I worked at Corindus Vascular Robotics for my co-op. It is a small to medium sized company with about 80 people. There is a huge variety of disciplines. The engineering department includes manufacturing engineers, software engineers, electrical engineers, and mechanical engineers. Outside of this, there are people who work in shipping, finance, IT, and marketing. The company has built a robot that aids surgeons in percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures. As part of the software team, I dealt with coding the robot. Working with the code involved programming new capabilities, fixing bugs, and creating supplemental testing applications. Work within the software team was mostly mono-disciplinary. However, we sometime worked with the electrical team when there were issues between our code and the hardware. For example, we had a bug where the system would throw an error when certain motors crossed voltage regions. My team also worked with manufacturing when we developed tools for them to test the robotic system. These were some inter-disciplinary experiences that I had.
For the most part, I focused on projects within the software team with little interaction with the other disciplines. Obviously this was very mono-disciplinary. However as mentioned in the previous paragraph, there were times when my work was inter-disciplinary. Outside of the research and development lab where I worked, a lot of the company was multi-disciplinary; manufacturing engineers, electrical engineers, software engineers, and mechanical engineers all worked on building the same robot, but they mostly did not integrate. Each team mainly focused on problems within their disciplines, and used those collectively to design and improve the robotic system.
After graduation, I could see myself doing this type of work. I liked the research and development environment I was in. There was always work to do, and there were a variety of problems to solve. I had the freedom to come up with my own solutions, and my work and my code directly contributed to the company’s robotic system.
