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Professional Background

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I’m Alejandro Lorite Mora, an Industrial PhD student in robotics at the IT University of Copenhagen and Novo Nordisk, working on how a quadruped robot and a drone can inspect large industrial facilities together. Before the PhD I spent two and a half years as a robotics software engineer at Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) in Odense, and before that I studied robotics in Spain, France, and Japan.

This page is the detailed version of my career. The short version lives on my homepage, and the always-current list of publications is on Google Scholar.

Current Role

Industrial PhD, Quadruped-Drone Industrial Inspection

IT University of Copenhagen and Novo Nordisk, Kalundborg. March 2025 to present.

My project is titled Teaming up a Quadruped Robot with a Drone for Active Inspections in Large Industrial Settings. Inspection and maintenance in complex industrial facilities is still largely manual work, so the research asks how a heterogeneous robot team, a quadruped with a manipulator arm plus a drone, can collaborate to do it safely and automatically.

The three areas I care most about are cooperative localization between the two robots, complex manipulation, and drone-assisted assembly. The method is simulation first in ROS 2 and Gazebo, then iterative validation on the physical robots in the lab and in realistic factory settings.

I sit with the REAL Lab (Robotics, Evolution and Artificial Life) at ITU, supervised by Andrés Faiña, and work with the Product Supply API organization at Novo Nordisk in Kalundborg. Part of the work also runs through the Helix Lab Research and Education Center in Kalundborg.

Hardware I work with day to day includes the Boston Dynamics Spot Robot and Crazyflie drones.

Experience

Industrial PhD Researcher

Novo Nordisk, Kalundborg, Denmark, with the IT University of Copenhagen. March 2025 to present.

The industrial half of my PhD is based at Novo Nordisk’s production site in Kalundborg, with the Product Supply, Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API), Business Support, IT and Future Operations organization, and two supervisors on the Novo side. Part of the work also runs through the Helix Lab Research and Education Center in Kalundborg.

What that means in practice is taking robotics research out of the lab and into a working pharmaceutical plant: understanding what inspection and maintenance actually look like on site, what the constraints are, and what a quadruped and a drone would have to handle to be useful there rather than only in a controlled environment. The research itself is described under Current Role above.

Selected work:

  • Derived the system’s task requirements from the site’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and from observing the manual inspection and maintenance work they describe, so the robots are designed against how the plant actually runs rather than an idealized version of it.
  • Ran the requirements-to-validation loop with the site: SOP and literature review, simulation in ROS 2, Gazebo and Isaac Sim, then validation at Helix Lab and on Novo Nordisk premises, feeding results back into the requirements.
  • Presented progress to stakeholders across the organization, including monthly insight sessions with the team, the API quarterly knowledge-sharing session, and a poster on the PhD for Helix Lab.
  • Handled factory data under the site’s confidentiality constraints, processing it locally, with a record of processing activities and a Privacy Impact Assessment for the project.

Robotics Software Engineer, R&D

Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR), Odense, Denmark. September 2022 to February 2025.

I worked across the full software development lifecycle for autonomous mobile robots in an international Agile team, from technical specification and concept development through design, implementation, testing, and documentation. My specialization was 3D vision and LiDAR.

Selected work:

  • Implemented a 5-camera 3D vision system using GMSL on an ARM platform.
  • Managed cross-compilation of the robot’s codebase from x86_64 to ARM.
  • Developed and refined point cloud filtering algorithms with PCL to improve environmental understanding and navigation.
  • Built new C++ and Python components inside a ROS framework, using Bazel and Docker on Linux.
  • Streamlined the CI/CD pipeline, and wrote unit, integration, and system tests for new and existing code.
  • Contributed to the MiR1200 Pallet Jack from day one of the software team, acting as a bridge between R&D and production.
  • Served as the technical resource for product demonstrations and expositions.

I received two internal innovation awards for projects built during the company’s bi-annual hackathons.

Researcher, Ohtsuki Laboratory

Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. 2021 to 2022.

Research on human activity classification from sensor data for robotic applications, carried out as part of my Master’s thesis and continued into two co-authored journal articles.

Selected work:

  • Built simulated datasets of human motion in Gazebo and Unity, driven through ROS 2 in Python and C++, with 3D human models and several sensor and robot configurations.
  • Automated the dataset generation so new configurations could be produced without redoing the setup by hand.
  • Designed and trained convolutional LSTM networks on the resulting data, using pandas, TensorFlow and matplotlib for analysis.
  • Validated the trained models on a real mobile robot, in real time, against real-world data rather than simulation alone.
  • Co-authored two journal articles in MDPI Sensors out of this work, listed under Publications below.

