REINVEST ROBOTICS - Key Persons
Esben created his first LEGO robot at age four to pull cables through pipes for his dad's engineering site making a water supply for Cebu city in the Philippines. Since then, he's built countless machines and robots; when he purchased a Commodore 64 in 1983, he quickly became proficient in Basic and assembler programming.
As a university student of physics and computer science, Esben specialized in robotics, while working part-time for LEGO on the Mindstorms concept. In 1998, as part of Team Static, Esben won the Khepera Robot Soccer World Championship in Paris. After achieving his Masters degree from Aarhus University in Denmark, he accepted a position at the University of Southern California, where he did research for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency) on multi-robot coordination and cooperation, together with Brian Gerkey who later wrote ROS.
While working toward his PhD in Odense, Denmark, he and his research team began work on transformer robots - that is, robot parts that would self-assemble and self-reconfigure. The research was a combination of various AI techniques, embodied intelligence and robotics, and was focused on self-organization of cellular structures to achieve self-repair and autonomous adaptation of the relationship between the body and the mind. The project involved world-class levels of technology in both simulation, AI and robotics. However, no practical applications were found.
Esben Hallundbæk Østergaard, with his wife, Richa Hallundbæk Misri, founded REInvest Robotics to provide leadership, vision, and seed money to start-up robotics companies.
Job Titles:
- Robotics Business Consultant and Co - Founder