Building humanoids at Love Death & Robots

Andrei-GabrielStroe.

Robotics Software Engineer

I build the software that lets humanoid robots walk, reach, see and talk, from reinforcement learning in simulation to C++ controllers on real motors.

Download CVEmail meLinkedIn
Focus
Humanoids · RL · Sim2Real
Based in
Bucharest, RO
Stack
ROS 2 · C++ · Python
rviz2 / arm_controllerAUTO · trajectory
Move your cursorDrag to move the arm · IK solved live (FABRIK)
  • ROS 2
  • NVIDIA Isaac Lab
  • MuJoCo MJX
  • PyTorch
  • RSL-RL · PPO
  • ONNX Runtime
  • ros2_control
  • EtherCAT
  • MoveIt 2
  • mc_rtc
  • Gazebo
  • YOLOv8
  • RealSense
  • Faster-Whisper
  • C++
  • Python

01About

Ten years of infrastructure,now teaching robots to move.

Operator speconline
Name
Andrei-Gabriel Stroe
Role
Robotics Software Engineer
Base
Bucharest, Romania
Languages
RO · EN · DE · FR
Training
MSc · Military Technical Academy Ferdinand I
Uptime
10+ years running production systems

I develop humanoid robots end to end: reinforcement learning and sim-to-real deployment, whole-body control and locomotion, manipulation, perception, Vision-Language-Action models and conversational human-robot interaction.

Before robots, I spent ten years running Linux, network and cloud infrastructure, often as the only engineer responsible for all of it. That background shapes how I work: a policy only counts once it runs reliably on hardware, with a proper bring-up, safety limits and documentation behind it.

  • 10+

    years in Linux, networking & cloud

  • 4

    humanoid platforms developed on

  • 32-DoF

    humanoid driven by my VLA pipeline

  • 3,000

    demonstrations collected in parallel

02Experience

A decade in production,then a pivot to humanoids.

Before robotics I designed, built and ran infrastructure, twice as the only engineer responsible for all of it. That's where my habits around reliability, documentation and clean deployment come from.

career logrec

2025→ now

Robotics Software Engineer

Love Death & Robots SRL

LD&RSystem InnovationIdeal FitSpeedtransferCMPS BucureștiClass ITCritical Tech
roles
7
years
10+
sole engineer
2×

  1. Sep 2025 — Present·1 yr 2 mos·Bucharest

    Humanoid R&D

    Robotics Software Engineer

    Love Death & Robots SRL

    Taking humanoid robots from simulation to real hardware.

    • Trained locomotion, imitation and arm policies in Isaac Lab and deployed them on hardware through custom C++ ros2_control controllers.
    • Built a motion-imitation pipeline from human video to humanoid motion, and an end-to-end VLA pipeline reaching 65% average success on 5 language-conditioned tasks.
    • Wrote PVT controllers and RL policy nodes for EtherCAT actuators; did motor identification and per-joint PD/PVT tuning.
    • Integrated mc_rtc whole-body control with ROS 2, in simulation and on the real robot.
    • Shipped MoveIt 2 manipulation, RGB-D perception, IMU/visual-odometry fusion and a bilingual voice HRI system.
    • Maintained the Harambe arms sim-to-real codebase (100+ commits).
    • ROS 2
    • Isaac Lab
    • MuJoCo
    • PyTorch
    • C++
    • EtherCAT
    • MoveIt 2
    • mc_rtc

  2. Apr 2022 — Sep 2025·3 yrs 6 mos·Bucharest

    SAP Business One

    System Engineer· Infrastructure, Cloud & SAP

    System Innovation Ro S.R.L

    SAP Business One first: running and debugging B1 on SAP HANA and SQL Server, while owning the company's entire server and network infrastructure.

    Details6 highlights
    • Administered SAP Business One systems; installed and configured the SAP HANA and Microsoft SQL Server databases behind them.
    • Debugged SAP Business One and database errors, and was the main technical contact for SAP database topics between clients and internal teams.
    • Ran SUSE Linux and Windows Server 2016/2019; managed physical servers through HPE iLO.
    • Designed and tested SLA-compliant backup and disaster-recovery strategies with AWS Backup, Veeam and Acronis.
    • Deployed VMs on AWS and GCP and private clouds on VMware vSphere and Hyper-V.
    • Automated OS patching, software installation and hardening with Ansible; real-time monitoring with Nagios.
    • SAP Business One
    • SAP HANA
    • MS SQL Server
    • SUSE Linux
    • Windows Server
    • HPE iLO
    • Veeam
    • AWS
    • GCP
    • vSphere
    • Ansible
    • Nagios

  3. Nov 2021 — Apr 2022·6 mos·Bucharest

    Servers & surveillance

    System Engineer· Infrastructure & Video Surveillance

    Ideal Fit Intelligence Support S.R.L.

