Head of Robotics at SIRB.AI
Abu Dhabi, UAE

Erwin Lejeune

I lead robotics software teams across orchestration, navigation and fault management. Eight years in robotics, five cities, one small table.

Scroll and the city builds itself, one place per chapter, from a dawn in 2014 to tonight. Drag to turn the table; tap or click a building to open it.

Start in 2014 Skip to the map

01Nantes, France · 2014–2018

Nantes Université

Where the table starts: a B.Sc. in Electronics Engineering, from 2014 to 2018.

B.Sc. Electronics Engineering

02Bordeaux, France · 2018–2019

Hiventive: a chip, in software

Embedded software engineer. I built a SystemC/TLM virtual prototype of an STM32 microcontroller, with its TIM, I2C, CAN, GPIO and USART peripherals, integrated with QEMU.

Treat time, memory and bandwidth as a budget, and test against a model of the hardware first.

Same years: an M.Sc. in Computer Engineering & Aeronautics at Ynov Bordeaux, the school with the little plane.

SystemC / TLM
QEMU
STM32

03Coimbra, Portugal · 2019

Ingeniarius: two mazes, two wins

Robotics assistant. I built full autonomy stacks from scratch with ROS and embedded systems, and won both maze-solving competitions: the mapped one and the unmapped one.

On the hill, a little robot keeps solving the maze, next to the two trophies.

2 of 2 maze competitions
ROS

04Nantes, France · 2019–2021

Centrale Nantes: research

An M.Sc. in Control & Robotics, then 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.

On the roof, three agents share a grid without colliding. Out front, an inverted pendulum, the case from the jitter paper. Alongside, in 2020–2021, I wrote backend services in Go, PostgreSQL and Docker for Hiventive, remotely.

05Odense, Denmark · 2021–2022

Coalescent: a robot in a real supermarket

Founding robotics engineer in the 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.

When the CTO left, I led navigation and trolley detection, recruited and trained interns and a junior engineer, and turned the CEO's requirements into sprints.

A real store changes your priorities fast.

06Abu Dhabi, UAE · 2022–2024

TII: from one robot to many

Senior engineer, robotics software, at the Technology Innovation Institute. I led R&D on multi-robot orchestration, collaboration and control, and designed new swarm behaviours, including decentralized bird-inspired flocking.

I ran the live demos for partners. The project led to USD 3M in contracts.

IROS 2024: bird-inspired flocking
USD 3M in contracts

07Abu Dhabi, UAE · 2024–2026

TII: leading the team

Team lead. I grew and led a team of 9 engineers across autonomy, infrastructure (DevOps, RobotOps) and platform integration, and we overhauled the swarm autonomy architecture.

−74%onboard CPU
−52%network bandwidth
USD 10M+in contracts

A joint program with Caltech on M4, their robot that flies and rolls (outdoor planning and tracking), and on their humanoid. Demos to companies in Europe and the UAE. I also started building AI tooling for the team.

08Remote · 2024–now

Unchained Labs

Founder. Local-first AI agents that run on a company's own models, data and infrastructure.

Kymatics is our graph-based agent orchestration: a spoken intent becomes a queue of build jobs. On the table, those jobs leave the workshop on a conveyor.

09Abu Dhabi, UAE · Feb 2026–now

SIRB.AI: 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, and 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.

سرب (sirb) is Arabic for a flock, or a swarm.

Tonight · 2026

The map so far

Five cities, 2014 to now, all lit up. Turn the table, or pick a place to open its chapter.

See the work

Work you can watch

Projects, running

Short, silent clips of each project, with the code one click away.

grip

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.

Code Site

PyMAPF

Multi-agent pathfinding on arbitrary graphs: CBS, PIBT, LaCAM, MAPF-LNS, plus multi-agent RL. The solvers stream their search live.

Code Site

Kymatics Unchained Labs

Turns a spoken intent into a queue of build jobs, with local-first agents.

Code Unchained Labs

flybots

Multirotor, fixed-wing and VTOL flight physics from scratch, with 40+ runnable simulations and an RL gym.

Code Site

PythonPDDL

A dependency-free PDDL framework: hand-written parser and grounder, 14 planners, LM-cut and FF heuristics, and trainable heuristics.

Code Site

rostree

Explores a ROS 2 dependency graph (a DAG, not a tree) from the command line, a TUI, or one self-contained HTML file.

Code Site

roue

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.

Code Site

Clanker Labs

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.

Code Site

Also

BTViewA visual behavior-tree editor for BehaviorTree.CPP, inside VS Code and Cursor.
jarvis_ros2Fault and recovery management for ROS 2 robots.
awesome-daily-minigamesA list of 281 daily puzzle games.

Reading