Meet the Dexory Team: Senior Perception Engineer

Can you briefly introduce yourself and provide an overview of your role within the company?

My name is Ignacio, but everyone calls me Nacho. I’m originally from Argentina. I lived in the US and am now based in Germany. I speak Spanish, English, German, and a little Italian.

I joined Dexory in September 2023 as a Senior Perception Engineer. The main focus of my role is to develop cutting-edge 3D mapping technologies to increase what our robots can perceive and understand from the environment. In other words: my role is to bring what I’ve researched in my Ph.D. thesis entitled “Robot Mapping with 3D LiDARs” to develop our robots' spatial artificial intelligence further.

What unique skills or perspectives do you bring to the workplace that set you apart from others?

I was not lucky enough to have a “normal” career path. I started working full-time in the energy industry, parallel to my Electronics Engineering degree in Argentina. After two years of doing field testing in Argentina, Colombia, and Chile, I realised I wanted to do something even more exciting.

I joined iRobot in California, but I quickly realised that without a degree in Robotics or Software Engineering and not the best English, I’d have to catch up! What followed was countless hours of non-stop working and studying, constantly learning from world-class engineers. At the end of my experience at iRobot, I was already contributing to the projects like any other engineer would do, but I still wanted to learn more.

I decided to embark on a PhD career to learn as much as possible about Robotics. Following my dream, I moved from sunny California to cold and dark Germany. I arrived in Bonn, Germany, and once again, I realised I lacked research experience or scientific education.

Following five years of hard work, I reached my goal and finished my Ph.D. career, and most importantly, I created a cutting-edge open-source project called KISS-ICP that is now used in many robotics applications, research projects, and labs worldwide.

Being resilient and having to work my life through all this trouble, move, language, and cultural changes define me as the person I am today. This collection of different perspectives allows me to always “think outside the box,” just because I never had one of such boxes! It’s natural for me to look for solutions that one could not even imagine and go a bit crazy sometimes, and I believe that sets me apart from others.

Why did you choose to work for Dexory and what initially attracted you?

I initially discovered the company after meeting Guillaume, Lead System Architect at Dexory. Guillaume has supported efforts related to an open-source project I maintain (called KISS-ICP).

After a few minutes, he started walking towards the robot to show it to me, and his excitement about the project was the spark that fired up my internal beast. I thought, “This is the team I want to join. I want to collaborate with these highly motivated people willing to go the extra mile to achieve unavailable results.”

Besides that, Dexory's commitment to the open-source community is a must-have for any modern robotics company. Building robots is a challenging problem to solve. I do not see how to do this without collaborating with the open-source community. This vanguardism mentality from Dexory is one of the many t

If your job/workday had a theme song, what would it be and why?

The song starts very gently, very quiet, and chill… it then becomes a bit more exciting, more noisy, and more dynamic…

At the end of the song, chaos is what governs the flow. Still, within this chaos, if one listens to the song multiple times, one can spot many threads in parallel, each unique, lovely, and quiet.