Erwin Lejeune
Head of Robotics, SIRB.AI · Abu Dhabi
I lead robotics software teams across orchestration, navigation and fault management, and I still write the code: ROS 2, C++, Python, Go. Everything I worked on is on this desk, left to right, from 2014 to now.
2014–2021Nantes · Bordeaux, France
A B.Sc. in electronics engineering at Nantes Université, then two master's degrees: computer engineering and aeronautics at Ynov Bordeaux, and control and robotics at Ecole Centrale de Nantes.
2018–2019Hiventive · Bordeaux, France
Embedded Software Engineer
I built a virtual prototype of an STM32 microcontroller in SystemC/TLM, with its timers, I2C, CAN, GPIO and USART peripherals, running inside QEMU.
The lesson I kept: treat time, memory and bandwidth as a budget, and test against a model of the hardware first.
2019Ingeniarius · Coimbra, Portugal
Robotics Assistant
Full autonomy stacks built from scratch, with ROS and embedded systems. We won both maze-solving competitions: the mapped one and the unmapped one.
2020–2021Ecole Centrale de Nantes, France
Robotics Researcher
I led four research projects: multi-agent pathfinding, AI planning with PDDL, real-time ROS control on Xenomai/XDDP, and ROS 2 latency benchmarking.
At the same time, remote for Hiventive (2020–2021): backend services in Go with PostgreSQL and Docker for a computer-aided production engineering platform, and an automated programming-test manager for candidate evaluation.
2021–2022Coalescent Mobile Robotics · Odense, Denmark
Founding Robotics Engineer
Part of the founding technical team that delivered the first working in-store robot. I led the navigation stack (path planning, motion control, localization) and worked on perception: detection, filtering, tracking.
After the CTO left, I led navigation and trolley detection: I recruited and trained interns and a junior engineer, ran planning, and turned the CEO's requirements into sprints.
A real store changes your priorities fast.
2022–2024Technology Innovation Institute · Abu Dhabi
Senior Engineer, Robotics Software
R&D on multi-robot orchestration, collaboration and control. I designed new swarm behaviours, including decentralized bird-inspired flocking, published at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2024.
I ran the live demos for partners. The project led to USD 3M in contracts.
2024–2026Technology Innovation Institute · Abu Dhabi
Team Lead, Robotics Software
I grew and led a team of 9 engineers across autonomy, infrastructure and platform integration. We overhauled the swarm autonomy architecture.
A joint program with Caltech on M4, their multi-modal robot that flies and rolls, and on their humanoid, including outdoor planning and tracking for M4. Demos to companies in Europe and the UAE led to more than USD 10M in contracts. I also started building AI tooling for the team.
2024–nowUnchained Labs · remote
Founder
Local-first AI agents that run on a company's own models, data and infrastructure. Kymatics is graph-based agent orchestration: a spoken intent becomes a queue of build jobs.
How I use AI in engineering: it lets a team ship more without lowering the bar, and the real work is the harness around it. Every change goes draft → AI review → checks → quiz (“can you explain your diff?”) → human review → ship, whoever or whatever wrote it.
Feb 2026–nowSIRB.AI · Abu Dhabi
Head of Robotics
Founding team. I designed the robotics software architecture and the autonomy roadmap, and built a self-healing autonomy layer: swarm-wide fault and state recording, agents that detect and recover from failures, ML-based mission scoring before launch.
We took the stack from prototype to public launch at UMEX 2026, where it was unveiled as the Middle East's first AI-powered swarm platform. Sirb is Arabic for a flock, or a swarm.
After hoursThe end of the desk
Things I build on my own time, photos I took, notes I wrote, and my card. Off the clock: basketball, films, photography, and Clanker Labs, my self-hosted home with an agent running it.
On the laptop
Open source. Every clip is a recording of the real thing running.
A git hook that quizzes you on your own diff before you commit or push, grades the answers against a hidden rubric, and blocks anything below the pass mark.
Multi-agent pathfinding on arbitrary graphs: CBS, PIBT, LaCAM, MAPF-LNS, plus multi-agent RL. The solvers stream their search live.
A dependency-free PDDL framework: hand-written parser and grounder, 14 planners, LM-cut and FF heuristics, and heuristics you can train.
Multirotor, fixed-wing and VTOL flight physics from scratch, with 40+ runnable simulations and an RL gym.
Explores a ROS 2 dependency graph (a DAG, not a tree) from the command line, a TUI, or a self-contained HTML file.
An offline file converter for the Linux desktop: Ctrl+Shift+right-click a file, pick a format on a wheel, and the result lands next to the original.
Turns a spoken intent into a queue of build jobs, with local-first agents.
Self-host your home (notes, mail, media, passwords, money) on hardware you own, with an agent in front so it doesn't need a sysadmin.
In the notebook
The polaroids
My own photos: California and the US West, Paris, Togo, the Maldives.
My card
A question about swarms, multi-agent planning, an open-source idea, or just hello.
