A short film in eight acts
Erwin Lejeune
Head of Robotics at SIRB.AI, Abu Dhabi. He leads robotics software teams across orchestration, navigation and fault management.
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Eight years in robotics.
From a virtual microcontroller in Bordeaux to robot swarms in Abu Dhabi.
I. Nantes, 2014
Nantes Université · B.Sc. Electronics Engineering · 2014–2018
Where it starts: four years of electronics engineering, before any robot.
II. Bordeaux, 2018
Hiventive · Embedded Software Engineer · 2018–2019
He built a SystemC/TLM virtual prototype of an STM32 microcontroller (TIM, I2C, CAN, GPIO, USART) with QEMU integration, alongside an M.Sc. in Computer Engineering & Aeronautics at Ynov Bordeaux.
The lesson he kept: treat time, memory and bandwidth as a budget, and test against a model of the hardware first.
III. Coimbra, 2019
Ingeniarius · Robotics Assistant · 2019
Full autonomy stacks, built from scratch with ROS and embedded systems.
He won both maze-solving competitions: the mapped one and the unmapped one.
IV. Nantes, 2020
Ecole Centrale de Nantes · Robotics Researcher · 2020–2021
Back in Nantes for an M.Sc. in Control & Robotics, he led four research projects: multi-agent pathfinding, AI planning in PDDL, real-time ROS control on Xenomai/XDDP and ROS 2 latency benchmarking. Two papers came out of it.
On the side, for Hiventive: backend services in Go, with PostgreSQL and Docker.
V. Odense, 2021
Coalescent Mobile Robotics · Founding Robotics Engineer · 2021–2022
On the founding technical team that delivered the first working in-store robot, for supermarkets. He led the navigation stack: path planning, motion control, localization. When the CTO left, he took over 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.”
VI. Abu Dhabi, 2022
Technology Innovation Institute · Senior Engineer, Robotics Software · 2022–2024
R&D for multi-robot orchestration, collaboration and control. He designed new swarm behaviours, including decentralized bird-inspired flocking, published at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2024.
USD 3M in contracts from the project. He ran its live demos for partners.
VII. Abu Dhabi, 2024
TII · Team Lead, Robotics Software · 2024–2026
He grew and led a team of 9 engineers across autonomy, infrastructure and platform integration, and overhauled the swarm autonomy architecture. With Caltech: outdoor planning and tracking for M4, their robot that flies and rolls.
- −74% onboard CPU
- −52% network bandwidth
- USD 10M+ in contracts after demos in Europe and the UAE
VIII. Abu Dhabi, 2026
SIRB.AI · Head of Robotics · since February 2026
Founding team. He designed the robotics software architecture and a self-healing autonomy layer: swarm-wide fault and state recording, agents that detect and recover from failures, ML-based mission scoring before launch.
From prototype to public launch at UMEX 2026, unveiled as the Middle East’s first AI-powered swarm platform.
سرب sirb is Arabic for a flock, or a swarm.
The reel — eight things he built
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Scene 1 of 8
flybots
Multirotor, fixed-wing and VTOL flight physics from scratch, with 40+ runnable simulations and an RL gym.
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Scene 2 of 8
PyMAPF
Multi-agent pathfinding on arbitrary graphs: CBS, PIBT, LaCAM, MAPF-LNS, plus multi-agent RL. The solvers stream their search live.
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Scene 3 of 8
PythonPDDL
A dependency-free PDDL framework: hand-written parser and grounder, 14 planners, LM-cut and FF heuristics, trainable heuristics.
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Scene 4 of 8
rostree
Explores a ROS 2 dependency graph (a DAG, not a tree) from the CLI, a TUI, or a self-contained HTML file.
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Scene 5 of 8
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.
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Scene 6 of 8
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.
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Scene 7 of 8
Kymatics · Unchained Labs
Turns a spoken intent into a queue of build jobs, with local-first agents. Unchained Labs is the company he founded in 2024.
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Scene 8 of 8
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.
Behind the scenes
Stills he shot off the clock, in the US, Paris, Togo and the Maldives. Click one to project it.
Yosemite, California
Clinton ball, USA
Grand Canyon, USA
Monument, Paris
Cooking, in colour — Togo
Pavel, happy — Zion, USA
Paris Baguette — Paris
The pier — Santa Barbara
Skating — Santa Monica
Hanging shells — Maldives
Cathedral Lakes, USA
Zion trail — Zion
End credits
Erwin Lejeune
in
Eight years in robotics
Roles
- Head of Robotics
- SIRB.AI, Abu Dhabi · 2026–
- Founder
- Unchained Labs · 2024–
- Team Lead, Robotics Software
- Technology Innovation Institute · 2024–2026
- Senior Engineer, Robotics Software
- Technology Innovation Institute · 2022–2024
- Founding Robotics Engineer
- Coalescent Mobile Robotics, Odense · 2021–2022
- Software Engineer
- Hiventive, remote · 2020–2021
- Robotics Researcher
- Ecole Centrale de Nantes · 2020–2021
- Robotics Assistant
- Ingeniarius, Coimbra · 2019
- Embedded Software Engineer
- Hiventive, Bordeaux · 2018–2019
Teams
- Team of 9 engineers
- autonomy, infrastructure and platform integration, at TII
- Joint program
- Caltech, on M4 (flying and rolling) and their humanoid
- Founding teams
- Coalescent Mobile Robotics · SIRB.AI
Papers
- IEEE/RSJ IROS 2024
- Decentralized Acceleration-Based Bird-Inspired Flocking
- Preprint, 2021
- Survey of the Multi-Agent Pathfinding Solutions
Upstream merged pull requests
- The ROS 2 navigation stack
- ros-navigation/navigation2
- Robotics algorithms
- AtsushiSakai/PythonRobotics
- Algorithms in Python
- TheAlgorithms/Python
Also by guilyx
- Behavior-tree editor for VS Code and Cursor
- BTView
- Fault and recovery management for ROS 2
- jarvis_ros2
- 281 daily puzzle games
- awesome-daily-minigames
Writing
Education
- M.Sc. Control & Robotics
- Ecole Centrale de Nantes · 2019–2021
- M.Sc. Computer Engineering & Aeronautics
- Ynov Bordeaux · 2018–2019
- B.Sc. Electronics Engineering
- Nantes Université · 2014–2018
Post-production
- Every change, whoever or whatever wrote it
- draft → AI review → checks → quiz → human review → ship
- The quiz
- “Can you explain your diff?”
Tools
- Hands-on
- ROS 2 · C++ · Python · Go
- Also
- Rust · TypeScript
Off the clock
- Basketball, films, photography
- and Clanker Labs, his self-hosted home with an agent running it
Filmed in Nantes · Bordeaux · Coimbra · Odense · Abu Dhabi
Stills shot in the US · Paris · Togo · the Maldives
Set in Instrument Serif and Geist
Fin.
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