Mechatronics Engineer, R&D at Unifiller
I build new machines for food production, and more and more of them are robots.
My work starts as a blank SolidWorks file and ends on a factory floor, with mechanics, electronics and code all pulling their weight. Robots that handle real, messy, physical work are what I'm chasing next, starting with a master's in robotics at Johns Hopkins.
Miss once, never twice.
The rule I build by. Getting better at anything comes down to showing up for the reps: in the gym, at the bench, in front of a blank SolidWorks file. A missed day happens. Two in a row is how a habit quietly dies. So I give myself one slip, and I don't take a second.
In progress · Iyan · started Oct 2026
Can I teach a robot to make food from video while incorporating uncertainties like poundo’s properties, all without a force sensor, for a simpler product?
Pounded yam is a smooth, stretchy West African staple, eaten with soups like egusi. It used to be pounded by hand in a mortar. Today most people make poundo from yam flour: stirred into hot water, then turned hard with a wooden stick until smooth.
That turning is hot, heavy, repetitive work. That’s why I’m teaching a robot to do it.
Photos: Toludpilgrim, CC BY-SA 3.0; Koutchika Lihouenou Gaspard (amala, a yam-flour swallow), CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped; via Wikimedia Commons.
The motion comes from clips of people turning poundo. The stick-tip path is tracked and retargeted to a robot arm.
The dough goes from loose flour and water to a thick, sticky mass, and no two pots behave the same. The robot has to adapt as the resistance changes.
The robot that runs has none. A load-cell stick is used only in training, to measure what a real turn takes.
A robot arm learning to turn poundo yam, a West African staple, from videos of people making it. So far: IK, PD control and contact sensing in simulation, now on a Franka Research 3. Next: learning the turning motion from video.
A 3D robot runner in three.js with a Cloudflare Workers + D1 leaderboard, shipped by running AI coding agents like a dev team: specs, build reviews, versioned releases. I rebuilt auamai.dev from scratch around it.
Stable balance in simulation from a state-space controller I designed. Modelled the dynamics in MATLAB and Simulink, checked controllability and observability, then built a 3D Simscape model.
A foot wrap that eases dystonia pain with PWM-controlled vibration. I led controls: firmware for two coin vibration motors, the protoboard circuit, and a desktop GUI for tracking sessions.
Tilt the board to steer a Python 2D shooter. I wrote the SPI driver for its accelerometer and used timers and interrupts to stream motion over USB.
A Bluetooth Low Energy control board, designed, brought up and debugged with a SEGGER J-Link, Tag-Connect and Code Composer Studio.
PWM motor control with encoder feedback and embedded firmware on an 8051 platform.
Mechatronics Engineering Project Leader, R&D
Founder & CEO
Technical & Business Analyst
Mechanical Engineering Intern
Software Developer Intern
IT Intern
M.S., Robotics and Autonomous Systems Engineering
B.A.Sc., Mechatronic Systems Engineering
A couple of times someone handed me a mic. Here's what I said.
I joined the studio in Nigeria to talk through whether a public ledger can make public money easier to follow.
Watch on YouTube ↗For four days, Vancouver felt like a city that expected to win. That’s a feeling worth protecting.
A few thoughts after Web Summit on turning one good week into lasting momentum for local builders.
Read the op-ed ↗I'm always up for talking robotics, mechanical design, or hardware that has to work on a factory floor. Book 30 minutes on Meet, weekday evenings or weekend days, Pacific time.