread across multiple continents, and we have learnt to work quite efficiently with each other over the last year or so. Please get in touch with me if you are interested, and please pass the message to anyone you know who is passionate about industrial visualisation and is looking for new opportunities.

Regards

Vilas