Exobotic Technologies is a Belgian startup developing autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) and drones. I joined the company in December 2019, when it counted a single employee, and spent the following five years there as technical lead before transitioning to freelance consulting under RBAI. I learned a great deal during these five years and I continue today as shareholder.
A unified engineering stack
Over the five years, the engineering effort moved from a set of segmented, project-specific prototypes to a shared software stack applicable across the AGV family. The architecture covered:
- perception (sensor fusion and deep-learning-based vision)
- control (including a 8 DoF Model Predictive Control)
- navigation (based on RTK-GPS, interial and visual cues)
- remote monitoring (with full centralized logs for a swarm of robots) The explicit goal was to reduce the per-project engineering cost and to enable validated components to be reused across platforms.
Start-up Management
Outside of pure engineering, the role covered a number of transversal responsibilities that are typical of an early-stage technical-lead position.
Strategic:
- move from small projects and subsidies to products matching real user needs (arboto, land-a2e, …) and VC funding
- unify the technical development for better efficiency
- hire a team with diverse profiles in engineering and business development
Public R&D funding. A significant part of the role consisted in contributing to public-R&D grant applications, supporting the company’s runway and hiring. Among the programmes involved, we can mention: ESA Space Solutions, ITEA 4 / Eureka cluster, EU Horizon Europe or VLAIO ICON.
Trade fairs and industry events. Another aspect of the role was the public representation of the company at clients and in fairs, with on-site robot demonstrations and pitch sessions.
FIRA — International Forum of Agricultural Robotics
Land-A2 live demonstration at the FIRA event.
SIMA Paris 2022
Presenting the Land-A2 robot and the Arboto tree-nursery service.
Agribex 2023 — Brussels
Robotic Island pitch session at the Belgian agricultural fair.
AgriTechDag ’23
Launch of the Flemish Test & Experiment Facility for agricultural robotics.
D2M Kortrijk
Machine vision for autonomous operation in unstructured environments.
Featured by Fedagrim & Revista Ferma
“Exobotic turns new technologies into turnkey solutions”.
Further coverage is available on Exobotic’s LinkedIn page.
Working methodology. As a team, we also worked hard to set up an Agile-flavoured working methodology adapted to robotics, i.e. covering software AND hardware. We are quite proud to have found a middle ground for fast innovation, also allowing quality control and tracking of user needs.
Related posts
Other Exobotic projects documented on this blog: SmartAgriHubs drone, Land-A2 robot, Arboto spin-off and tree-measurement pipeline, Eriksbo spraying robot, SQAT soil-sampling robot.