João Estilita Antunes

João Estilita Antunes has a diverse and extensive work experience in the field of robotics and automation. Since November 2020, they have been working as a Senior Principal Robotics and Automation Engineer at The Toro Company. Prior to that, they co-founded TURFLYNX in 2014, where they served as the Operations and Robotics Engineer. In this role, they were responsible for the hardware architecture and engineering, industrialization, production, and product deployment on golf courses. At TURFLYNX, they developed an electric and autonomous mower for fairways.

Before TURFLYNX, João worked at SELFTECH, a company they co-founded in 2008. At SELFTECH, they worked on various mobile robotics projects for indoor and outdoor applications. João focused on designing and integrating electric, electronics, and mechanical subsystems, selecting sensors and actuators, and developing software for the MOnarCH project. This project aimed to develop a framework to model mixed human-robot societies and utilize a network of robots and sensors in a pediatric oncological hospital.

João also has experience as an IoT Product Engineer at SmartHome - Construção de Edifícios Inteligentes. In this role, they designed and conceived a product for home automation and integrated it with the SmartHome mobile application. João also performed requirements analysis for home automation projects.

Lastly, João worked as a researcher and volunteer at the Institute for Systems and Robotics. João was involved in the Robotic Soccer project ISocRob and had a grantee role in the ISocRob project.

João Estilita Antunes completed their Master's Degree in Electronics and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, spanning from 2002 to 2009. In 2008, they pursued a Post Graduation in Entrepreneurship, Business Administration, Management, and Operations from ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. Furthermore, in the same year, they completed a BEST Course in Metallurgy and Electrotechnics at Ural State Technical University.