Work

Since 2024 I have built products for startups in Amsterdam, alongside the family business in Mileto.

Robot

Olivabot

founder February 2024 – present

  • Robotics
  • edge AI
  • firmware
  • drones

Robots for olive groves, and the company my contract work runs through. Olivabot B.V. was incorporated in July 2024. Laboratory prototypes, not a product for sale.

  • Edge AI on a Raspberry Pi 5 with a Hailo-10H NPU: vision models compiled onto the NPU, a local language model, and the path from perception to actuation. No internet.
  • Gibbon Bot, a 24-DoF tree-climbing robot. C++ firmware on ESP32 (ESP-IDF) for motors and sensors, and a browser controller over Web Bluetooth for tests in the groves.
  • CAD, 3D printing, and assembly of mechanisms for trees: motors, batteries, bioplastics.
  • Multispectral drone surveys of olive groves and orchards, photogrammetric reconstruction, and vegetation indices.
  • Hardware and firmware for Basil Bot, a four-axis arm with a camera. Marin Marian’s thesis in artificial intelligence at VU Amsterdam.
  • Supervision of Arina Fayzulina’s thesis in artificial intelligence at VU Amsterdam: detecting disease on olive trees from images.
  • Twelve bachelor theses in 2025, six briefs, with VU Amsterdam and the University of Twente: wind turbine, shape-memory alloys, compressors, a Stirling engine, walking robots, an aerostat.
  • Supervision of an MSc thesis in robotics.

Sensor

Respira

R&D engineer March 2026 – June 2026

  • Sensors
  • batteries
  • firmware

A portable nitrous-oxide detector for police. They had a working benchtop unit and a portable mock-up that did not work. I re-engineered the portable unit end to end — architecture, parts, battery, firmware — and delivered it: more than 8 hours on one charge. Police in the United Kingdom used it on duty.

  • Architecture, part selection, the electronics, and a Li-ion pack with its management circuit.
  • C++ firmware: sensor sampling, a real-time data path, battery monitoring, and the existing BLE protocol extended to the new hardware.

Sensors

Mycofarming

embedded and IoT engineer September 2024 – July 2026

  • Sensors
  • telecommunications
  • cloud

Sensors for water filtered through mycelium, in the lab and outdoors. They run on a battery, and the readings show on a web page.

  • Sensors for mycelium water filtration: dissolved solids, air, temperature, and humidity.
  • Raspberry Pi and microcontrollers, in Python and C++. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and LoRaWAN, including the outdoor LoRaWAN gateway. Batteries and waterproof housings.
  • Processing on the device, then PostgreSQL and a Django dashboard for live and past readings. The project had support from the Province of Noord-Holland.

Sensor

Madglove

product engineer November 2024 – August 2025

  • Sensors
  • artificial intelligence
  • firmware

Motion sensing for a rehabilitation glove, from a feasibility study to prototypes tried with patients and clinicians. Recognition runs on the device.

  • IMU features extracted in C++, and a quantised TensorFlow Lite model on the microcontroller that classifies hand movements.
  • Battery-powered nodes the size of a ring, linked in a BLE mesh.
  • A Django dashboard and REST API for session data. MediaPipe hand tracking for physiotherapists.
  • Bluetooth and Wi-Fi firmware, with OTA updates, and support in the design-for-manufacturing meetings.

Robot

Storks

robotics engineer January 2024 – June 2024

  • Robotics
  • 3D printing
  • firmware
  • A spider-like robot for uneven farm ground. Motor selection, CAD, 3D-printed parts. C++ firmware with PID control and fusion of joint encoders and an IMU. First motion within the first month.
  • Waterproof housings and batteries for outdoor sensors.
  • Six mechanical engineering degree theses with VU Amsterdam and the University of Twente: a rover with rocker-bogie suspension, a hexapod and its energy management, buoys for sensors in canals, a gripper for drones, and toroidal propellers.

Family business

Building systems

Currà Vincenzo

family enterprise, from 2020 2005 – present

  • Hardware shop
  • HVAC
  • energy efficiency

The family business in Mileto, in the province of Vibo Valentia. My grandfather opened it in 1963, and my father runs it today. I have worked there since I was a boy; from 2020 as a partner in the family enterprise.

  • Sales of hardware, building materials, and heating and air-conditioning systems.
  • Choosing, installing, maintaining, and repairing pellet stoves, boilers, air conditioners, and solar thermal.
  • Each system is sized for the house: the area, the volume, the temperature, the flue.
  • From 2026 I also look after the systems: the website with its request queue, an assistant that answers from the public pages, and the archive of jobs turned into a dashboard of zones, travel cost, and margin.

Earlier

Lecture

VU Amsterdam

guest lecturer October 2025

  • Teaching
  • prototyping

A lecture on evolutionary prototyping, within rapid prototyping for innovative product design, BSc Mechanical Engineering. Prototypes and minimum viable products for early-stage companies and, more generally, for new products.

Laboratory

D-Lab

laboratory manager September 2024 – December 2024

  • Prototyping
  • laboratory
  • VU Demonstrator Lab. I kept the laboratory in order, installed the 3D printers, and trained people on the machines and tools.
  • Architecture and prototyping support, hardware and software, for more than fifty students and startups.

School

Teaching

teacher of mechanical sciences and technologies school year 2022/2023

  • Teaching
  • mechanics
  • A technical high school, about one hundred students. Materials, machines, robotics, energy, sustainability, structures, and embedded systems.

Design

AKKA Technologies

mechanical designer 2020

  • Mechanical design
  • CAD
  • Consulting for an oil-plant engineering client in Milan.
  • I coordinated specifications with international stakeholders, checked CAD, and designed structures and parts. A few months, through the first lockdown.