Chief Technology Officer
at Coalescent Mobile Robotics
Sep 2021 — Jun 2022
Built the Product Development department from scratch — 8 engineers, multi-national. The team owned the full vertical: mechanical redesign, embedded firmware on STM32 for hard real-time navigation, high-level decision-making and ML inference on Intel NUC, and field servicing on-site at the client's hypermarket.
Architected and delivered the first version of a VDA 5050-compliant fleet management system, designed for scale beyond the single pilot. Initiated the company's first CE marking compliance effort — mapping all applicable standards and building a thorough roadmap where none existed.
Key achievements
- Led product development and operations to secure the company's first pilot project with the Salling Group — Denmark's largest supermarket chain.
- Led a multi-national engineering team with full vertical ownership — from mechanical design and embedded real-time computing to cloud integration and on-site servicing.
- Introduced the company's first delivery cadence to the board of directors, replacing ad-hoc updates with a transparent roadmap that enabled faster funding decisions.
Gallery
Behind the Scenes
Under the hood
Developed a novel global localization technique combining a bag-of-words layer with a YOLOv2 backbone. During mapping, the robot captured images and their map positions to create visual embeddings; at runtime, these embeddings enabled global localization — critical in a hypermarket where classical geometric features fail because aisles are architecturally identical, but visually distinct (dairy products look nothing like fresh produce). This was a core part of the navigation stack, not a standalone perception module.
Robot processes communicated internally via ROS 2, with messages leaving the robot through a RabbitMQ broker over MQTT to reach both handheld staff displays and the cloud-based fleet management system.
Validated navigation and cognition stacks in a simulated replica of the Bilka hypermarket before every field deployment.