    Kept the servers and the video-surveillance systems running: Windows Server, the Trassir and Hikvision servers and the cameras connected to them.

    Details5 highlights
    • Administered the Trassir and Hikvision video-surveillance servers: camera channels, alarm rules and recording settings.
    • Installed cameras on site and brought them online on the surveillance servers for live monitoring.
    • Administered Windows Server 2016 (Active Directory, IIS, GPO) and a cPanel mail server.
    • Managed a Hyper-V private cloud; configured Mikrotik and Fortinet networking.
    • Diagnosed hardware, software and network incidents and trained users on the company systems.
    • Trassir
    • Hikvision
    • Windows Server
    • Active Directory
    • IIS
    • GPO
    • cPanel
    • Hyper-V
    • Mikrotik
    • Fortinet

  4. Jul 2020 — Nov 2021·1 yr 5 mos·Bucharest

    Money-transfer ops

    System Engineer· Infrastructure & Application Support

    S.C Speedtransfer S.R.L

    Kept a money-transfer business online: transfer software, databases, mail, telephony and surveillance.

    Details4 highlights
    • Debugged MoneyGram money-transfer software and internal applications; fixed issues in the PostgreSQL databases behind them.
    • Administered Linux (CentOS, Debian) and Windows Server 2016.
    • Installed an Axigen mail server and an Asterisk VoIP telephony server; administered the Dahua surveillance server.
    • Deployed AWS VMs and a VMware vSphere private cloud; configured Fortinet networking.
    • MoneyGram
    • PostgreSQL
    • CentOS
    • Debian
    • Axigen
    • Asterisk
    • Dahua
    • AWS
    • vSphere
    • Fortinet

  5. Mar 2019 — Nov 2021·2 yrs 9 mos·Bucharest

    Sole engineer · greenfield

    System Engineer· Infrastructure Build-out

    Compania Municipală Pază și Securitate București

    Built the entire IT infrastructure from scratch as the only system engineer: servers, Active Directory, email and the phone system, plus the network that connects them.

    Details5 highlights
    • Installed and administered Windows Server 2012R2/2016 (Active Directory, DNS, IIS, Group Policy) and Linux servers (CentOS, Ubuntu).
    • Set up the company email on a Zimbra mail server and the phone system on an Asterisk VoIP exchange.
    • Ran Hyper-V and VirtualBox private clouds and AWS VMs; configured backups and the Linux firewall.
    • Configured the network around the servers: FortiGate firewall policies, SSL-VPN and SD-WAN, plus Cisco, Mikrotik and Fortinet equipment.
    • Trained staff on the new systems and provided ongoing support.
    • Windows Server
    • Active Directory
    • DNS
    • GPO
    • CentOS
    • Ubuntu
    • Zimbra
    • Asterisk
    • Hyper-V
    • AWS
    • FortiGate
    • Cisco
    • Mikrotik

  6. Sep 2017 — Feb 2019·1 yr 6 mos·Bucharest

    Outsourcing · SOC

    System Engineer· Infrastructure & Security Operations

    S.C Class IT Outsourcing S.R.L

    Kept client infrastructure healthy across networking, mail and security operations.

    Details5 highlights
    • Debugged and fixed SOC-related errors.
    • Configured Cisco routers (firewall, WLAN, LAN) and installed Cisco and Fortinet equipment.
    • Administered Linux mail servers and Microsoft Exchange Server.
    • Managed VMware vSphere and Hyper-V private clouds and AWS/GCP VMs.
    • Resolved incidents end to end through a ticketing system.
    • Cisco
    • Fortinet
    • Exchange
    • CentOS
    • Ubuntu
    • Windows Server
    • vSphere
    • Hyper-V
    • AWS
    • GCP

  7. Feb 2016 — Feb 2017·1 yr 1 mo·Bucharest

    Sole engineer · EU-funded

    System Engineer· Infrastructure & Deployment

    S.C. Critical Technologies S.R.L

    Sole engineer on an EU-funded project for the emergency-services inspectorate (IGSU): brought the CoordCom emergency dispatch system live, from bare hardware to go-live.

    Details5 highlights
    • Installed and configured CoordCom, the emergency call-handling and dispatch system, together with the full hardware stack it runs on.
    • Took the project from hardware setup and OS installation all the way to go-live.
    • Designed, installed and administered the Cisco network infrastructure.
    • Administered CentOS and Windows Server 2012R2 (Active Directory, DNS, IIS), plus a Zimbra mail server.
    • Deployed AWS and GCP VMs and trained end users on CoordCom and the delivered systems.
    • CoordCom
    • Cisco
    • CentOS
    • Windows Server
    • Active Directory
    • Zimbra
    • AWS
    • GCP

03Work

What I buildfor humanoid robots.

