Nantes France
2014–2018
B.Sc. Electronics Engineering · Nantes Université
Where the route starts
Four years of electronics engineering at Nantes Université. The first stop on the map, and the city I came back to for a master's in robotics.
An atlas in ten stops · fifth edition
Erwin Lejeune
Head of Robotics at SIRB.AI, Abu Dhabi
Eight years in robotics, plotted as a route: from electronics in Nantes and a virtual microcontroller in Bordeaux to robot swarms in Abu Dhabi. I lead robotics software teams across orchestration, navigation and fault management, and I'm still hands-on in ROS 2, C++, Python and Go.
Bordeaux France
2018–2019
Embedded Software Engineer, Hiventive · M.Sc. Computer Engineering & Aeronautics, Ynov
Starting at the chip
I built a SystemC/TLM virtual prototype of an STM32 microcontroller (timers, I2C, CAN, GPIO and USART) with QEMU integration.
Lesson kept Treat time, memory and bandwidth as a budget, and test against a model of the hardware first.
Coimbra Portugal
2019
Robotics Assistant · Ingeniarius
First robots, two wins
Full autonomy stacks built from scratch, with ROS and embedded systems.
- 2 of 2 maze-solving competitions won, mapped and unmapped
Nantes France
2019–2021
M.Sc. Control & Robotics, then Robotics Researcher · Ecole Centrale de Nantes
Back to Nantes, into research
I led four research projects: multi-agent pathfinding, AI planning with PDDL, real-time ROS control on Xenomai/XDDP, and ROS 2 latency benchmarking. Remote for Hiventive at the same time: backend services in Go, PostgreSQL and Docker.
Odense Denmark
2021–2022
Founding Robotics Engineer · Coalescent Mobile Robotics
A robot in a real supermarket
The founding technical team delivered the first working in-store robot. I led the navigation stack (path planning, motion control, localization) and worked on perception. After 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.”
Abu Dhabi UAE
2022–2024
Senior Engineer, Robotics Software · Technology Innovation Institute
From one robot to many
R&D on multi-robot behaviour orchestration, collaboration and control. I designed new swarm behaviours, including decentralized bird-inspired flocking, and ran the live demos for partners.
- IROS 2024 Bird-inspired flocking
- USD 3M in contracts from the project
Around the world
2023
Travels on record
Off the clock
Basketball, films, photography, and Clanker Labs: my self-hosted home with an agent running it. Keep scrolling to fly the six stops. The round pins hold my photos.
Abu Dhabi → Pasadena
2024–2026
Team Lead, Robotics Software · Technology Innovation Institute
A team of nine, and a line to Caltech
I grew and led 9 engineers across autonomy, infrastructure and platform integration, and overhauled the swarm autonomy architecture. A joint program with Caltech on their multi-modal robot M4 (flying and rolling) and their humanoid, with outdoor planning and tracking for M4. I also started building AI tooling for the team.
- −74% onboard CPU
- −52% network bandwidth
- USD 10M+ in contracts from demos in Europe and the UAE
Remote anywhere
2024–now
Founder · Unchained Labs
Agents that stay on your machines
Local-first AI agents that run on a company's own models, data and infrastructure. Kymatics is its graph-based agent orchestration: a spoken intent becomes a queue of build jobs.
Abu Dhabi UAE
2026–now
Head of Robotics · SIRB.AI, since February 2026
Sirb, a flock
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 it from prototype to public launch at UMEX 2026.
- UMEX 2026 unveiled as the Middle East's first AI-powered swarm platform
سرب sirb is Arabic for a flock, or a swarm.
Workshop
Things I build
Tools for robots, planners, and the agents around them. Each one comes with a short clip.
Also
- BTView A visual behavior-tree editor for BehaviorTree.CPP, inside VS Code and Cursor.
- jarvis_ros2 Fault and recovery management for ROS 2 robots.
- awesome-daily-minigames 281 daily puzzle games.
Gazetteer
Papers, upstream, notes
Papers
- Decentralized Acceleration-Based Bird-Inspired Flocking IEEE/RSJ IROS 2024
- Real-time Jitter Measurements under ROS2: the Inverted Pendulum Case Preprint · 2021
- Survey of the Multi-Agent Pathfinding Solutions Preprint · 2021
Upstream, merged
- ros-navigation/navigation2 The ROS 2 navigation stack
- AtsushiSakai/PythonRobotics Merged pull requests
- TheAlgorithms/Python Merged pull requests
Postcards
Off the clock
Twelve of my photos, from California and the US West, Paris, Togo and the Maldives.
Abu Dhabi UAE · now
Say hello.
Write to me about multi-robot autonomy, one of the projects above, or anything else.