From Robots to Web Services: TIMEWELL Engineer Interview Vol. 2
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TIMEWELL Employee Interview Vol. 2 — Yoshiki Ando on His Journey from Robot Development to Web Services, and His Relentless Pursuit of the Ideal Engineering Environment | TIMEWELL
What kind of background does a cutting-edge engineer developing innovative services with the latest technology have, and what kind of future do they envision? We spoke with Yoshiki Ando, GM and Principal Engineer at TIMEWELL's Technology Division, about his career, his current work, and the development of TIMEWELL Base — which launched this month.
Yoshiki Ando
Affiliation: TIMEWELL Corporation, Technology Division — GM / Principal Engineer
Profile: Born and raised in Tokyo. Passionate about robotics and AI research, he achieved 2nd place in the world at the RoboCup @Home competition during his university years. He spent 10 years at a major home appliance manufacturer working on IoT software development, leading the specification design of a home management system for over 1,000 residential units and steering the project to success. He continued to take on hackathons and maker events, winning the grand prize at ONE JAPAN Hackathon x Tokai. He independently acquired cloud technology skills, launched and operated a site for social game players, and currently manages a fan community site. Hobbies include gaming and VTubers. He draws UI design insights from games and applies them to his daily work, constantly pursuing innovative communication methods and approaches that bring enjoyment to users. He focuses on leveraging both technical skill and creativity to create new value.
Interest tags: #Tokyo #Engineer #Robots #AI #IoT #Hackathon #Gaming #VTuber #hololive #F1
- A childhood fascination with home appliances, and a passion for robot development
- Ten years at a home appliance manufacturer: how IoT opened a new world
- Realizing the ideal development environment through TIMEWELL Base, and evolving alongside users
- Conclusion
A Childhood Fascination with Home Appliances, and a Passion for Robot Development
Please introduce yourself.
My name is Yoshiki Ando, and I work as GM and Principal Engineer in TIMEWELL's Technology Division.
At university, I was in the Department of Electronics, where I immersed myself in robotics and AI research. I competed in the RoboCup @Home competition and achieved 2nd place at the world championships. During my graduate studies, I researched how to enable robots to acquire language and concepts using multimodal information — combining speech, vision, and touch.
After completing my master's degree, I spent about 10 years at a major home appliance manufacturer, working on software development for IoT devices. Outside of work, I participated in hackathons and similar events, winning the grand prize at ONE JAPAN Hackathon x Tokai. I joined TIMEWELL after being invited by a current colleague. Web development was outside my expertise at the time, but over the past year I've mastered front-end coding and now work on features like the profile pages for TIMEWELL Base. My hobbies are gaming and VTubers, and I also run fan community sites. Nice to meet you.
You clearly had a strong interest in robots from early on. What drew you to robotics in the first place?
From childhood, I loved taking apart home appliances. Playing with my father's computer and discovering the internet was really my awakening to technology.
My fascination with robots was heavily influenced by science fiction films — I was captivated by stories and works featuring AI. Growing up in Japan, I also think my familiarity with characters like Astro Boy and Doraemon played a role.
In that context, I was fortunate to get involved in robot development in my university lab, and I felt an enormous sense of possibility in the field. Robotics is a domain where hardware and software combine in complex ways, and that's what strongly attracted me and led me to make it my research theme.
What was your university life like, specifically around robot development?
University life revolved around studying, part-time work, and research. I pushed hard to achieve top grades and spent a great deal of time in the lab.
In the lab, I was deeply absorbed in AI research — specifically, enabling robots to learn multimodal information including language, vision, and haptics.
Looking back, I was throwing myself single-mindedly into studying, part-time jobs, and research. It might have looked uneventful from the outside, but it became the foundation of who I am today.
What part-time jobs did you have, and how did they influence your career?
I mainly held three types of part-time jobs: supermarket cleaning staff, a tutoring teacher, and programming work.
The tutoring position lasted the longest. The skills I developed there — capturing students' interests and guiding them — have been directly useful for team building in both research labs and the workplace. The lab culture allowed freedom in your personal time as long as you delivered results, which very much connects to my current view of work.
At the supermarket, I proactively found ways to work more efficiently, cutting a 2–3 hour job down to 1–2 hours. But because of that, my hourly earnings effectively halved, which made me feel the irony of not being rewarded for efficiency. It made me question Japan's work practices and evaluation systems.
The programming work is directly relevant to what I do now. Being able to sharpen practical skills at an early stage has been a significant advantage.
Ten Years at a Home Appliance Manufacturer: How IoT Opened a New World
You've talked a lot about your background in robotics, but what was your reasoning for choosing a home appliance manufacturer as your first employer?
While working on robot development in university, one question kept nagging at me: why does a robot have to sense all the surrounding information on its own? I thought that if the home appliances and equipment around a robot could proactively provide information to it, a far more efficient system would be possible.