Built at Love Death & Robots. The code belongs to the company and stays private, so this is a summary of each area. Happy to walk through any of it in a conversation.

Pixels to torque.

The loop I work across. I've built and shipped every stage on real projects, from a person's motion on video to the trained policy running on EtherCAT motors.

  1. 01

    Human video

    GVHMR pose estimation

  2. 02

    Retarget

    onto the robot URDF, with quality checks

  3. 03

    Train

    PPO in Isaac Lab & MuJoCo MJX, domain randomization

  4. 04

    Sim-to-sim

    Isaac ⇄ MuJoCo ⇄ Gazebo via ROS 2 bridges

  5. 05

    Export

    ONNX policy & runtime

  6. 06

    Deploy

    custom C++ ros2_control controllers

  7. 07

    Actuate

    EtherCAT, PVT control & safety limits

simreal

Ten areas I've delivered in.

From training policies and modeling robots to the C++ that drives the actuators and the voice that lets people talk to them.

C/01

Reinforcement Learning & Sim2Real

Locomotion, imitation and arm policies trained in NVIDIA Isaac Lab with RSL-RL PPO and domain randomization, exported to ONNX and deployed on hardware through custom C++ ros2_control controllers and Gazebo policy plugins. I also maintained the Harambe arms sim-to-real codebase (100+ commits): joint calibration, a motion library and the ONNX deployment tooling.

validateIsaac LabMuJoCoGazebo
deploypolicy.onnxros2_control · C++hardware
  • Isaac Lab
  • RSL-RL
  • PPO
  • Domain randomization
  • ONNX
  • ros2_control
C/02

Vision-Language-Action

End-to-end VLA pipeline for the 32-DoF T200 humanoid in MuJoCo: IK-based scripted expert, 3,000 parallel-collected demonstrations, ResNet-18 + Transformer policy with action chunking.

65%

average success on 5 language-conditioned tasks

demos
3,000
DoF
32
vision
ResNet-18
  • PyTorch
  • Transformer
  • Action chunking
C/03

Motion Imitation from Human Video

From a video of a person to humanoid motion: GVHMR pose estimation, retargeting onto the robot URDF with quality checks, PPO training in MuJoCo MJX and ONNX export.

  • GVHMR
  • Retargeting
  • MuJoCo MJX
C/04

Actuator Control over EtherCAT

Extended an open-source ros2_control EtherCAT driver, then built PVT controllers and RL policy nodes in C++ on a test bench: torque deadband, EMA filtering, safety limits, damping mode, setpoint interpolation and a PyQt tuning GUI. Motor identification and per-joint PD/PVT tuning.

  • C++
  • EtherCAT
  • PVT
  • PD tuning
C/05

Whole-Body Control & Walking

Integrated mc_rtc with ROS 2 in simulation and on the real robot (CoM/posture tasks, baseline walking). Corrected the dynamic model (inertia tensors, mass/CoM, friction, dual IMU) to match Isaac Lab physics.

  • mc_rtc
  • CoM / ZMP
  • Bipedal walking
C/06

Robot Modeling & Simulation

Scripts that turn CAD exports and raw URDFs into modular Xacro descriptions and simulation-ready models for Gazebo, RViz, MuJoCo and Isaac: link merging, joint axis and limit fixes, collision variants, mesh simplification.

  • URDF
  • Xacro
  • Gazebo
  • RViz
C/07

Motion Planning & Manipulation

MoveIt 2 for humanoid arms (IK, trajectory execution, OctoMap collision checking), gripper control, real-time MoveIt Servo teleoperation, and a ROS 2 driver for Inspire RH56DFX dexterous hands over RS485 Modbus RTU.

  • MoveIt 2
  • MoveIt Servo
  • OctoMap
  • Modbus RTU
C/08

Perception & State Estimation

RGB-D perception with YOLOv8 and OpenCV: detection, orientation, 3D localization and tracking. BNO055 IMU fused with RealSense D435i visual odometry in a robot_localization EKF, for one smooth pose estimate of the humanoid.

  • YOLOv8
  • OpenCV
  • RealSense
  • EKF
C/09

Conversational Robot (HRI)

Bilingual Romanian/English voice system on ROS 2: wake word, VAD, Faster-Whisper ASR, a streaming LLM with conversation memory, Piper TTS, barge-in and LLM-to-motor commands. Unitree G1 audio/TTS via unitree_sdk2 in C++.

  • Faster-Whisper
  • LLM
  • Piper TTS
  • unitree_sdk2
C/10

System Integration & Documentation

A ROS 2 Jazzy control system for the humanoid arm with a documented package architecture, launch system and PyQt5 launcher for headless full-system bring-up, plus living documentation on EtherCAT control, sim-to-real, safety supervision and tuning.

