Victor Paléologue

Software Lead for Robotics & AI — PhD in Human-Robot Interaction — Paris, France

contact@palaio.eu palaio.eu
/in/victorpaleologue
@palaio

Summary

Robotics are magic: use the right words (software), and it will animate (hardware). After a dozen years in the field, the passion is still whole, and my experience has been rich: designing decision-making systems, core robotics software, SDKs, GUI tools (web, desktop); as a developer, a researcher, a software lead, a manager, scrum master or product owner.

My know-how: integrating AI in a larger piece of interactive robotics software. LLMs, task planners, on embedded systems, with care for the performance required for Human-Robot Interaction. I keep nurturing deep programming and system skills, and am knowledgeable in many programming languages and frameworks.

Experience

Semio

Lead Software Engineer Oct 2023 – Present (freelance, part-time)

Making Semio’s next animation tool for robotics, from Los Angeles (remote). Software architecture, development process and DevOps. Cross-platform development in Rust (Web & Embedded).

Software Engineer Jan 2022 – May 2022 (freelance, full-time)

Studied and presented various approaches for a new behavior system. Developed the new behavior system in Rust, and demonstrated it on NAO.

Enchanted Tools

Software Engineer Oct 2023 – Present (freelance, part-time)

Developing the next Skill System for the Mirokai robots, in Paris. Pushing natural interaction forward with (small) language models and more autonomous decision-making. Sharing expertise for architecture and software industrialization.

ESIEE Paris

Rust Teacher Sep 2023 – Present (from time to time)

Teaching Rust for cybersecurity and networking to future engineers. A way of sharing something I care about, beyond business as usual.

Skills

Programming

  • C++ · Rust · Python
  • TypeScript · Kotlin

    • Robotics & AI

  • ROS · PDDL planning
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Language Models · TinyML

    • Engineering

  • Software Architecture
  • SDK & API design
  • Embedded Software
  • DevOps · Teaching

    • Education

    ISIR, Sorbonne Université

    PhD in HRI
    2016 – 2019
    Teaching Robots Behaviors using Spoken Language

    IMT Atlantique

    Engineer's degree, Control Theory & Industrial Computing
    2006 – 2010

    Languages

    French - Native

    English - Full Professional

    Romanian - Elementary

    Spanish - Elementary

    Certifications

    ROS-based Unitree G1 Humanoid RL

    The Construct

    AI Agents Fundamentals

    HuggingFace

    Applied Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) for Scale

    HarvardX

    Deep Learning

    DeepLearning.AI

    Victor Paléologue

    Software Lead for Robotics & AI — PhD in Human-Robot Interaction — Paris, France

    contact@palaio.eu palaio.eu
    /in/victorpaleologue
    @palaio

    Experience (Cont.)

    SoftBank Robotics Europe — formerly Aldebaran

    R&D Software Engineer in HRI Jan 2020 – Nov 2021

    Applied the outcomes of my PhD on teaching behaviors to robots in rich scenarios, into an application for the Pepper robot to work as a receptionist. Translated the decision-making system from Python / C++ to JNI and Kotlin for Android, centered on the PDDL planner Fast-Downward (AI). Optimized to achieve sufficient performance for end-user-grade HRI with limited (embedded) resources; designed the software architecture and the ontology; set up an independent release process.

    R&D Software Engineer in Robotics Jun 2015 – Jan 2020

    Reworked the behavior execution pipeline for more repeatability and security. Study, specifications and technical lead for the integration of NAOqi with Pepper’s new GMS-compliant Android tablet. Maintained the Qi SDK’s API, part of the Pepper SDK, and contributed to libqi, the C++ open-source framework for micro-services used in NAOqi.

    R&D Manager for Graphical Applications Aug 2012 – Jun 2015

    Led the team behind Choregraphe, an intuitive robotic behavior development environment making the SDK more user-friendly. Main challenges: software architecture, code quality (mostly C++), contributions to the robotic framework, and making things appear simple.

    R&D Software Engineer for Robotics Sep 2010 – Aug 2012

    Developed various embedded modules and clients, including Choregraphe. C++, multi-threading, software architecture, GUI.

    Internship for Robot Teleoperation Feb 2010 – Sep 2010

    Developed a prototype for teleoperating NAO robots through the internet: real-time data capture, custom RPC protocol and GUI.

    Universitatea Politehnica Timișoara

    Internship in Robotics Jun 2009 – Aug 2009

    Expert training for KUKA robots programming. Vision-based tracking prototype using MATLAB. Worked on inverse kinematics at Robcon.

    Publications

    A. Schoen, V. Paléologue, S. Elbeleidy, C. Birmingham, T. Ribeiro, D. Dooley, R. Mead, "Vizij — A Workshop & Tutorial on Expressive Robot Faces", Companion Proc. 21st ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2026.
    V. Paléologue, "Teaching Robots Behaviors Using Spoken Language in Rich and Open Scenarios", PhD thesis, Sorbonne Université, 2019.
    V. Paléologue, J. Martin, A. K. Pandey, M. Chetouani, "Semantic-Based Interaction for Teaching Robot Behavior Compositions Using Spoken Language", Social Robotics (ICSR 2018), Springer LNCS, pp. 421–430, 2018.
    E. Broadbent, et al., "Can robots improve the quality of life in people with dementia?", Proc. Technology, Mind, and Society (TechMindSociety '18), ACM, pp. 7:1–7:3, 2018.
    V. Paléologue, J. Martin, A. K. Pandey, A. Coninx, M. Chetouani, "Semantic-based interaction for teaching robot behavior compositions", 26th IEEE Int. Symp. on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pp. 50–55, 2017.
    P. F. Dominey, V. Paléologue, A. K. Pandey, J. Ventre-Dominey, "Improving quality of life with a narrative companion", 26th IEEE Int. Symp. on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pp. 127–134, 2017.
    M. Tilneac, S. Grigorescu, V. Paléologue, V. Dolga, "Wrist Mounted Camera for Colour and Shape Recognition", Advanced Materials Research, vol. 463–464, pp. 1543–1546, 2012.