At the time, robot operating systems like ROS existed, but there was no established OS that could integrate and control home appliances and household equipment as a unified system. So I had this idea: if we could build an "OS for controlling the entire home" and connect it to a robot, it could be revolutionary.
That line of thinking led me to choose a home appliance manufacturer, where I hoped to pursue — through actual product development — the technology to link home appliances, robots, and AI.
The shift from developing robots in isolation to building larger systems that encompassed home appliances, and eventually to thinking about cloud and web technologies, was a real turning point in expanding my technical horizons.
Realizing the Ideal Development Environment Through TIMEWELL Base, and Evolving Alongside Users
You're now involved in development at TIMEWELL. What gives you the greatest sense of fulfillment?
More than anything, it's being able to realize the development style I had always envisioned through building TIMEWELL Base.
Designers and engineers work closely together here — we build products truly side by side. We're also able to incorporate the latest technologies at a rapid pace, continuously evolving the service through constant technical updates. That's one of the most exciting aspects.
In TIMEWELL Base development, we make full use of generative AI, and I feel like it's genuinely the ideal development environment — one where cutting-edge technology and creativity converge.
Above all, hearing directly from users is deeply rewarding. The ability to reflect feedback directly in our development work, and to feel tangible evidence that what we build immediately translates into user experience — that's the greatest satisfaction an engineer can have.
Were there any particular challenges during development?
Honestly, I don't feel like TIMEWELL Base development itself has been particularly hard. What was technically demanding was getting up to speed with web development. My background was in embedded software and IoT device development, with virtually no front-end experience. Building a full-scale web application like TIMEWELL Base was entirely new territory for me.
But rather than a hardship, it felt like an exciting challenge. My love of learning new things hasn't changed since my student days — the process of absorbing knowledge frantically in the face of the unknown is genuinely thrilling.
I spent almost every weekend this past year on development, but along the way, the skills I acquired also allowed me to completely revamp my own hobby sites. It was a precious year — one where I could feel the sense of accomplishment that comes from pushing through challenges. Technical obstacles can be overcome with curiosity and a spirit of inquiry. The real difficulty might lie in organizational challenges.
At my previous workplace, larger projects made it easy for communication gaps to arise, and even a single spec change could consume enormous amounts of coordination time. Organizational friction was frequently the bottleneck in development.
TIMEWELL, by contrast, has a flat structure and fast decision-making. Engineers are also given considerable autonomy, which means we can respond to issues quickly. This environment allows me to stay highly motivated and keep moving forward.
Is there anything about TIMEWELL Base you'd particularly recommend to potential users?
The service is still evolving, but TIMEWELL Base already has some distinctive features.
One is that your event participation history is automatically recorded. You can look back at any time to see what events you attended and who you met there. As more and more people choose to spend money on experiences, TIMEWELL Base aims to be a platform where those experiences are beautifully preserved.
Going forward, I also want to significantly strengthen the connection features built around events — a system that lets people who attended the same event find each other and connect online afterward. We're aiming to expand social networking functions, so that real-world encounters become the starting point for ongoing online relationships.
It's a shame when a wonderful experience ends the moment you leave. I'd love for TIMEWELL Base to be the platform that supports community building — a place where people you met at an event can continue to nurture those connections.
Of course, there's still plenty of room to improve. And that's precisely why there's a real benefit to using TIMEWELL Base right now. The chance to build a service together with users — hearing real voices and shaping the product through co-creation — might only exist at this early stage.
I also think it would be really interesting to build niche fan communities organized around specific interests. Personally, given my love of games and VTubers, I'd love to build a community centered around that. "A dense, passionate space where people unite through their favorite content" — building something like that on top of TIMEWELL Base would be a dream.
Is there anything you want to take on going forward?
My near-term goal is to strengthen TIMEWELL Base's profile features. Long-term, I'm aiming to build out social networking capabilities that can rival platforms like X or Facebook.
To get there, we need to solidly implement core SNS features like follow functionality and messaging. Beyond that, it would be interesting to add features unique to TIMEWELL Base — like recommending users to connect with based on shared event participation history.
Events as a shared experience, and a platform that nurtures human connections from there — that's what TIMEWELL Base is striving to become. We want to offer a new kind of community experience where offline encounters become the seed of rich online exchanges: a space where the real and the digital truly merge.
Conclusion
Yoshiki Ando has channeled his passion for robot development since his student days into research driven by his own clear sense of purpose. With an eye toward a future where robots and humans coexist, he pursued the technology to link home appliances and robots — and that same spirit of inquiry and drive to solve problems is now directly reflected in his work on TIMEWELL Base.
His forward-looking attitude and sincere approach to development — "actively incorporating the latest technologies while staying close to designers and users" — are what's driving TIMEWELL Base to evolve into a uniquely compelling platform.
For inquiries or more details about TIMEWELL Base, which Yoshiki Ando helped build, please feel free to reach out.
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