Alejandro Bordallo

Senior Research Engineer

Alex applies hands-on robotics expertise to the domain of autonomous vehicles, specialising in Motion, Planning and Prediction. As a senior research engineer, he drives progress towards deploying safe, interactive and assistive robotics in human spaces.

Tell us about your journey before you joined the Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy?

I moved from Spain to Scotland when I was 17 to join the Robotics and Cybertronics MSc degree at Heriot-Watt University, then the only dedicated undergraduate robotics program in Europe (how things have changed!).
That led me to a PhD in NeuroInformatics at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Subramanian Ramamoorthy, where I developed models predicting human behaviour for effective interactive robot navigation.

After academia, I had the great opportunity of joining FiveAI (a UK-based autonomous driving start-up) where I led the Motion, Planning and Prediction team for 7 years. I grew the team to include 10 engineers and scientists, tackling some of the hardest challenges in deploying autonomous robotics in real world environments.

From an early start of <10 employees to our full 150 and acquired by Bosch, it was a fantastic journey providing me the opportunity of leading hands-on work on engineering and scientific challenges. Building and deploying an autonomous software stack controlling cars at speed in dense urban environments is very different from testing just in simulation!

What motivates you to work in this area?

Robotics really is the dream for an engineer. You get to work on both software and hardware. Plus, at the intersection of research and engineering, I get to develop cutting edge solutions and deploy the final product as well! Furthermore, open-source is the future of robotics (ROS), and I am happy to do my part to ensure anyone in the world can benefit from our work.

What do you love about Edinburgh?

So many hobbies and so little time. Of relevance, I am a big proponent of science communication having participated in multiple science festivals. AI and robotics get a bad rep in the media (and some of this is justified!), but I truly believe we will only progress if scientists and engineers engage with the public in honest and informative 2-way communication. You will see me actively pursuing this agenda in multiple local pubs.