  • ROS 2 launch
  • PyQt5
  • Docker
  • Docs

Platforms I've developed on.

In-house humanoids built at Love Death & Robots, plus commercial platforms integrated into the same ROS 2 stack.

  • UNIT-01

    Harambe

    In-house

    Love Death & Robots

    • Arms sim-to-real
    • mc_rtc whole-body control
    • Motion library
  • UNIT-02

    T200

    In-house

    Love Death & Robots

    • 32 DoF
    • VLA pipeline
    • MuJoCo model
  • UNIT-03

    Unitree G1

    Commercial

    Unitree Robotics

    • unitree_sdk2 (C++)
    • Audio & TTS
  • UNIT-04

    Adam Lite

    Commercial

    PNDbotics

    • Full-size humanoid

04Skills

Tools of the trade.121 and counting.

Robotics and ML on top, with a deep base in cloud, systems and networking underneath.

Robotics & ML

Programming

  • C++
  • Python
  • Bash
  • PowerShell

Robotics frameworks

  • ROS
  • ROS 2
  • ros2_control
  • MoveIt 2
  • MoveIt Servo
  • RViz
  • mc_rtc

Simulation

  • NVIDIA Isaac Lab
  • MuJoCo / MJX
  • Gazebo
  • URDF
  • Xacro

ML for robotics

  • PyTorch
  • RL (PPO, RSL-RL)
  • Imitation learning
  • VLA models
  • Domain randomization
  • ONNX Runtime

Control & locomotion

  • PID / PVT
  • Joint & trajectory controllers
  • Whole-body control
  • Bipedal locomotion
  • CoM / ZMP
  • Motor identification
  • IMU state estimation

Manipulation & perception

  • FK / IK
  • Trajectory planning
  • Collision avoidance
  • Gripper control
  • Dexterous hands
  • OpenCV
  • YOLOv8
  • RealSense
  • OctoMap
  • Visual odometry
  • EKF fusion

Hardware interfaces

  • EtherCAT
  • Modbus RTU / RS485
  • Unitree SDK2

Speech & LLM

  • Faster-Whisper
  • Piper TTS
  • Wake word / VAD
  • LLM integration
  • MCP

Dev tools

  • Git
  • GitHub
  • CMake
  • Docker
  • PyQt5

Cloud

AWS

  • EC2
  • S3
  • EBS
  • RDS
  • VPC
  • IAM
  • CloudWatch
  • Route 53
  • AWS Backup

GCP

  • Compute Engine
  • VPC
  • IAM
  • Cloud Storage
  • Cloud Monitoring

Azure

  • Virtual Machines
  • Virtual Network
  • Microsoft Entra ID
  • Blob Storage
  • Azure Monitor

Private cloud

  • VMware vSphere (ESXi, vCenter)
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Oracle VM

Systems & Automation

Linux

  • Ubuntu
  • CentOS
  • Debian
  • Red Hat
  • SUSE
  • iptables / firewalld
  • apt / yum / dnf
  • Apache
  • Nginx

SAP & databases

  • SAP Business One
  • SAP HANA
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • PostgreSQL

Windows Server

  • Active Directory
  • Group Policy
  • DNS
  • DHCP
  • File Services
  • Hyper-V

Ansible

  • Provisioning
  • Configuration management
  • OS patching
  • Hardening
  • Hybrid inventories

Network & DR

Networking

  • DNS
  • DHCP
  • VPN
  • Firewalls
  • Security Groups / NACLs
  • NAT Gateways
  • VPC Flow Logs
  • TCP/IP
  • Wireshark
  • Cisco
  • Fortinet
  • Mikrotik

Monitoring

  • Nagios
  • Dashboards
  • Log analysis & reporting

Backup & DR

  • AWS Backup
  • Veeam
  • Acronis
  • Windows Server Backup
  • Incremental / differential
  • Recovery tests
  • DR planning

05Education

Engineering roots,military precision.

  • Master's degree · 2016 — 2018

    Communications and Electronic Security Systems Engineering

    Military Technical Academy "Ferdinand I"

  • Bachelor's degree · 2011 — 2015

    Aviation Equipment and Installations

    Military Technical Academy "Ferdinand I"

Languages

  • RomanianNative
  • EnglishC2 · Proficient
  • GermanA2 · Basic
  • FrenchA2 · Basic

06Contact

Let's build robots that workin the real world.

Need a humanoid to walk, grasp, see or talk, or infrastructure that has to stay up? Email is the fastest way to reach me.

stroeandrei.gabriel@gmail.com
Send an emailDownload CVLinkedIn

Bucharest, Romania·local time --:--