
A teenage exchange year, an unfinished degree and one stubborn engineering question led from Ukraine to Poland to North Carolina. Along the way, Melnyk learned that the useful robot is the one that can finish the boring job without asking for applause.

A noise outside his house gave Alex Pachikov an idea. A pandemic nearly killed it. Now Sunflower Labs is turning autonomous drones into roaming eyes for airports, rail yards and other hard-to-watch places.