Build the team. Build the robot.
Four years leading RobEn’s Software & AI team—building competition robots, teaching engineers, and creating systems that survived student handovers.
ROBEN / SOFTWARE & AI TEAMI helped build the competition software while teaching others to own it. The real achievement was making a team capable of doing more than any one person could.
Robots, deadlines and the desert.
I joined RobEn while I was still at university and ended up leading the Software & AI team for almost four years. We built software for fixed-wing UAVs and underwater robots, often with competition deadlines and the usual reality of debugging hardware in the field.
I worked directly on control, communication and computer vision tasks, but I also taught newer members so the work didn't all come back to me. Our software had to connect with the mechanical and electrical teams' designs, not just pass tests on a laptop.
A team that could teach itself.
The team grew to around 40 engineers, including subteams for DevOps and security. I taught coding, computer vision, Git and networking, then tried to give people enough ownership to learn by doing. We presented technical talks too, from GitHub workflows to practical engineering skills.
We entered MATE ROV and other underwater events every year, took our large fixed-wing aircraft to MCT's UAV competition, and joined ECPC, OpenCV and cybersecurity challenges. I kept mentoring after graduation, including the team that took second place at a 2025 MATE regional event.
Fixing the boring problems, too.
Every year, new students inherited the same club-management chores. I architected a Django web application to automate the recurring work, so the next team could spend more time building and less time figuring out the paperwork.
I still help mentor the team and give talks when I can. RobEn is where I learned that teaching someone a tool is often more useful than writing the next bit of code for them.