I arrived in Plymouth at 19 with almost no money, barely any English, and a stubborn dream of working with robots. The route that followed moved through manual work, study, robotics, GPU computing, public speaking, applied vision, and finally a place where all of those habits had to meet the physical world.
Legacy journey
The journey, in six chapters.
These are the anchor moments. The detailed chronology, milestone records, research, and original writing remain available below.
The Plymouth bench, photographed years later.
01
Starting again in Plymouth
After Stredná priemyselná škola strojnícka in Zvolen, I arrived in the UK at 19 with little money and barely any English. Manual work came first. A chance conversation with Professor Simon Davies made university seem possible; after returning to Slovakia to complete civil service and improve my English, I came back to Plymouth for night shifts and daytime study. The city became where I earned a First-Class BSc, received the Revell Research Systems Prize, found robotics, and built the foundations for everything that followed.
With iCub during the cognitive robotics years in Plymouth.
02
From the Revell Prize to iCub and the PhD
The final-year Mars rover simulator led into a formal ESA collaboration; the Revell Prize and that research then opened the route to the iTALK PhD. With iCub, the childhood dream became a technical question: how can a robot connect perception, action, language, timing, and learning? CUDA made larger neural-network experiments practical, while Aquila turned the work into an open software architecture. POETICON++ later continued the action-and-language research with the Plymouth team.
NVIDIA headquarters, Santa Clara, during the GPU robotics period.
03
ESA rover work and NVIDIA CUDA
The research moved beyond a single laboratory. Work with ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team explored parallel evolutionary robotics for simulated Mars rovers. The iCub and CUDA work then led to an invited presentation at NVIDIA headquarters, a CUDA Spotlight feature, GTC material, an SC11 keynote mention, and research time in Santa Clara. These were not separate detours; they showed that the same ideas could travel between robotics, space research, and high-performance computing.
TEDx Bratislava at the Slovak National Theatre, 2014.
04
Putting the journey on a TEDx stage
TEDx Bratislava brought the personal and technical routes into one room. The talk connected the move to Plymouth, the years of manual work and study, iCub, GPU computing, and the dream of intelligent machines. It remains one of the clearest public records of why the work mattered to me, not only what the research produced. The standing audience photograph preserves the human moment around that story.
A six-camera fused-cloud precursor: many views, one physical scene.
05
From cameras to coordinates
After the PhD, the robotics habits moved into applied computer vision at Cortexica and then through the same A-Team role as AnyVision became Oosto and was acquired by Metropolis. The work stayed focused on research and innovation under real constraints: edge devices, difficult lighting, latency, synthetic worlds, and cameras outside the lab. Over time a detection inside one image was no longer enough; observations had to belong somewhere in a shared world. Calibration, geometry, timing, and uncertainty became the bridge from seeing objects to understanding place.
Project Tao from above. The complete drone frame is shown without cropping.
06
Tao: returning systems to place
Project Tao brought the long technical route back to physical life. Rough land became a place shaped by water, paths, planting, structures, energy, weather, repair, and daily care. The project is not a product or a demonstration site. It is the lived continuation of the builder habit: observe what is actually happening, understand the constraints, make a change, and return long enough to see whether it holds.
Dates, transitions, source links, astronomy, research, and supporting moments remain here for readers who want the complete route.
Arriving in the UK with almost nothing
A hard restart in Plymouth: little English, little money, and manual work. Meeting Professor Simon Davies helped turn university from an unlikely thought into a real path.
After returning to Slovakia to complete civil service and improve my English, I came back to Plymouth to combine full-time study with night work.
Working full-time nights while studying BSc Computing full-time during the day, with astrophotography and distance-learning astronomy running in parallel.
The Plymouth work-study period ended with a First-Class BSc and the 2008 Revell Research Systems Prize as top final-year BSc Computing student. It marked the transition into iCub, ESA rover work, and the PhD.
Astronomy trained patience, optics, timing, and careful attention through telescope alignment, planetary images, public observing nights, and the discipline of letting the sky correct the idea.
The dream became technical: iCub humanoid learning, action and language, neural networks, vision, and GPU acceleration to make larger experiments practical.
Parallel Mars rover research with ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team and the iCub GPU work opened a route to NVIDIA headquarters, CUDA features, conference material, and research in Santa Clara.
The rover-control paper received the 2010 best paper award. In 2011, Aquila: Massively Parallelised Developmental Robotics Framework received the same recognition.
The same questions moved through Cortexica, AnyVision, Oosto, and Metropolis: from edge cameras and synthetic worlds to multi-camera calibration and perception that had to work outside the lab.
The journey leads into three different records: key moments, the technical work, and writing preserved in the voice of its time.
Legacy
For the people who made the work possible.
This archive is also a record of help: family, teachers, supervisors, collaborators, friends, colleagues, and the people who gave me chances when the path was not obvious. I want future readers to understand the work as a life, not just as a CV.
