Kane Jackson
Engineering across software, mechanical, and the mechatronics between them.
Mission Software Lead at ANT61, building the ground software behind spaceflight operations. My background is mechatronics, so the hardware side is home too.
About
- Based
- Sydney, Australia
- Now
- Mission Software Lead at ANT61
- Focus
- Space systems, robotics, AI
- Study
- Mechatronic Eng. + Computer Science, UNSW Sydney
I'm a space industry engineer working on mission and ground software, with a mechatronics background that covers the hardware it runs on.
At ANT61 I lead the mission software team. That means owning project planning and delivery across the ground software stack, defining the system architecture, and taking integration level implementation and testing through to spaceflight operations. On the hardware side I've designed mechanical fixtures for flight hardware testing, run thermal vacuum and vibration campaigns to SpaceX qualification standards, and analysed the structural integrity of flight enclosures.
The mechatronics background is why I can work on both. Knowing how a part is toleranced changes how I write the software that drives it, and knowing what the software needs changes how I draw the part. I'm finishing a double degree in Mechatronic Engineering and Computer Science at UNSW, and I want to keep building across that boundary in space and robotics.
Career
- 03Sep 2024 – PresentSoftware / Mechanical
Mission Software Lead
ANT61
- Lead the mission (ground) software team, owning project planning and delivery across the mission software stack.
- Define system architecture and drive integration level implementation and testing for spaceflight operations.
- Designed mechanical fixtures for spaceflight hardware testing, and ran thermal vacuum and vibration campaigns aligned with SpaceX qualification standards.
- Analysed the structural integrity and reliability of flight enclosures.
- 02Sep 2023 – Dec 2024Software
Lead Software Engineer
InnerSteps
- Led a team of 3 to 4 engineers designing and building a full stack web and mobile application.
- Built responsive front end components in React.js, React Native, Tailwind and MUI.
- Developed and optimised the AWS hosted backend on Node.js, MongoDB and WebSockets.
- Implemented authentication with Google and Facebook login integrations.
- Integrated OpenAI GPT-3.5 and Google Gemini Pro 1.5 for AI driven content generation, cutting manual data processing by 80%.
- 01Oct 2022 – Sep 2024Software / Mechanical
Software Engineer, CAD Specialist
Gaming Entertainment Systems
- Developed interactive web applications in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, integrating REST APIs for real time data display.
- Created 3D CAD models to enhance digital product presentations.
Selected work
Convoii
Proximity voice comms for motorcyclists.
A cross platform mobile app for real time proximity voice communication between motorcyclists, with open comms for nearby riders and private crew channels. I designed and built the whole thing: the app, the interface, the icon pipeline, and the product strategy around a cold start density problem.
GNN for Mechanical Health Monitoring
Teaching a network the shape of a machine.
My thesis. A graph neural network approach to health monitoring of robotic systems, modelling mechanical components and the interactions between them so degradation and faults show up before they become failures.
Cycloidal Drive and Robot Arm
The drive the home page is drawn from.
A dual disc cycloidal drive designed from first principles, as the basis for a 4 to 5 DoF robot arm. The drawing on the home page is generated from this design: the disc profile, pin ring and reduction are all computed from its real parameters. Drive built, arm next.
Table Tennis Computer Vision
Tracking a 40mm ball at speed.
A real time ball tracking system using HSV filtering and motion analysis to measure ball speed accurately from ordinary video.
Contact
Working on something in space, robotics or AI? I'd like to hear about it.
hello@kanejackson.com