The motivation was personal. Monitoring elderly people living alone matters because falls often go undetected, and a fall that is not caught early can change the rest of someone’s life.

Teaching and Research Assistant

University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain. During my undergraduate studies.

Assistant work in programming teaching and in the Deusto LearningLab research lab, alongside my own studies.

Selected work:

  • Supported programming classes for groups and for individual students, and corrected exercises, labs and tests.
  • Maintained the computer classroom, both the machines and the software installed on them.
  • Refereed the First LEGO League.
  • Developed the Android, iOS and web versions of the MOON game, plus a physical device to capture the MOON card game.
  • Managed OSOS Spain (Open School for Open Societies) and fixed bugs in the Kodetu.org web environment.
  • Handled inventory control and systems administration for the lab’s workshops, and helped run those workshops for students and teachers.

Outside the university I also privately tutored two high-school students, 4.5 hours a week.

Education

PhD in Robotics (Industrial PhD, ongoing)

IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. March 2025 to February 2028 (expected).

Enrolled and employed as a PhD student at ITU, in the REAL Lab (Robotics, Evolution and Artificial Life), supervised by Andrés Faiña. It is an Industrial PhD, so the research is carried out jointly with Novo Nordisk in Kalundborg.

Thesis topic: Teaming up a Quadruped Robot with a Drone for Active Inspections in Large Industrial Settings. Alongside the research I take PhD-level coursework and teach, which is listed on Lectures taught during my PhD.

Double MSc, Japan-Europe Master on Advanced Robotics (JEMARO)

École Centrale de Nantes (France) and Keio University (Japan). September 2020 to August 2022. 120 ECTS plus 30 Japanese credits.

JEMARO is a two-year integrated programme covering academic and industrial perspectives on robotics and artificial intelligence across Europe and Japan. It was fully funded by the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree scholarship of the European Union.

I spent the first year at École Centrale de Nantes and the second at Keio University in Tokyo, where I worked as a researcher in the Ohtsuki laboratory.

Degrees awarded: MScEng in Science for Open and Environmental Systems (Keio University, 2022), and MSc in Technology and Health, Control and Robotics, Advanced Robotics (École Centrale de Nantes, 2022).

Double BSc, Computer Software Engineering and Industrial Electronics and Automation Engineering

University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain. Graduated 2020. 360 ECTS.

The software engineering degree covered algebra, statistics, programming in C, C++, Python, Java, and bash, software development processes, design patterns, and AI. The industrial electronics and automation degree covered calculus, electronics, industrial automation, control systems, PLCs, and electrical machines.

Secondary Education

I grew up and studied in Bilbao. In 2014 I spent Grade 11 at Stratford Central Secondary School in Canada on an Amancio Ortega Foundation scholarship, which is where I specialized in software programming, science, and woodshop, and where I decided what I wanted to do with my career. While there I wrote games in C# and built a wooden arcade cabinet with software to load classmates’ games and track high scores.

Publications

  • Activity Detection in Indoor Environments Using Multiple 2D Lidars. MDPI Sensors, 2024. Read it. Multiple 2D LiDARs placed around an obstructed indoor environment are combined into an image-like representation and classified with a convolutional LSTM, reaching 96.10% accuracy on activity detection, 99.13% on fall detection, and 93.13% on unsteady gait detection.
  • A 2D-Lidar-Equipped Unmanned Robot-Based Approach for Indoor Human Activity Detection. MDPI Sensors, 2023. Read it. Mounting a 2D LiDAR on a moving cleaning robot rather than fixing it in place lets the system find a person lying on the floor even some time after the fall, raising fall detection accuracy from 69.4% to 81.2% and lying-body detection from 88.6% to 99%.

The current list is on Google Scholar and ITU Pure.

Skills

Robotics and software: ROS and ROS 2, C++, Python, Linux, embedded systems, computer vision and point cloud processing (PCL), simulation in Gazebo and Unity, Bazel, Docker and containers, git, CI/CD, testing, automation, PLCs, sensors, PCBs, databases.

Ways of working: Agile and Scrum, technical documentation, cross-functional collaboration between research and production teams.

Languages: Spanish (native), English (fluent), French, Basque.

Elsewhere

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