Apheth D'Almeida
Co-founder of Lucen Robotics; mechanical design engineer, Bengaluru
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Apheth D'Almeida is a co-founder of Lucen Robotics, an autonomous retail restocking robotics company he is building alongside Linyan Fu. He is a mechanical design engineer based in Bengaluru, India, working full-time at Arka Energy, a Bengaluru solar energy company, while co-building Lucen Robotics.1 His engineering background spans product design for medical devices, electric vehicle thermal management, structural analysis, and — crucially for Lucen — robotic arm development with computer vision integration.1
D'Almeida completed a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at B.M.S. College of Engineering (BMSCE) in Bengaluru from 2018 to 2022.1 BMSCE is one of Bengaluru's established private engineering colleges, consistently ranked in the 151–200 band of India's NIRF Engineering Rankings, and is known for producing engineers who enter both product companies and startups across the city's technology ecosystem.
His undergraduate years were highly project-intensive: most of his significant engineering work was completed as student projects during the degree rather than in formal industry roles, a pattern consistent with a hands-on curriculum that encourages building.1
D'Almeida's technical profile covers multiple domains of mechanical engineering:1
The robotics-specific skills — kinematics, YOLO-based vision, Jetson Nano integration — did not come from formal courses but from a student project that directly prefigures the Lucen Robotics vision system.
From January 2021 to January 2022, D'Almeida worked as a Design and Development Engineer at CANMED Pvt Ltd in Bengaluru — a medical equipment manufacturing startup.1 His project there was designing a Gum Cooling System for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy to prevent oral mucositis (mouth ulcers), a painful side effect of many chemotherapy regimens caused by damage to the rapidly dividing cells lining the mouth. The device works by cooling the gums during treatment, reducing blood flow to the tissue and thereby limiting exposure to the chemotherapy agent.
He designed the cooling channels, conducted heat transfer and flow simulation on the model to achieve the optimal cooling gradient, and used mesh and surface modelling to generate custom gum profiles matched to individual patient anatomy.1 This is clinically motivated engineering — the design constraints are set by biology and patient comfort, not just manufacturing tolerances — and it gave D'Almeida early exposure to the full design-analysis-simulation loop on a product that had to work in the real world.
A cluster of undergraduate projects from 2021 shows D'Almeida working through the mechanical subsystems of a complete electric scooter from first principles:1
Chassis and frame design. Using generative design (a computational method that explores many possible structural geometries given load constraints and manufacturing requirements), he designed an EV scooter chassis and frame that achieved an optimised strength-to-weight ratio of 10 KG — verified through FEA including modal analysis and event simulation.1
Battery thermal management system and motor cooling. He designed airflow channels and cooling fins for both the battery pack and the motor. The results: 6°C lower temperature on the battery pack and 14°C lower temperature on the motor compared to the unoptimised baseline.1 Battery thermal management is a critical safety and longevity problem in EV design — lithium-ion cells degrade faster and risk thermal runaway outside their optimal temperature band.
4KW Battery pack design. A separate project determined input and output parameters and cell arrangement for a battery pack capable of delivering 4 KW to run a 6 KW motor.1
These three projects together form a coherent exercise in EV powertrain and thermal engineering — not unlike what a junior engineer at an electric vehicle company might spend their first year working through.
The project most directly connected to Lucen Robotics is a pick-and-place robotic arm D'Almeida built from June 2020 to June 2021, as part of a student project at ISA (the Indian Science Academy or a similarly named institutional context).1 He built the robotic arm mechanism with both inverse and forward kinematics — the mathematical frameworks that compute joint angles from a desired end-effector position (inverse) and compute the end-effector position from given joint angles (forward). He then integrated the arm with image recognition using Python and NVIDIA Jetson Nano, an embedded AI compute board.
For the vision component he used YOLO to train on images of emergency stop buttons and analog manometers — industrial safety hardware — enabling the arm to identify and act on those objects.1 This is a substantial undergraduate robotics build: a full mechanical system, a kinematics solver, a neural network vision pipeline, and embedded deployment on Jetson Nano. It also anticipates the technology Lucen Robotics is using: YOLOv8 for product detection is a direct descendant of the same YOLO framework D'Almeida used for the robotic arm project years earlier.
Since November 2022, D'Almeida has worked as a Mechanical Design Engineer at Arka Energy, a Bengaluru-based solar energy company.1 The role involves mechanical design work in the renewable energy sector — likely covering mounting systems, enclosures, and thermal management for solar installations.
D'Almeida met Linyan Fu in the Bay Area / physical AI hackathon circuit and began co-building Lucen Robotics with her in early 2026. He participated in the 48-hour AMD Robotics and AI Hackathon in Tokyo on January 31, 2026, where the broader team trained a robot to pick up and plug in a charger using the LeRobot framework and ACT policies — and won a "World Intelligence Award."4 He and Fu then submitted Lucen Robotics to the lablab.ai hackathon on February 15, 2026, and placed 2nd at Founders Inc's Night Hack on March 20, 2026.23
The through line from student robotic arm (YOLO + Jetson Nano + kinematics) to EV thermal engineering (CFD and FEA) to medical device simulation (heat transfer, custom profiles) to Lucen Robotics (retail robot with YOLOv8 vision and pick-and-place manipulation) is a coherent mechanical engineering arc: D'Almeida has been, in different forms, building systems that sense an environment and move physical objects within it since his undergraduate years.