Headline

Building robots and the AI that runs them· Head of Engineering & Product, Machani Robotics · Humanoids, VLA, Physical AI - Author, The Inevitable AI · TU Delft PhD

About

Bringing Physical AI to the real world. I've spent eighteen years on the side of robotics where machines actually meet people — in hospitals, in living rooms, on public roads, inside a Dutch highway tunnel under nighttime closure. The interesting part of this field is rarely the demo. It's everything that happens the next day, when the lighting changes, the operator goes home, and the robot still has to work. I'm currently Head of Engineering & Product at Machani Robotics, leading RIA — a research humanoid in the lineage of Hanson Robotics' Sophia — and CC, a desktop cognitive companion for older adults that I took from concept to market in six months. The work right now is VLA for social understanding, trust building, and dynamic behavior. These are the parts of embodied AI that benchmarks don't measure and demos don't show. They are also where the next decade of value will be created or quietly lost. Before Machani, I co-founded Robot Care Systems around LEA, an elderly walking companion. Then I founded Loop Robots and shipped SAM-UVC, an autonomous hospital disinfection robot now in clinical service across the Netherlands — three published patents from that program. Earlier, at TU Delft and RRC, I was among the first developers to deploy NVIDIA DrivePX in production, on the WePod public-road shuttles that carried real passengers between Schiphol and its parking lots. More recently I advised Grimbergen Industrial Systems on the Hubertustunnel — a world-first adaptive milling robot that resurfaced 26,000 m² inside one of The Hague's main tunnels at ±5 mm precision. Six patents in robotics and embodied AI, three of them filed at Machani and still under embargo. A book — The Inevitable AI: Art of Growth with Generative Intelligence (2023) — written for the people who actually have to decide what to do about all of this: founders, investors, enterprises, policy makers. I write and speak when I have something to say that I haven't yet seen said. PhD in Cognitive Robotics, TU Delft, with Prof. Pieter Jonker and Dr. Maja Rudinac. MBA from Quantic. MSc in Bio-Robotics, TU Delft. B.Tech in Electrical & Electronics, NIT Trichy. Dutch citizen, currently based in Bengaluru, open to relocation. If you're interested in Physical AI, building a board, raising a fund in the category, or programming a venue on embodied AI — I'd be glad to hear from you. www.aswinchandarr.com

Location

India

AI stack

claude code

cursor

hugging face

huggingface

Granola

OpenRouter

Work experience

Head of Engineering at Machani Robotics, Jun 2025 - Present · 1 yr 4 mos

Founder at Global AI Transformation Institute (GAITI), Aug 2023 - Present · 3 yrs 2 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Chief Technology Officer & Founder at Loop Robots, Jan 2021 - Mar 2023 · 2 yrs 3 mos, Delft, South Holland, Netherlands

Chief Technology Officer at Jonker Makis Robotics, Oct 2019 - Jan 2021 · 1 yr 4 mos, Delft Area, Netherlands

Technical Business Manager at RRC Robotics, Jan 2019 - Oct 2019 · 10 mos, Delft Area, Netherlands

Education

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Personal service robotics, Delft University of Technology

Master of Business Administration - MBA, Quantic School of Business and Technology

Public links

aswinchandarr.com: https://www.aswinchandarr.com/