Software Engineer Intern/Co-op
Phluxtechnologies · Pittsburgh, PA · ~$20–30/hr, depending on experience and where you are in your program
- Paid
- Full Time
About the role
About Phlux Industrial robots are fast, heavy, and unforgiving, so they get fenced off. The devices that guard them — light curtains, laser scanners, safety mats — mostly protect a flat plane or a patch of floor, which forces a big rectangular cage around the machine, eats floor space, and halts production every time somebody steps too close. We build a 3D safety sensor that changes the shape of that problem, literally.
It monitors a programmable three-dimensional protection zone around a robot, detects in real time when someone enters it, and drives safety outputs wired into the customer's safety controller. Safety itself is table stakes — every plant already has to meet it. What a 3D zone adds is flexibility: cells shaped to the actual work instead of a rectangle, people and robots far closer together, less floor space, and far fewer stoppages.
Getting there means solving a hard set of problems at once: optical sensing, real-time detection on constrained hardware, precise timing, cal