Researcher and engineer. Measuring environments that resist measurement: informal urban form in Rio, tree canopy from aerial LiDAR, and perception on real robots.https://theoalessandro.com/en-ushttps://github.com/thrmnn/ros2-localization-triagehttps://github.com/thrmnn/ros2-localization-triageRobots that navigate from their own sensors fail quietly: the estimate drifts while the reported confidence stays high. I built four detectors that find those moments in the logs a fleet already records, and graded them against labelled recordings from five platforms.Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://theoalessandro.com/projects/agent-harness/https://theoalessandro.com/projects/agent-harness/Agentic systems fail the way robots do: a tool call breaks, nothing traces it, and nobody notices until a user does. I built a typed tool layer with one structured trace line per call and a regression suite wired into CI, so a bad prompt change fails the build instead of the user.Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://github.com/thrmnn/perception-pipelinehttps://github.com/thrmnn/perception-pipelineFour years of one-off perception prototypes, consolidated into one modular stack: detection, multi-object tracking, re-identification and pose, each swappable, with a latency budget the whole thing is held to.Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://senseablerio.mit.edu/https://senseablerio.mit.edu/Favelas are built without plans, and the descriptors urban analysis relies on assume a street grid that is not there. I build the ones that hold on this fabric, from terrain models and building footprints, fine enough to resolve a single alley.Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.ams-institute.org/https://www.ams-institute.org/A city knows where its trees are, not how much leaf they carry. I recover leaf area per tree by inverting how much sky the canopy blocks in an aerial LiDAR survey the city already flies for other reasons.Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://theoalessandro.com/projects/autonomous-boat-perception/https://theoalessandro.com/projects/autonomous-boat-perception/Roboat's autonomy ran on LiDAR. As its first intern I added the camera side: detection and tracking on the vessel's own edge hardware, and the MLOps to keep models and data versioned as the recordings grew.Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.iri.upc.edu/https://www.iri.upc.edu/6-DOF pose estimation through flight maneuvers exceeding 5g acceleration, where conventional frame cameras fail.Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.epfl.ch/labs/vita/https://www.epfl.ch/labs/vita/A full autonomy stack — SLAM, planning, obstacle avoidance, person-following — validated end-to-end on a physical robot (Segway Loomo, EPFL VITA Lab research platform).Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT