Erwin Lejeune

I lead robotics software teams across orchestration, navigation and fault management. Eight years in robotics, leading teams since 2021, and still hands-on in ROS 2, C++, Python and Go (some Rust and TypeScript too).

Before robots, circuits. Four years of electronics engineering in Nantes, the city I came back to a year later for a master's in control and robotics.

The parts on this floor belong to that chapter: a resistor, a capacitor and a breadboard, toy-sized.

I built a SystemC/TLM virtual prototype of an STM32 microcontroller, with its TIM, I2C, CAN, GPIO and USART peripherals, and integrated it with QEMU. This room is the chip.

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

Same year, same city

M.Sc. Computer Engineering & Aeronautics at Ynov Bordeaux, 2018–2019.

Back at Hiventive, remotely · 2020–2021

Backend services in Go, with PostgreSQL and Docker, for a computer-aided production engineering platform, and an automated programming-test manager for evaluating candidates.

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

• 2 of 2 maze competitions won

That's why this site is a maze. Both trophies are in this room, and the little robot on the table is still solving.

I led four research projects: multi-agent pathfinding, AI planning with PDDL, real-time ROS control on Xenomai/XDDP, and ROS 2 latency benchmarking.

• Survey of the Multi-Agent Pathfinding Solutions Preprint · 2021
• Real-time Jitter Measurements under ROS2: the Inverted Pendulum Case Preprint · 2021

The robot you're driving runs the one-robot version of the first paper's problem.

I was on 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.

When the CTO left, I took over navigation and trolley detection, 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.

Senior Engineer, Robotics Software · 2022–2024

R&D on multi-robot behaviour 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, and the project led to USD 3M in contracts.

Team Lead, Robotics Software · 2024–2026

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

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

A joint program with Caltech on M4, their multi-modal robot that flies and rolls, and on their humanoid: I worked on 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.

• Decentralized Acceleration-Based Bird-Inspired Flocking IEEE/RSJ IROS 2024

The little robots around you are planning together: each one reserves its cells in space and time, so nobody collides. A small nod to PyMAPF.

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.

unchainedlabs.devGitHub

How I use AI in engineering

It lets a team ship more without lowering the bar. The real work is the harness around it: every change takes the same road, whoever or whatever wrote it.

1. Draft
2. AI review
3. Checks
4. Quiz: “can you explain your diff?”
5. Human review
6. Ship

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. Watch the drones over this room: now and then one fails and drops, and the flock brings it back.

Drive up to a screen and its clip plays.

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.

Upstream, merged

• ros-navigation/navigation2: the ROS 2 navigation stack.
• AtsushiSakai/PythonRobotics
• TheAlgorithms/Python

Travels on record, 2023: California and the US West, Paris, Togo, Tokyo, the Maldives, Dubai. These are my photos; open one to see it large.

A question about multi-agent planning, swarms, or one of the projects? Write to me.

GitHub LinkedIn ResearchGate

Writing

• A homemade Alexa, and the agents that will hack my houseOct 2026
• BTView: behavior trees you can actually reviewAug 2026
• rostree: exploring a graph instead of drawing a treeAug 2026
• zucman: a data-viz kit for a tax policy argumentAug 2026

© 2026 Erwin Lejeune · built with three.js · previous version